By integrating Training & Registration with Employee Scheduling, you can reserve the times of approved training opportunities to avoid double-booking employees for shifts that overlap training periods.
Benefits of Integration
Integrating Training & Registration with Employee Scheduling will help you to coordinate and manage employee commitments by blocking their schedules, making existing shifts vacant and reporting overlap errors with their approved training opportunities on creation of new shifts.
Setting up Employee Scheduling to work with Training and Registration
A few simple setup steps are required to permit Training & Registration to update Employee Scheduling. These steps must be performed in NAV.
Prerequisites
- An unavailable unit must be created and configured for each Area that has employees who will be using Training & Registration. See Setting up Employee Scheduling.
- Employees must have a Schedule Area No. configured on the Scheduling section of the Time Entry/Scheduling fast tab of the Employee Time Attendance card. Training & Registration uses this field to find the corresponding "Unavailable" unit, where it will create blocking records for the schedule that match the training opportunities.
- A Nonworking HR Calendar Code needs to be in place in the Altus HR Setup.
Adding a Training Activity
The unavailable unit(s) must have one activity designated for training and registration.
- Under Schedule Units, select the desired Unavailable unit, then from the Navigate tab, select Activities on the ribbon.
- The Schedule Unit Activities card will open. Create a new activity row and check the Training Activity field. An unavailable unit can have only one training activity.
Note: You may need to scroll horizontally to the extreme right to find the Training Activity field. - You must also set the Payroll Control Code for this line, as it will be used if a vacant shift needs to be created due to an existing schedule conflict. All other fields on the activity record are optional, but it is best practice to set up the dimensions on the activity line, so that the correct cost centers are charged for the training.
How it works
Dates and Times of the Training
If you are licensed for Employee Scheduling, when the status of a training is changed to Open, the system will populate the Training Schedule Lines with the dates between the training Start and End Dates, excluding the non-working days as configured in Altus HR Setup. See Prerequisites above.
- Enter the Start and End Time on the View - Training Registration card to specify the duration of the training for each day to allow only shifts in this time period to be considered.
Update Schedule
When the "Update Scheduling" operation is triggered on the Training Registration card, shifts are created in the Unavailable unit that correspond to the Training Schedule Lines on the View - Training Registration card for the registered employees. These shifts will prevent an employee from being assigned a shift that overlaps the training times, and will cause validation errors if an employee shift is altered to create an overlap.
Note: The shifts in the unavailable unit are not visible to Employee Center users, as they cannot access the Unavailable unit.
Any existing employee shifts that conflict with the training will be made vacant when the Update Scheduling operation is triggered. The Payroll Control Code specified on the training activity line (see Prerequisites above) is used for this.
Creating a Schedule from a Schedule Template will check if a blocking shift exists for an assigned employee. If so, the corresponding shift(s) will be made vacant when the schedule is created.
If the status on an employee training line has been changed from Registered back to Pending, or if the line is deleted, then if the related shift has not been transferred to payroll the schedule for the employee will be unblocked.
Troubleshooting
- If the Update Scheduling operation on the Training Registration card reports that "Schedule Area No. must have a value..." then that field needs to be set on the Employee Time Attendance card for the indicated employee(s). See Prerequisites above.
- If the Update Scheduling operation on the Training Registration card reports that "There is no Schedule Unit Activity within the filter..." then the Unavailable unit for the Area does not have a Training Activity configured. See Adding a training activity above.
- If the Update Scheduling operation on the Training Registration card reports that "The field Payroll Control Code of table Schedule Unit Line Shift Activity contains a value...that cannot be found in the related table..." then the Training Activity does not have a payroll control code. See Adding a training activity above.
Note: You will only encounter this error when the integration needs to create a vacant shift, that is, when an existing employee shift is in conflict with the training opportunity.