Absence/Leave Management in Human Resources Management–Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

I have been contacted by many of the readers requesting a post regarding the absence management functionality of AX 2012. In today’s post I will cover the key features and benefits of the absence management functionality along with the setups and processes involved in it.

Workers are the key assets for every professionals services firms and gaining control over the workers capacity cost and workers availability is always a key to success. Moreover managing employee leaves/absences is always a key aspect of Human resources operations for every organization. Organizations always looks for a flexible and effective leave management system, when they choose an ERP to implement.

The Human Resources Management module of AX 2012 provides a very effective absence management functionality which is simple to setup and use and also enables organizations to have their employees to use enterprise portal to submit and approve leave/absence requests.

Key features and Benefits:

Below few points represents the key features and benefits of Absence management functionality of AX 2012.

• Simple to configure and easy to use.
• Easily group absences and associate absence codes with them.
• Register past absences.
• Request for future absences.
• Setup validation rules for absence types such as, employee’s cannot avail more than 3 casual leaves consecutively.
• Option for absence administrators to register absence for multiple workers acting like a delegate.
• Option for workers to request absences  and approvers to approve them in the Enterprise portal, when away from office/work.

Configuration and Absence management Process:

This section of the post will explain the necessary setup required to enable absence recording in AX 2012.

1. Absence Groups: The first step is to create Absence Groups. The absence groups are used to group various absence types such Holidays, Sickness, Jury duty etc. Absence groups are mandatory information for setting up absence codes.

• Navigate to HRM > Setup > Absence > Absence Groups.
• Create new record and enter absence group id and a description.
• Additionally enable Registration to enable absence recording in Time and Attendance process.

2. Absence Codes: The absences codes represents the reasons for the employee absences. These are are the codes against which employees will register absences. Additionally several validation rules can be setup on the absence codes as per requirements. Example of absence codes are Sick, Injury, Jury, Vacation, Leave etc.

• Navigate to HRM > Setup > Absence > Absence Codes.
• Create new absence codes such as Jury, Sick, Illness etc.
• You can also setup validation rules which will enable validation such as an employee can take only 3 days Funeral leave in a series etc..

3. Absence Setup: It is required sometimes to have multiple absence administrators, multiple absence period frequencies, multiple working times(Hours, Days) for different groups of workers. The absence setup allows to accomplish this. The Person in charge is the Absence administrator who will review and approve/reject/cancel the absences.

• Navigate to HRM > Setup > Absence > Absence Setup.
• Create new records and setup Person In charge, Period unit( Month, Week, Month-Fixed and No Period), and Working time.
• Absence setups are attached to workers to enable them for absence registrations.

4. Absence Setup for Worker: The Absence related parameters needs to be setup in the Worker details form as shown in screen below.

We are now done with all the setups necessary for absence registrations. Let us not take quick look at how employees can register absences. In AX, employees can register absences both in rich client and Enterprise portal.

Recording Absences In AX Rich Client:

• Before employees can register absences in a given absence period, the absence journals must be created by the absence administrators for that period. Absence journals can also be setup to be created in batch.
• Navigate to HRM > Periodic > Absences > Create absence Journals to create the absence journals for workers.

• To register absences, go to Home > Absences > Register Absences.
• Create new records and enter dates and absence code for each day.
• You can also create a absence series such as Vacation for 5 days/10 days etc..
• The Notes section will contain the notes from the absence registrar and absence approver if any.

• After creating the absences, Click Transfer to transfer the absences for approval. This will transfer the absence details to the approver for review and approval.
• The Approver can go to Home > Absences > Approve Absence Requests.
• Approver can click Approve/Reject button to approve or reject the absences.

Using the absence management function, employees can also can request for future absences, and one absence admin can register absences for multiple workers as a delegate. I will not explain those all here in this post.

Recording Absences In AX 2012 Enterprise Portal:

Below is a quick video which I have prepared for the employee absence management in the enterprise portal of AX 2012.

That is it for this post. Please contact me in case you have any queries with regards to absences management in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

Regards

Sandeep