Troubleshoot HR manager update issues

Applies to:

  • Workday to on-premises Active Directory user provisioning
  • Workday to Azure Active Directory user provisioning
  • SAP SuccessFactors to on-premises Active Directory user provisioning
  • SAP SuccessFactors to Azure Active Directory user provisioning

Understanding how manager reference resolution works

The Azure AD provisioning service automatically updates manager information so that the user-manager relationship in Azure AD is always in sync with your HR data. It uses a process called manager reference resolution to accurately update the manager attribute. Before going into the process details, it is important to understand how manager information is stored in Azure AD and on-premises Active Directory.

  • In on-premises Active Directory, the manager attribute stores the distinguishedName (dn) of the manager's account in AD.
  • In Azure AD, the manager attribute is a DirectoryObject navigation property in Azure AD. When you view the user record in the Azure portal, it shows the displayName of the manager record in Azure AD.

The manager reference resolution is a two step-process:

  • Step 1: Link the manager's HR source record with the manager's target account record using a pair of attributes referred to as source anchor and target anchor.
  • Step 2: Use the manager reference attributes defined in the schema to update the manager attribute in the target in the required format.

The default anchor attributes and reference attributes for each app is listed below.

App Name Anchor attribute Reference attribute in user profile
Workday WID ManagerReference (which points to the WID of the manager record)
SAP SuccessFactors personIdExternal manager (which points to the personIdExternal of the manager record)
On-premises Active Directory objectGUID manager (which points to DN of the manager record)
Azure AD objectId manager (which points to the manager's Azure AD record)

Prerequisites for successful manager update

In order for manager reference resolution to work successfully, the following pre-requisites should be met:

  • Your provisioning app should be configured to use the default source and target anchors as listed above. Do not change the metadata properties (data type, API expression) associated with these anchor and reference attributes.
  • The API expressions (XPATH for Workday and JSONPath for SuccessFactors) associated with the manager attribute resolve to a valid non-null value.
    • Workday ManagerReference default XPATH API expression: wd:Worker/wd:Worker_Data/wd:Management_Chain_Data/wd:Worker_Supervisory_Management_Chain_Data[position()=1]/wd:Management_Chain_Data[last()=position()]/wd:Manager_Reference/wd:ID[@wd:type='WID']/text()
    • SuccessFactors manager default JSONPath API expression: $.employmentNav.results[0].userNav.manager.empInfo.personIdExternal
  • The manager record must also be in scope of the provisioning job.
  • The provisioning app should have processed the manager record prior to processing the user record.

Provision-on-demand does not update manager attribute

Troubleshooting Details
Issue You have successfully configured the inbound provisioning app. You are testing sync with provision-on-demand. It does not update the manager attribute and you get an error message "Invalid value".
Cause Your provisioning job is not meeting one of the prerequisites for successful manager update
Resolution * If you have changed the default manager attribute mapping, restore the default mapping.
* Ensure that the manager record is in scope and the manager API expression resolves to a valid value.
* Run provision-on-demand for the manager's record first and then run provision-on-demand for the user's record.

Full sync does not update manager attribute

Troubleshooting Details
Issue You have successfully configured the inbound provisioning app. You are using a scoping filter to process only certain HR records. You observe that the manager resolution is not happening for some users.
Cause If you are using scoping filters, most likely the manager record is not in scope.
Resolution Update the scoping filter to add the manager record in scope

Next steps