We are building our HR structure and have many Process Levels (PL's) and many depts. A few PL's do NOT have any depts under them. I'm suggesting that we create a dept with the same name as the process level, just for consistency.

This would also allow us to make Dept mandatory on HR10, whereas now we cannot have it as mandatory, since we have a few people that do not have a dept.

I'm also concerned about reporting. If I run a report for list of all employees grouped by dept....will those employees without a dept even show up?

What is the recommendation of those veterans out there? :nix:

Your help to this new comer is greatly appreciated!!

I agree with you, create a department. Sometimes the dept is the same as the process level, other times it's something like "ADMIN" or "MGMT" because those who don't have a "department" are the top of the organization in that process level.

Although Lawson allows a Process Level without a department, I've found that leaving it blank causes issues You hit on one reason, the data entry person has to know when a department is required and when it's not - since department is a heavily used reporting field, leaving it blank when it should be filled in can throw off reports. I also found that if you create a time record and try to pay from a Process Level with no Department, the employee's level 1 Department code will default in, resuting in an error (this may have been a bug that's been since fixed, but it was a problem a couple of years ago).

I don't think reports should not be a problem, those without departments should float to the top of the list.

We did something similar to what you are suggesting but instead of using the same name for dept and process level we created a dept of admin that will exist in all PL's. We already had duplicate names w/ the PL's, locations and user levels and figured depts w/ the same name would further confuse matters. The only exception is that we don't assign depts on some PT-temp employees who may work in many different PL's over the course of the year.

Reporting shouldn't be a problem if you don't have a dept since your selection criteria will drive what is included on the report and depending on your sort they will normally print first. We use Crystal fo most of our reporting and it causes no problems.

Our initial set up was as you're thinking - many employees with departments, selected process levels officially weren't broken down further, so we set up departments with the same names as process levels. Unfortunately, our reporting wouldn't work appropriately and we had to get rid of those departments, and depend on our data entry users. I feel your pain though - it's certainly easier from a user perspective to consistently enter the same info as opposed to having to remember who has or doesn't have a particular field. Good luck!