The first thing to create in ERP5 is the persons. Every person who has interaction with our company has to be entered based on different roles such as staff, clients, suppliers, etc. Then they can be assigned duties, linked to organisations, set relations to marketing campaigns, etc. In this way, the persons are managed according to our company's needs.

In our example, VIFIB has staff (role "Internal") - engineers in the field of software development who run the production environment, technicians in the field of computer hardware who install PC hardware, company managers, accountants and HR who manage the company, etc. VIFIB has clients (role "Client") who purchase hosting capacity for their own use or for retail through their own SlapOS platform, and clients who are software developers and need to receive software certification. VIFIB has suppliers (role "Supplier") of computer capacity and hosting space, and suppliers of software licenses and software integration service. VIFIB is also in relation with journalists (role 'Media') and social insurance center (role "Administration").

In ERP5, there are two principles in identifying the person. First, the roles of a person should be differentiated. Through configuration, we must be able to differentiate a client from a supplier and from a staff, as shown in the example above. But we also must be able to attribute many roles to the same person. For example, a VIFIB client who purchases large amounts of capacity for retail use can also provides computer capacity to VIFIB through their SlapOS platform, thus becomes a VIFIB supplier. So this person is at the same time a client and a supplier. Second, a person must be unique. We must create the person once into the system then be able to use it everywhere it is needed. If we create false persons (as Person 1 – Customer; Person 1 - Client) we are getting far from the reality which we try to represent within our system.

Once we have created each person's document in the system, we will have to do the same for the organisation, which can be a company, a non-profit organisation, an association, etc., and then to link them together to show the relation between "Person" and "Organisation". For example, Cédric De Saint Martin and Yingjie Xu are staff of our organisation VIFIB, John Scott Doh is linked to VIFIB's client Z Company, Lei Xu is linked to VIFIB's another client Y Company, Laurent Dubois works for Ma vielle imprimerie SA - a publication company which is VIFIB's supplier, and Lei Xu works for VIFIB's another supplier EC China.
The second use of the organisation can be to represent the departments or subsidiaries of a specific company (group). For example, John Scott Doh can be linked to the function "Marketing Manager" of the VIFIB's client "Z Company". Yingjie Xu who works in China for VIFIB's subsidiary VIFIB China can be linked to the organisation "VIFIB China" of the group "VIFIB", while Cédric who works in the headquarter of VIFIB in Paris is belong to "VIFIB" of the group "VIFIB".

In ERP5, a person can be represented both by a person document and by an organisation document, but both entities are independent and have their own life cycle. A person can work for one or many organisations, or change organisations during their career. But there is no need to create a new person, only to update the existing one. Then a new career step will be created.

When a person is working for a given organisation, it is a step in his global career. A person might have different career steps since he/she must evolve in his/her work. If the person changes organisation, we will create a new career step, linked to a new organisation and start it. As shown in the table above, each step of a career has a beginning date, and a ending date. This gives us a really simple but realistic way to handle careers within ERP5. Many organisations also use a grid that presents an internal career step with an associated salary level.

We have a very simple work-flow for career steps, since they can only be either opened or stopped.

However, careers are not sufficient to represent what is the responsibility within the company and what is the person responsible for. We must be able to represent what duties are assigned to a given person. This is why we should talk about the notion of assignment. Assignment is a way to represent, for example, the fact that a community manager of VIFIB is in charge of communication with the software developers, or that a client of VIFIB is responsible for the retail operations department of his company.

Assignments are completely independent from a career step. First, these assignments (duties) will evolve more quickly than the career step. So within the same career step, people must have many different duties. Second, the assignments within a career step could be very different from each other, and sometimes can be very far from the career step itself. For example, a financial manager of VIFIB might be assigned the duty of handling the director role during a few times while the company director is absent for business trips. Third, assignments are not always related to the organisation in which people are through the career step. For example, a software developer of VIFIB might be in charge of some missions of a project for a VIFIB client's organisation.

So we have a simple way to handle responsibilities within the system. Assignment can also be used to handle security level within your system. It is often a good representation of the responsibility levels within the company.

The workflow of an assignment is also very simple. The status of updated is here to represent that you might be reviewing duties related to a project and a person. For example, the assignment "software developer" of VIFIB might become "project manager" of a Beta Developer Program. So he is not only a software developer, but becomes responsible for organizing the project.
When you affect security permission to assignment role, they will only be available when the assignment is in a started state. So updated is during the reviewing. Once it is done, you just change it back to Started.

Careers and assignments are the strict minimum to manage human resources. But there are many other fields which can be added to the ERP5 system configuration to have a complete human management system.
Skills: We should be able to manage the skills of people within and outside the company. A really useful thing would be a skill catalogue, so when we need a special skill, we can choose the appropriate person from the catalogue.
Training: The skills should be extended with the possibility to manage formations of employees. Those formations usually create new skills which might be validated with a diploma or something similar.
Positions: A position is a combination of the group, the function and the site on which is the position, it comes with a clear job description. Many organisations prefer to talk about position rather than anything else.
Hiring: Finally we can also think about handling the recruitment procedure. When a company open a position, we have candidates for this position, and once we found someone, the position becomes closed.