Best Practice to Avoid Record Locks

Best Practice to Avoid Record Locks

GOAL: To provide an overview of best practices on how to coordinate data entry, and workload within the team to avoid record locks and minimize the event where other users cannot process data further. 

There are a few things to consider when trying to minimize the chances of Record Locks.  

1) Always ensure that when you are done work, you sign yourself out of HRP/close the Windows and close the Application.

2) Ensure that you and your team maintain communication as to who will be completing what work during the day and try not to do similar tasks and data entry at the same time

• Helpful tools to maintain communication with the team include
  1. Group chats (MS Team or equivalent Organizational communication platforms)
     • Slack, etc.
  2. Regular check in meetings/chats
  3. Shared Calendars
  4. Task Management Tools

Example: If the Employee Salary table was locked by someone updating data, which essentially means the table is in use. This could block you from running a similar process such as Salary Update. The system will do this to maintain a standardized integrity of data. 

3) It is important to close Windows in HRP as you are finished using each module, so any edits and changes are either finalized or discarded from the Window and made Inactive.

When using Menu to exit a screen, this leaves the Window open as a background session, sometimes containing unfinished changes.

This can cause a buildup in background sessions and for the system to sometimes block secondary users from making desired changes under the same module.

It is important to use the WINDOWS tab to ‘Close All’

Or to make use of the ‘X’ in the top right corner when leaving each module as this will ensure each Tab is closed as you leave the module.

Ensuring that you and your colleagues are proactively closing Windows once done with a module, and always logged out of HRP properly will minimize the chances of anyone being locked from entering changes, because we will know the sessions and modules are not sitting idle and open. 

Secondly, ensuring that data entry and processes for similar data (in our above example; Salary) do not overlap will ensure that in the future all Salary Data Entry can be complete, before you go in to run a Salary Update process, allowing the system to complete one and then the other; and not try both at the same time.