It has been a while without any post on this topic but I'm actively working on it and have a few comments/requests to post.
My input comes from a specific case on a medium sized hospital-type environment with near 500 employees. The requirements that come from this environment are likely to represent a rather common use case. The first request is the ability to assign an employee to more than one department each with a specific rate of employment, e.g. 20% unit A, 30% unit B and 40% unit C. Each unit may have its own responsible so the current scheme is not usable as is. The possibility to assign an employee to different units means that many field should be changed from one-to-one into one-to-many. It seems to me that the contract is the right place to define the relationship as it is the place where you define the department, superior, wage, working hours, employment rate, etc. Another item that is missing is the ability to assign the working time for an employee. For example, an employee for a 50% job could be assigned to the morning hours only, stating that its time is only available in this window. This could be further explored by time planning algorithms elsewhere in the tool. Currently, it is only possible to select the number of working hours for an employee with a minimum increment of 1 hour. Typically, you assign an employee to a rate of employment (30%, 50%, 80%, etc.). Head count planning would be a further step forward. In a service-type environment, head count planning is required to manage the hiring process and is closely related to the financials. Again, the contract item should be the base for this. As a result, it should be possible to add tags to a contract such as "signed", "provisionary", "to be confirmed", etc. Related to the head count planning is the possibility to manage voluntary and involuntary leaves of an employee as this has an impact of the head count planning. Examples are leaves for pregnancy, training, sabbatical holidays, etc. These leaves are different from ordinary holidays as they affect the available headcount for a longer period of time and in some cases insurances will cover the salary during this period. In addition to these requirements, the time aspect needs to be considered too. As for certain positions it may take months to find the right person (specialists), HR people need to anticipate the headcount of a company and can do this through proper contract management. An agenda or Gantt view of future headcounts as well as alerts that are sent when a specific threshold is crossed can be vary valuable here. The above requirements are much more employee-oriented than finance-oriented. This is clearly reflected in the reports section where all reports are related to timesheets and projects. The "Print Screen" action does not really do a print screen. Instead, a "Print Employee status" would be very useful for HR management to get a summary of the employee. It would further be possible to go one step further and split the employee part from the organizational part. That would mean that you would be able to describe the organization in terms of hierarchy, head count (including part-time jobs), job description, salary range, etc. and than to assign employees to a specific job position. This is similar to the concept of the work centers in the manufacturing module except for the fact that much more information should be available to configure the work center as a "job", in particular including the company department. I'm aware that each company has its own specific needs but believe that a solid planning capability can be valuable add on for OpenERP. If interested, I may submit a blueprint on this subject early next year. -------------------- m2f -------------------- -- http://www.openobject.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=47706#47706 -------------------- m2f -------------------- _______________________________________________ Tinyerp-users mailing list http://tiny.be/mailman2/listinfo/tinyerp-users
