One of the powerful tools for configuring SAP HR is features – structured decision logic that looks at various attributes of an employee. Features are used to determine all sorts of things in the SAP HR system – which wagetype to use in paying an employee, which benefit plans they are eligible for, which pay frequency to use and so on.
SAP's Concurrent Employment (CE) functionality has been out for a few years now, and several customers have successfully implemented it. This CE functionality enables you to have multiple 'assignments' per person in the HR system. Think of an assignment as a job or position (not necessarily 'job' or 'position' in strict SAP-terms, but in a business-sense). If you have a sizable population of employees who work in multiple jobs or positions, then CE might be right for you.
Installing a new HR system - like SAP HR - takes a lot of work; and it requires consultants with a lot of experience to install it well. That experience will help you design work processes that work well both with the system and for your business. Those processes and the technical configuration supporting them are the foundation for your system and all that you will do with it in the future - and that is why it is critical to get it 'as right as possible' early-on.
I heard from a company the other day that they were told that they shouldn't use the Payroll Reconciliation Report for US Payroll because it wasn't accurate. They were talking about report RPCPRRU0 (RPCPRRU0_CE if you're on CE), transaction PC00_M10_REC. They said someone from SAP told them this, back in the late-90;s when they first implemented. Incredible!
A couple years ago I noticed a new version of the payroll posting program - in addition to RPCIPE00 I noticed RPCIPE01 was now available. This new version of the posting program breaks the posting run into multiple parallel jobs so that the elapsed run time is shortened. That was great news because I had clients who were spending way too much time getting payroll posted into FI, CO, FM, GM, etc!