ESS/MSS access and Payroll Processing

Are curernt process is to turn off ESS/MSS access while we process payroll. We process a regular and payout payroll bi-weekly, turning off ESS/MSS access basically for 3 days. We process off cycle payrolls, one the same week as regular and payout payrolls and two the following week. The processing of so many payrolls and shuting down or very limited access to ESS/MSS has caused challenges and hardship for some of our customers, so we want to explore reducing the shut off or the limiting of ESS/MSS. We would like to keep open access during the off cycle payrolls. Does anyone current do this? Do you have issues or concerns with doing this? Any help or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

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unknown

Rachel,
We do this process and it seems to work fairly smoothly for us. We are on LS security and have a rule built for security access. What we do is read a field that PR sets prior to the PR run that limits access. Once PR is completed they change the value of the field and access is restored. That limits the amount of downtime and user intervention.

Secondly, we have a stop light icon on LBI dashboard that everyone sees when they access Lawson that shows payroll processing status. If it is red the note tells them what can or can't be changed at the time.

These two features have eliminated virtually all the questions and issues employees have around PR processing.

We did a similar process within LAUA years ago but this process is even better as PR is in control of when to turn off access and when to turn it back on.

Hope that helps, if you need more info let me know.

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plancor

For the various functions that we want to turn off during PR, a small enhancement was added to the ESS htm code that checks the PR flags in PRSYSTEM (PR00.1). This way there's no manual intervention required. If the flags indicate that PR is in process, the user is redirected to a page that says that this function is not currently available.

We only do one PR, but this same process could be used to check individual Process Level or Company statuses.

Since this is an enhancement, the enhancement code needs to be added back to the htm files when ESS/MSS is upgraded/patched.

I like the dashboard notification with instructions mentioned by Mark.

rchudek1

Do you know what would hapeen if we decided to leave ESS access open while processing a smaller payroll, like an off cycle or a payout cycle? If an employee accessed ESS to make changes to PR12 or PR18 would it shut down payroll or cause an error? Or would it only impact the employee that made the change if that employee was in the payroll cycle we are processing? Thank you for your feed back-very appreciated.

unknown

From my experience, it wouldn't shut down payroll or affect any other employee records (we don't use PR18) - but the change may or may not be part of the payroll, depending on exactly where in the process your cycle may be. We simply shut off access to self service with a message saying that payroll is processing so that there isn't any confusion.

unknown

We do not shut down ESS during our payroll cycles. To my knowledge, we have had no issue with payroll due to employees making changes while payroll is running.

unknown

We do not shutdown all of ESS either. However, we do prevent access to some key ESS screens at the beginning of the Payroll Cycle via additional checkboxes on PR140. Later, those same ESS screens are re-enabled via additional checkboxes on PR160.

janelle-walcott

I am new to Lawson as of Jan 2016. What check boxes on PR140 & PR160? We currently use HS18 lock out.

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