If you were like us, you've got all of your position codes set up for all of your jobs. This is a first step for accomplishing things like fully utilizing the FTE budget capabilities, implementing position specific tracks for educations, and managing job descriptions at both the job and position level. But what about position defaulting? Position defaulting is one of those things that is more easily implemented, extremely effective, and with miminal effort.

If you aren't already using position defaulting, let me break it down for you. Say you've got 50 employees in Registered Nurse positions in the Urgent Care reporting to the Urgent Care Manager and all of the sudden they decide they want to change all of these RNs to start reporting to the Emergency Department manager and eliminate the Urgent Care supervisor position. Well, without position defaulting you would need to go to HR11.1 and update each individual employee's record with the new supervisor. If you used position defaulting, you could just update the supervisor on the position record (PA02.1), run PA102, and it would update all of the employee's records automatically.

Not only can you use position defaulting for maintaining your supervisor structure, you can also use it to standardize pay grades, job codes, departments, accounting information, schedule information, security and exemption status. Standardization is the key, because if you don't default this information from your position record, more than likely, someone is keying this information manually for each employee on HR11.1 and that means there is an opportunity for individual records to differ from one another.

Here's another example of the power of position defaulting. Say you have a new employee, instead of having to memorize the complex rules that say, if someone works in this position, give them this grade, this supervisor, this accounting unit, and this exemption status. Well, with position defaulting, you simply enter in the position number onto HR11.1, press the 'fill defaults' button, and viola, Lawson fills in all of the fields for you based on the position record.

So how do you set up position defaulting you ask? The key is HR10.1.

Important Note: Try these instructions in TEST before you try in your live environment in Lawson!!!

To begin, open HR10.1, enter the company number, and for the Topic, enter PO. Hit the Enter key or Inquire. HR10.2 will appear.

The key to position defaulting is understanding the difference between 'Default; no override", and "Default; override". If you want every single employee record's base information to be consistant from employee to employee with no exception, use "Default; No override". If you want the employee's record to default but every now and then, you want to replace what Lawson puts into the record with something else, use 'Default; override'. The best and cleaniest option is 'default; no override', but exceptions are always prevalent (and always cause our great aches and pains) so realistically, you'll probably be using a combination of both options depending on the field. As a note, if you use 'default; override', say if you change the supervisor on one employee and make it difference than the default, when you run PA102 to mass update employee's based on an position change, this field will not be automatically updated and you will have to update the employee's record yourself (which almost defeats the purpose of using position defaulting in the first place).

So back to HR10.2. To set a field as a position default, enter 'C' for the FC, change the default field to 2 or 3, and press the change button. That's it.

To use or test a position default, open or add an employee on HR11, enter a position, then click the special actions button and choose fill defaults. The defaulted fields will automatically be filled in.

To mass update employee based on position records (PA02.1), make the change on PA02.1 then run PA102.1 (first in report mode, then in update mode). This program will update the employee's information based on the PA02: Position change.

Note: You may need to run PA113: retroactive history update since PA102 updates records like a personnel action and if any of these changes are retroactive that overlap another personnel action, PA113 will resolve the conflicts.