In any enterprise there is a need to identify different groups of people. For each group that exists in your enterprise there may be different types of information you need to keep. You may also want to control access to the records of different groups of people.

There are four basic types of people for whom you maintain information in your human resource system. These are:

• Employees, both current and ex-employees

• Applicants, both current and ex-applicants

• Contingent workers, both current and ex-contingent workers

• External people

A special category of the External type is contact. A contact can be associated with an employee, contingent worker, or an applicant.

Contacts can include the following types of people: people who are dependents of employees, people whom employees name as beneficiaries of certain benefits, and people whom employees list as their contacts in case of emergency.

System and User Person Types

Oracle HRMS comes with a set of seven person types recognized by the application, and identified by a system name. These are shown in the table below. Note that the system person type of External is supplied with two user names.

Person Types and System Names Table

The following table describes the person names and system types:

Person Types and System Names

Each person type has a predefined user name, or user person type, that you can change when you install the system. To more accurately represent the people of your enterprise, you can then extend this further by adding subgroups to each system person type. For example, Oracle HRMS is installed with the system person type of employee, you might have two types of employee in your enterprise:

• Regular employee

• Fixed term employee

You can define these as subgroups of the Employee person type to:

• Enable fast identification of these groups

• Manage different kinds of personal information for each group

• Change employees from Fixed Term to Regular Employee, without changing current work information

In another example, you might want to distinguish between internal and external applicants for vacancies. You may also be involved in a redundancy program or a program of staff layoffs, and need to identify employees as preferred candidates for any vacancies. You can do this with the following subgroups of applicant:

• Internal Candidate

• External Candidate

• Preferred

In these examples you are able to extend system person types by defining your own user person types to accurately represent the people of your enterprise.

When you create people in Oracle HRMS, you assign them a person type to represent them in your enterprise. The user person type you select for them is known as their person type usage.

If subsequently you apply further person types to a person, for example if an employee applies for another job in your enterprise, then this is displayed as a concatenation of all the applicable person types, in this example, employee.applicant.

OAB Person Types

In addition to system and user person types there are also OAB person types. These are predefined in Oracle HRMS and automatically created when certain actions occur in Standard or Advanced benefits. For example, when an employee dies, a user type of surviving family member could be created or when the leaving reason of retiree is entered for an employee, the user person type of retiree is created.

The eight predefined person types are shown in the table below.

OAB Person Types Table:

The following table describes the OAB person types:

OAB Person Types

Although these are usually created automatically as part of your benefits administration, you can add and delete these person types manually using the Person Type Usage window. This enables you to correct any special circumstances and also assign people to OAB person types for which they would otherwise not be eligible.

You can also change the user name of any person type usage to another user name defined for the same system person type in this window.

OAB system person types co-exist with the HR system person types. This means that a person can be recorded as an Applicant for HR purposes and a Beneficiary for OAB purposes simultaneously.

Person Types and Information Management

You can use person types to control the type of information you can enter. For example, you cannot enter earnings or deductions for an applicant. You can use person types in the following ways:

• To control access to peoples' records on the application. For example, you may give all managers in a department access to employee records, but only give recruitment officers access to records of applicants and ex-employees.

  Your system administrator can achieve this by creating configured versions of the People window.

  See: CustomForm

• When you set up your own fields to hold additional information, you can tie them to particular person types. For example, you may want a user-defined field holding visa information for foreign workers to appear for employees and applicants, but not for other people.

  You can do this by setting up the descriptive flexfield on the People window.

  See: User Definable Descriptive Flexfields