Our users are not paying attention to the warning message provided when a "new" employee is entered that is already in the system (ie, the social security number is duplicating). This issue is causing problems throughout; history is built, time-off calculated, etc. I will be working on a solution in-house this weekend. Does anyone have suggestions...other than training users to watch the messages? We use PA31 to track applicants...it might be pertinent here so we do not data enter applicants more than once. I have submitted an enhancement request. The GSC said this is a frequently requested option.

I once received a request from a user that asked if I the system could tell them that they accidentally typed "Joan" when they should have typed "John"? Even though I could have built something with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, I told them 'no'.

I realize that you can't always say 'no'. I looked around in Lawson and couldn't find any easy fix. If it were me I'd look into the capabilities of a report or notification that warns that an applicant's social matches a terminated employee's social. This is helpful in identifying candidates or termed with a negative rehire status or to do a rehire instead of a new employee. That would be fairly easy to do a compare on a the applicant and employee tables.

We added an additional index to the employee table on FICA number. This prevents actual entry of the duplicate SSN. This is a mod, but it is fairly simple. Of course you have to make sure you clear all the existing duplicates before doing this. I'm not aware of any way to do this in Lawson without some sort of mod.

While I like the idea of the additional index (its clever and easy) I find it somewhat dangerous.

First to clean the data, a simple SQL call (GROUP by FICA_NBR) should give you a list of dups.
You can then mod the code to prevent the transaction. The SSN check is overwritten by the XMIT BLOCK, so technically you can as a workaround to modding COBOL reset the XMIT BLOCK (the positions that matter anyway) to continue to complain until the user changes the value.
Alternatively, you could make any number of COBOL changes to error and not allow the transaction.

Disclaimer:
We are preparing to go live with Lawson Payroll and HR on July 1, AS/400, 8.03. This is our first Lawson system, and I probably don't know what I'm talking about, or even understand the question. I personally don't work with data entry and forms, I have not tried this, and I have no idea if it is a customization or native Lawson functionality, but I'd thought I'd pass it on.

Our consultant recently sent out this message:
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As most of you know by now, Lawson provides a warning message if you attempt to hire someone who has the same SSN as an existing employee (active or terminated).

Lawson now provides you the opportunity to stop the hire if there is a duplicate SSN in your employee list. If you would like to ensure that you never enter a duplicate SSN, go to HR00 and inquire on your company. Go to the Personnel/Special Processing tab or related page and change the Duplicate Social Nbr flag to "N". Cick Change at the top of the form.

From 8.1 release info:

"A new field on Company (HR00.1) lets users indicate if an employee is allowed to have the same Social Number as another employee within the same work country. If they leave the field blank, an employee is allowed to have a duplicate Social Number as another employee. A warning message informs the user of this situation."

This actually is a hard stop in 8.1, if the flag is set to not allow duplicate SSN's.

hth

The flag is not available in our system, currently at Apps level 8.0.3 MSP9. :angry:

That's strange. We are also on Apps 8.03 (MSP10), env 8.03 and we have the flag. According to the field help it is a hard stop but I haven't tested it yet.

Might be an MSP10 change, we have it as well.