The Employee Interaction Center (EIC) organizational structure serves as the foundation for the creation of an effective shared services center. Existing documentation on the EIC does not provide specific details about its organizational setup. We will fill this knowledge gap for you if your company is in the process of implementing EIC, and also enable potential EIC clients to get a head start setting up a working prototype.

Integration with SAP ERP HCM

EIC integrates with the following subcomponents of SAP ERP HCM: the employee and manager portals in SAP ERP (formerly called Employee Self- Service and Manager Self-Service [ESS and MSS]), SAP ERP HCM Processes and Forms, and Personnel Administration.

EIC with SAP ERP 6.0 delivers out-of-the-box integration with existing portal roles through self-services. An employee can contact an EIC Agent directly from the employee or manager portals in SAP ERP via a Web request. The employee simply clicks a link and completes a Web-based service form to initiate the request, which generates an automatic workflow to the EIC Agent’s inbox.

EIC also offers close integration with SAP ERP HCM Processes and Forms. This integration allows an EIC Agent to trigger or execute an SAP ERP HCM process with pre-defined workflows, approval steps, and pre-populated data directly from EIC. For example, the process could be the birth of an employee’s child. The EIC Agent can track and monitor this process from start to end via the integration with SAP ERP HCM Processes and Forms.

EIC can tie in with any SAP ERP HCM transaction and make it available for EIC Agents on the navigation bar. With this functionality, EIC Agents can access transactions such as PA30 (maintain HR master data) or PA20 (display HR master data) directly from their desktop.

EIC Organizational Structure Basics

The purpose of EIC is to enable one or more organizational units within your company to provide HR-related services for the entire organization.

You can set up these organizational units based on the nature of services provided, such as payroll services or training. You can also base the units on the employee population that is being serviced. An example of this would be an EIC unit dedicated to hourly employees and another unit dedicated to executives. An additional way to structure these units is based on the support level of the service. An example of this grouping is tier 1 (general support), tier 2 (subject matter experts), and so on.

These units form the building blocks of the EIC organizational structure. You can use them to define your EIC organization and control the process flow for the services provided. You can build the EIC organizational structure using Organizational Management (OM). To set up an efficient structure, you should use EIC organizational units, EIC positions, and EIC users or EIC Agents. If you are not familiar with these terms, you can refer to the “EIC Terminology” sidebar.

Create the Organizational Structure

To set up the EIC organizational structure, which you do in SAP ERP 6.0, you first identify the various EIC Agent groups that will be part of your EIC organizational structure. In this example, we use three EIC Agent groups: Helpdesk, Payroll, and Benefits.

Then identify the various EIC Agents that are working within each of these EIC Agent groups. These EIC Agents can be in-house employees or outsourced service providers. However, they should exist in the SAP system with a valid user ID. We have identified three users for our example: EIC Agents 1, 2, and 3 (Figure 1).

Figure 1

EIC Agents

Then use transaction PPOCE (create organization and staffing) to create the organizational structure for EIC. Create a top-level EIC organizational unit. This unit, called the High Level EIC Organization Unit, serves as the top-level node in the EIC organizational hierarchy (Figure 2).

Figure 2

EIC organizational units

Next, create three lower-level organizational units for the three EIC Agent groupings. In this example, we named the units EIC Helpdesk, EIC Payroll, and EIC Benefits. Using the standard reports-to relationships (with a value of A002 or B002), assign the lower level organizational units to the top-level organizational unit. Once this is completed, your EIC organizational structure looks like the example shown in Figure 2.

Then create one or more new positions to assign to the lower-level organizational units (Figure 3). In this example, we created one new position for each of the three organizational units. We named these positions EIC Position for Helpdesk, EIC Position for Payroll, and EIC Position for Benefits.

Figure 3

EIC positions

Next, assign the EIC Agents to these EIC positions. You do this by assigning the standard holder relationship between the User object and the Position object (Figure 4).

Figure 4

EIC organizational structure with positions assigned to EIC Agents

At this stage, you have your EIC organizational structure built. You then need to perform an additional step to associate a support level to each lower-level EIC organizational unit. You can use this support level to perform organizational reporting for EIC activities. It also allows EIC Agents to delegate EIC activities to the next support level using workflow rules.

Use transaction PO10 (maintain organizational unit) to assign the support levels. Enter the organizational unit for EIC Helpdesk and select infotype 1291 (EIC: Support Level). Assign Support Level 1 to this organizational unit (Figure 5). SAP provides a list of support levels from 00 through 09 that you can choose from, and this list is not configurable by users. Make sure to save your changes. Perform the same step for the EIC Payroll and EIC Benefits organizational units.

Figure 5

Assign Support Level 1 to the organizational unit

The last step is to assign an IC WebClient Profile to the EIC Agents. You can assign this at the position level or at the organizational unit level. The profile controls the look and feel of the EIC Agent desktop. You can choose one common profile or create different profiles for the various EIC Agent groupings you have within your organization. Create these profiles within the EIC customizing tasks by following IMG menu path Personnel Management > Employee Interaction Center (EIC) > Interaction Center Web-Client > Define Profiles for Interaction Center WebClient.

For this example, we decided to use one common profile for all three EIC organizational units. Therefore, we assign the IC WebClient profile to the top-level EIC organizational unit. Using transaction PO10, enter the top-level organizational unit and create a new infotype 1261 record with the IC WebClient profile (Figure 6).

Figure 6

Assign the IC WebClient profile to the EIC organizational unit

You have now successfully set up the complete EIC organizational structure. At this stage, the EIC Agents can log into the EIC transaction. The system determines the IC WebClient profile to be used for the EIC Agent using the organizational structure and displays the Agent desktop application based on this profile.

Jarret Pazahanick

Jarret Pazahanick is an SAP Mentor, Human Capital Management (HCM) Certified Consultant, and Managing Partner of EIC Experts who has specialized in SAP HCM since 1998. He is a subject matter expert in US Payroll, Employee Interaction Center (EIC), and Enterprise Compensation Management (ECM). Over the past 14 years, Jarret has completed 20 high profile, full life cycle SAP HCM implementations for global Fortune 1000 companies. He is SAP HCM certified and ASAP certified; author for HR Expert, CloudAve, and ASUG News; and a moderator, blogger, and gold-level contributor on the SAP Community Network.

If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.

Chandan Gopalani

Chandan Gopalani is a senior SAP HCM technical consultant with over 18 years of experience working on SAP projects across various industries and clients since 1995. He is co-founder of EIC Experts and specializes in Organization Management, Employee Interaction Center (EIC), US Payroll, Enterprise Compensation Management, ESS/MSS, Personnel Administration, Benefits, CATS, Finance, and Sales & Distribution. He is ABAP certified and ASAP certified, as well the author of several HR Expert article. He is currently working as an ECM consultant for a Fortune 50 client.

You may contact the author at cgopalani@eicexperts.com.

If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.