A Guide to Activities

Hourly or salaried employees enter activity start and stop times, or activity durations. Personnel can enter start and stop times or durations for resources (for example, equipment and vehicles) that are used by employees to perform activities. Production, grant, or project managers monitor performance and efficiency, track monetary and hours budgets, approve timecards, and run reports.

Note: The Activities domain was previously known as the Work domain. To maintain backwards compatibility, Work is still present in the URI of API operations.

Getting started with Activities

You can configure the Activities system using the API by performing the following tasks:

• Create the building blocks of the Activities system (activities, activity queries, result codes, and forms)
• Assemble building blocks into subordinate profiles according to the roles and needs of your employees
• Create activity profiles that reference subordinate profiles
• Finally, in the People Editor, assign the activity profiles to employees

There is a logical hierarchy to the entities in the Activities domain. In general, you must create subordinate entities before creating higher-order entities. For example, create activities before activity queries and create custom fields for forms before creating forms, and create forms before creating form profiles.

Hierarchy of Activities entities

There is not a strict order for all configuration tasks. However, there are some tasks that must be done before others. The following list suggests a sequence and notes task dependencies, where applicable.

1. First create the following building blocks. Note that the system provides certain pre-configured building blocks. If those serve the needs of your organization, you do not need to create custom building blocks.
   • Create field definitions for use on forms and in result codes
   • Create units of measure to quantify work completed
   • Create activity customers
2. Second, create the following first-order entities.
   • Create result codes to allow entry of results on forms
   • Create activity forms
   • Create activities to associate with shifts
3. Third, create the following second-order entities.
   • Create pay code actions for non-productive activities
   • Create activity queries to allow searching for activities
   • Create result code profiles
   • Create activity form profiles
   • Create activity query profiles after creating activity queries
   • Create activity results templates
4. Fourth, create activity profiles to assign to employees.
5. Last, assign activity profiles to employees using operations against the Persons API resource.

Note: You can update activity settings at any time.

Call structure

For every resource that supports the full set of CRUD (create-retrieve-update-delete) operations, the API calls follow a consistent structure.

Create requests use the POST method to call the base resource URL. For example, for Create Activity, the URL is:
https://<<hostName>>/api/v1/work/activities

Retrieve requests use the GET method to call either the base resource URL or the base resource URL plus an ID. For example, for Retrieve Activity and Retrieve Activity by ID, the URLs are:
https://<<hostName>>/api/v1/work/activities
https://<<hostName>>/api/v1/work/activities/{id}

Update requests use the PUT method to call the base resource URL plus an ID. For example, for Update Activity by ID, the URL is:
https://<<hostName>>/api/v1/work/activities/{id}

Delete requests use the DELETE method to call the base resource URL plus an ID. For example, for Delete Activity by ID, the URL is:
https://<<hostName>>/api/v1/work/activities/{id}

System settings

The following system settings affect the behavior of the Activities product:

• Kiosk mode
• cumulatively totaling (or “rolling up”) daily and grand totals of hours, costs, charges, and wages
• form submission for days that have been approved
• processing non-chronological Start Only forms
• controlling of activities to use for idle time
• allowing concurrent activity durations for employees
• enabling enhancements to Future Dating Validation Period

Activities license

The Activities license is required for certain actions in the Activities domain, and must be applied when assigning activity profiles to employees.

Refer to the Licenses section of the configure access topic for more information about licenses and assigning licenses using the API.

For more information

Refer to the UI online help for Activities Setup for more information, including the following topics:

• Additional details about system settings
• Setting up Function Access Profiles (FAPs) for Activities employees
• Activities standards calculations
• Hours allocation methods

Pre-defined configuration data

The Activities system provides configuration data elements such as activity forms already defined to help you with system configuration. You can edit some pre-defined configuration data to suit your business needs or duplicate the data as templates to create more elements.

For example:

• Pre-defined activity form 90003 (Activity Stop) includes a field for each of three activity levels. Your business uses only two activity levels. You can edit the form to remove the third activity level.

Pre-defined activities

Pre-defined activities are used to generate activity events that fill the gaps between logged activity events and to account for unpaid breaks.

Note: You cannot edit or delete pre-defined activities.

The system includes the following pre-defined activities:

Pre-defined activity queries

Pre-configured activity queries are also known as system queries. They were designed with business needs in mind and to help reduce the number of queries you need to create for your needs.

Note: You cannot edit or delete system queries. To create a query that is based on a system query, duplicate the query, and then edit it.

You can assign system queries to activity query profiles.

The following table lists the pre-configured activity queries. The term “held status” refers to any of the following activity statuses: “Hold,” “Released,” “Never Held or Released.”

Pre-defined activity query profiles

There are two pre-defined activity query profiles:

Pre-defined field definitions for result codes

The Activities system provides the following pre-defined fields for which you can create result codes. Result code fields are optional on activity forms to enhance result information.

• _Completed Quantity Code
• _Reworked Quantity Code
• _Scrapped Quantity Code
• _Reason Code

For example, for _Scrapped Quantity Code, you may want to create result codes to indicate reasons why material was scrapped.