Job codes, Positions & Supervisor

mariyama_von_thenen

I am new to my company and would appreciate talking with an experienced Lawson professional about our structure both from a process issue and technical perspective. We are looking at cleaning up our job codes which leads me to the bigger picture. I have questions pertaining to job codes, positions and supervisors & future impact it may have on personnel actions (not currently using), ESS/MSS & process flow (which we aren't currently using but would like to in the future). Here's the background...We are a manufacturing company which implemented bare bones Lawson many years ago. We have roughly 3500 employees (primarily hourly) which fall into 7-8 job codes. We have about 350 job codes in our system so many were created for each individual employee. We are not using positions in Lawson. We have roughly 55 active process levels and our supervisor code & description was set up as the actual employee (name) rather than the job. We are not truly processing payroll through Lawson - still using a program written in the 70's run off AS400 for payroll/labor efficiencies. The rate of pay is driven off of the employee record in HR11 so the job code isn't set-up with pay information.

*Are there any advantages to reducing the number of job codes?
*What are the advantages/disadvantages to implementing positions if we want to implement personnel actions rather soon? If we won't be using MSS for another year or two?
*What is the best way to define supervisor codes and to inactivate existing supervisor codes?

I'm certain I have many more questions but this is a good start. I look forward any responses/suggestions.

Thank you!