Indirect Role Assignment via OM

We have come across the Organizational Management (OM) component while talking about SAP HCM. The OM component in SAP is used to map the Organizational Hierarchy of an enterprise by means of HR objects and Relationships between these objects. In this post we will discuss about the possibility of using OM to simplify some of the user-role assignments tasks that need to be handled by a security administrator.

Lets start with an sample org hierarchy created in PPOME transaction as shown below. We start with a root org unit ( HR obj O) “IDES Root” with “IDES India” and “IDES Bangalore” under it. ” IDES India” includes the position (HR obj S) of “Director – India” which is also set as the Line Manager for it. The position is filled by person (HR obj P) “Mister Director”. We make the basic assumption that the SAP access for a user corresponds to his position in the org structure of the enterprise.

Consider the access for “Mister Director”. In the case of direct role assignment, any role would be assigned to the user id for “Mister Director” through SU01 or PFCG. Now lets consider, that “Mister Director” get promoted to be the CEO of “IDES Root” and a new person comes to take his place. However, since the roles for the India Director were directly assigned to his user id, he will continue to keep his old access even in his new position. Also the new person filling the position of “Director – India” will have to be manually assigned with enough access to enable him to do his job. This same situation will repeat for every transfer, promotion, demotion (and most other org changes in general) that takes place in an enterprise. For an enterprise with more than a few thousand employees, the effort involved in keeping user access in sync with the org hierarchy is substantial. In addition to the monetary cost of the effort, their is a time penalty as users would need to wait for the User Admin team to adjust their security before they can start using SAP. Indirect role assignment comes to the rescue in such situation and if configured correctly can reduce the routine maintenance effort appreciably. In indirect assignment, instead o directly assigning the roles to user id for “Mister Director” we assign the roles to the position “Director India” (The standard SAP configuration allows role assignments to the OM objects – Position, Org Unit, Work Center, Task and can be used depending on business cases) such that any user occupying the position would automatically get the access needed for “Director India”.

There are four technical prerequisites for the use of indirect role assignment through Org Mgmt

• • An active planning version must be defined in the system. Roles/profiles are assigned to the OM objects defined in the active plan.
  • The User and Personnel masters are linked via the IT 0105 (communication) subtype 0001 (system id). This translates to maintaining the SAP user id for a user in IT 0105, 0001 for the user’s personnel number with an active validity date.
  • The HR_ORG_ACTIVE customizing switch is set to YES in the PRGN_CUST table either as the default value or as an entry in the table.
  • The evaluation path US_ACTGR is defined and suitably adjusted in the system. The evaluation path is actually used by SAP to assign roles to the users during user comparison and is the last and the most vital cog in the wheel. The screen-shot below shows the default definition of the evaluation path in OOAW.

Once the above prerequisites are met, we can just go ahead and create indirect role assignments between roles and HR objects. Indirect role assignment through PFCG can be accessed through the “Organization Management” button shown below. The blue lines correspond to indirect role assignments.

Clicking the Org Mgmt button opens the below screen where we can check the existing assignments for the role (both direct and indirect). New role assignments can e created using the highlighted button

Roles can also be assigned through PP01. An indirect role assignment is a relationship between object type AG (Activity Group or Role) and HR objects like positions, org units, etc. Below screen shows a new assignment (relationship B007) between the users’ position and the role object (object type AG)

The final step in the process of indirect role assignment is to copy the roles from the HR objects to the users. One of the most common way to achieve this is to execute the PFUD transaction with the option for HR reconciliation checked. In productive systems, this program is normally scheduled to run everyday at midnight to sync user access with a changing org structure.

The critical success factor for indirect role assignment is to understand how correctly your org hierarchy mirrors the roles/ responsibilities of your users. Some of the questions that need to be discussed with your business owners, functional consultants and security team are

• What is the correlation between the roles/responsibilities users and their position in the org structure?

• Who will be responsible for maintaining the org structure and how frequently?

• Will users need their old access even if they move to a new position?

• How will contractors be given access? Contractors are normally not part of the org structure and don’t occupy a position. So do you continue to directly assign roles to contractors or do you link them to the org structure in some way (for example through positions/jobs/tasks)?

• Are you only concerned about a central ECC system or are there other systems in the landscape (BW, CRM, SRM, APO, etc)? Will the roles assigned in these other systems also be determined by the users’ positions in ECC?