When we enter a new employee in Employee Maintenance and check Shop Supervisor, a new record gets created in WorkForce. This causes a problem for our Sales team as they now see the new employee in the drop down list for Salesperson in Order Entry. The employee has nothing to do with sales. Is this a bug? Is anyone else seeing this? I have to periodically go in and “clean” these people out of Work Force.
I never knew that!
We see the same thing on 10.2.300.15. Our customers have default Salespeople assigned to them, so our Sales team hasn’t had to add a Salesperson to an order, so they never mentioned this issue.
Have you noticed any problems deleting the extra work force records? I wouldn’t mind going in and removing them, but don’t want to if Epicor is expecting it to be there. There’s also an “Inactive” field on the WorkForce you could use.
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I’ve had no problem deleting them. Our issue is that it is annoying and if someone wasn’t careful, they could select one of them incorrectly. When a few of them build up, it takes more time to scroll through the list. A little knit-picky but I understand why sales has an issue with it.
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Same in 10.1.600
I would suggest creating the employee without shop super checked, save, then check and save again. I don’t think the Workforce/SalesRep record gets created after the first save.
Doing a trace might be useful to see what methods are being fired to add the workforce record. There may be a parameter/value that is used that might prevent it, or you could create a BPM that unchecks shopsupervisor prior to the save of the Employee then checks sets the value and does a second save.
We are the same as @tsmith so I have not delved into this issue more deeply apart from the fact that it is a useful way to ensure your EmployeeID matches your WorkforceID when creating new employees.
As long as there are no transactions against the SalesRep you can delete as @Beth mentioned.
If this is the only complaint you are having from sales then, happy days!
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@Hally not the only complaint from Sales…lol!
It’s just crazy that a WorkForce record would be added just because Shop Supervisor has been checked. What does being a Shop Supervisor have to do with being a Salesman??? Nothing!!
Sounds like a bug to me. Maybe I should send it in to Epicor Support. I would expect that they would tell me it’s “working as designed”…
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You could argue that Shopsupervisor needs some other access to SO than the standard shop employee.
What I do know if you don’t add the workforce/salerep to territory and they don’t have view all territories checked, it will play havoc with using helpdesk/case management functionality. At least it did in E9.
Yes, I remember that. But it is just an annoyance and the less “annoyances” I get, the more I’m able to troubleshoot real problems 
I’ll take a look at some of the suggestions for creating a BPM to handle it.
I just ran into this today LoL…
I found it was added because of SCR: 71186 back in 2010 (it’s even documented in the Help)
I would really like to know WHY though? What’s the purpose?
Anyone from Epicor willing to dig up an old SCR and figure it out? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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I would guess it has to do with Time Approval which can be done within a Task Set. Everyone with a Task has to be in the Workforce table.
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There may be reasons for it but it still seems silly to me. Thanks for the reminder to clean it out though… 
I just tested this, actually it WILL create a workforce every time you save if Supervisor = true. Really too bad there is no option in Company Config or Employee to turn this off. This was likely designed for convenience when setting up the Time Management module with approvals, but the issue is, the Supervisor field is not necessarily the same as the Supervisor checkbox. I have many customers with quality inspectors who need access to the Supervisor tab in MES, but aren’t anyone’s supervisor.
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Having a workforce record won’t hurt anyone no? What’s the downside
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The downside is that it doesn’t keep the drop-down list for Salesperson clean. Eventually it’s gets quite cluttered with “shop floor” personnel that don’t have anything to do with Sales. So either clean up the Workforce table or use another field to create the list for Salesperson.
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We use the role for the workforce and filter on our screens that way. It keep things a liitle more manageable.
The CRM module limits visibility to Customers by Sales Territory.
If you have the CRM module and a Work Force record is created for someone without assigning them a Sales Territory, they suddenly lose visibility to the Customer list. This happens often for us if an employee is assigned as a supervisor for Time Approval.
So strange that Work Force is used for Salesperson and Supervisor roles. Most times they do not have anything to do with one another.
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Got ya we had the same problem View All Territories checkbox on Workforce seems to fix it
Simple BPM to default on if they are coming from Employee Maintenance.
This created an issue for us when populating our pilot database with DMT, we couldn’t update an Employee to a Shop Supervisor because it threw and error that it was creating a duplicate entry. Thanks to this post, we were able to figure out that the duplicate entry was in Work Force.
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