Designing Workgroups in Time and Labor

Workgroup is a nodal definition in Time and Labor. It is synonymous to a Paygroup in Payroll and Absence Management and every valid Time and Labor employee has to be attached to a Workgroup. Time Reporters can inherit a number of features including their Work Schedule, Holiday Schedule, TRCs they have access to, the Time processing rules applied to them etc.from the workgroup. Designing workgroups and employees eligible for each workgroup is a critical aspect of any Time and Labor. Here are few thumb rules for designing workgroups:

• A Workgroup only contain either Positive Time Reporters or Elapsed Time Reporters - never a combination of both.
  
• All employees in a workgroup will have access to the same set of TRCs.
• All employees in a workgroup will be subject to the same Time Processing rules.
• All employees in a workgroup should have the same work Period (Weekly, Biweekly, Monthly etc.)
• Not a robust design to create separate workgroups for different schedules. A schedule can and should ideally be directly attached to an employee.
• If the definition of the day breaker varies for various employees in your organisation, then it might be required to group employees together based on the day breaker requirements. Thanks to Galego for bringing this point to notice.
  

In short - group together all employees who access the same TRCs and have the same time and labor rules together into one workgroup (also ensure that all employees are either Elapsed or Punch in a workgroup and share the same period id). All other definitions like a Work Schedule, Holiday Schedule, Compensatory Time Off plans etc. can be attached to the employee at other levels. A number of implementations have ended up having an unmanageably large number of workgroups as the creation of a workgroup depended on a schedule, location etc.

This approach will greatly reduce the number of workgroups that will have to be configured and increase the maintainability of the application. Workgroup is inherently a definition local to Time and Labor whose main purpose is to ensure that the correct time processing rules are applied during the TIMEADMIN process. The performance of the TIMEADMIN process can also be significantly improved by decreasing the number of workgroups.