Experiences and Experiments with Peoplesoft

Identifying forecasting run in an Absence Management formula

2011-12-20T12:08:00.000-08:00

It is a common requirement to apply different entitlement rules during forecasting, in comparison to the entitlement rules that need to be applied during the actual absence calculations. This requires a method to identify whether a certain formula is being invoked by the forecasting process or not. Use the "TXN ID" or "TXN RSLT OPTN" system variables to identify whether the run is a forecasting run or not. These system elements are available only during forecasting and their values can be effectively used in this scenario.

The big news: SAP to acquire SuccessFactors

2011-12-04T04:33:00.000-08:00

This is one heck of a merger - SAP to acquire SuccessFactors. With one single move, SAP has moved as a strong vendor in the cloud based HCM market. Follow the news here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-03/sap-to-buy-successfactors-for-cloud-offerings.html

One of the most exciting piece of news I've read in the HCM space of late. This just goes on to highlight the importance people are placing on HCM software and more importantly, the technical shift that is happening in the market at present. Another strong indicator of a cloud based future for HCM software. Really interested in the move by Oracle now! Will they stick on with Fusion alone or go ahead to 'fuse' with another HCM cloud vendor in the market? Workday may be?!!

ERP Flashcards - Time and Labor Tables

2011-12-02T02:31:00.000-08:00

Use these flash cards to familiarize yourself with the most important tables in PeopleSoft Time and Labor and to revise what you have learnt!

PeopleSoft HCM Fundamental Tables - Flash Cards

2011-11-30T16:58:00.000-08:00

Presenting easy to use flash cards for revising the most important list of tables in PeopleSoft Workforce Administration

ERP Movies: Episode II - Time and Labor setup fundamentals.

2011-11-29T07:17:00.000-08:00

Andrea helps Jim understand the basic setup architecture of Time and Labor. She does so by introducing a generic setup framework of Time and Pay modules in PeopleSoft.

This 214 seconds long video, is intended as the very first introduction to setting up Time and Labor. This is targeted at PeopleSoft functional and technical consultants who want to start learning Time and Labor. Don't miss the quiz at the end of this post!

Take a short quiz based on the movie and see if it was time well spent!

ERP Movies: Episode I - The Right Choice

2011-11-22T06:34:00.000-08:00

Join Peter as he helps Rachel select the right PeopleSoft modules for her company's Time and Attendance requirements. An introduction to the business scope of Time and Labor, targeted at HRIS leaders who are quizzing on implementing a Time and Attendance system in PeopleSoft. Watch on YouTube here

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

GPS for office navigation and potential for location based services in the workplace

2011-10-22T14:40:00.000-07:00

How many times have you got lost in your office looking for an obscurely named conference room? How many times have you gone in a maze trying to locate the work cubicle of a colleague? Wouldn't it be great if the ever-helpful GPS navigation systems were extended to our offices as well? What I am envisaging is a mobile based navigation app that would help employees find their way through in an office. Well, it would also perfectly fit into the 'social/mobile' dimension that HCM applications are moving towards. Expanding on the idea, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have features of common location based services in this app. For example, the employee could indicate that he/she is in a meeting by 'checking in' to a meeting room. Stretching the idea a bit further - would be great if the mobile phone automatically switches to 'meeting mode' when the person checks into a meeting room and switches back to normal mode when the meeting ends (this would possibly require an integration with the mail client so that the meeting details can be extracted by the app).

Gartner identifies App Stores as one of the strategic technologies for 2012

2011-10-22T07:16:00.000-07:00

An enterprise App Store for PeopleSoft is a topic I have discussed many times in this blog before. The hidden potential of that idea hit me again when I was reading the list of strategic technologies for 2012 published by Gartner. You can read the complete list here. An excerpt from the report is given below:
"Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus. With enterprise app stores, the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support entrepreneurs"
With mobile/tablet based applications becoming ubiquitous, there is no doubt in my mind that the timing is just right for an App Store dedicated to PeopleSoft applications. Considering the strong partnership Workday has with Salesforce.com, it would not be a surprise if a Workday App Store is launched soon.

Outside the walls of the ERP implementation team

2011-09-30T00:33:00.000-07:00

"Sorry, I do not do these transactions. Can you get it done by my assistant?"

If an ERP rollout went smooth, but the culture of the organization did not change - do you declare the project a success or a failure?

T&L New Features: Templates Made Available

2011-09-14T05:44:00.000-07:00

Oracle is rolling out the feature to create new Time and Labor rule templates as part of PeopleSoft HCM9.1 Feature Pack 2. PeopleSoft Time and Labor has a number of delivered rule templates that allow business users/functional consultants to create time related rules with minimum effort. One limitation of this feature was that it was never possible to create user defined templates which could be reused (Do not confuse this with the ability to create new rules. T&L has robust tools that can be used to create custom time and labor rules). Dubbed as "Templates Made Available", the new features allows the creation of new rule templates. Significant technical effort is required though in create a new template, including creation of a new record/page which will be used as the template's UI as well as additions to the TL_RULETEMPLATES application package. One real good enhancement I saw was the flexibility to use a number of Application Engine actions while define the steps of a rule. Earlier, we were constrained by the use of only SQL while creating a rule, but now actions like Do Select, Do While etc. are supported by the Templates Made Available Framework.
This is a great feature from the point of view of a consultant/consulting organization - this tool can be used to create re-usable templates which can be used to enhance the service offering as well as reduce the time of implementation. Visionary organizations should be creating templates for common Time and Labor rule requirements that are not catered by the delivered templates and should make it part of their service offering.
But, from the point of view of a customer and general product strategy, I am really looking forward to better features from Oracle for Time and Labor.

Reference:
http://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/entry/new_peoplesoft_time_and_labor

Sneak peek into Fusion HCM

2011-08-27T04:15:00.000-07:00

Got to attend a Fusion HCM demo couple of days back and I have to say that I was left extremely impressed with the features on offer. Here are some of the points that struck me, which I feel will go a long way in establishing Fusion as a strong contender in the HCM marketplace:
1. Excellent inbuilt and graphical analytics including predictive analytics with a first of its kind module called Workforce Predictions.
2. A wide variety of hosting options including on-premise, public cloud, private cloud etc.
3. Excellent User Interfaces and integrated web2.0 features. As we all know, the fusion team has put a lot of research and emphasis on the UI and it really looks very impressive.
4. Plug and use compatibility with other Oracle HRMS suites like PeopleSoft, e-biz, JD Edwards etc.
5. The various modules seemed to be integrated with respect to analytics and presentation rather than being individual silos - thus giving organizations a comprehensive view of it's people.

All in all, the features on display in the demo (need to put the disclaimer that it was just a prepared demo!) were extremely impressive and somehow I feel that Fusion HCM is going to make a sizeable dent in the HCM market space.

PeopleSoft App Store: Expanding the idea

2011-05-22T10:22:00.000-07:00

I had talked about the idea of a PeopleSoft app store in two previous posts. You can find them here and here. I went on to expand the idea a bit on the prodding of Ryan Martiny of iResume. Some key areas from the thesis is presented below. The below details represent my intellectual property and anyone wanting to quote this or expand on this can do so after consulting with me.

We already have proven and working models around us with regards to an App Store, so my ideas around this is nothing radical. The basic concept would mirror the already existing App Stores, in the sense that it will serve as an online marketplace, providing a common platform for developers and customers to interact. But considering that PeopleSoft is an on-premise enterprise software, we will need to tailor the App Store to best suit the requirements of PeopleSoft customers as well as to come up with a delivery model that will be ideal for an enterprise software.
As I look at it, there can be 3 distinct categories of content that can go in this store: (a) Apps (b) Database scripts (c) Books/Training guides/Red papers etc. Delivery of this content will vary depending on the nature of the content. For example, database scripts and content like books etc. can be directly downloaded from the app store. But, it will be interesting to think how best to deliver the apps themselves. I foresee that the installation of a lot of apps will require an impact analysis from customer to customer and this presents us with two options. One option is to let the customer download the app directly from the store and the customer itself takes up the impact analysis and installation of the app. In this case, the app store nor the developer(s) of the app would provide any ongoing support and the customer would acknowledge that they will be downloading and managing the app at their own responsibility. The second option is to let the customer download the app from the store, but leave the impact analysis and installation to the developer(s). In this case, the customer would be provided with the contact details of the developer(s) such that the two parties can interact for further installation and support. The app store will house all items required for the installation of an app, i.e. PeopleSoft project, DMS scripts, all necessary documentation, any necessary installation guides etc. Any app purchased through the app store will have to be downloaded from the app store itself and it will be illegal for participating developers/development houses to directly deliver the installation package of an app to the customer.

Posting content in the store
Considering the nature of software we are dealing with, it will be required to enforce strict quality control on the software that will be posted in the store. The credibility of the developer is extremely important in this case as it will be required for those who generate the content to provide on going support to customers. Considering all these factors, only those developers/development houses that pass certain criteria will be allowed to post content in the app store. Any content that is posted in the app store will have to go through a review process and has to be supported by all necessary documentation like functional design document, technical design document, installation guide, installation objects like project, DMS scripts etc. and detailed test cases. Minimum coding standards will also have to be maintained. Only those developers/development houses that can adhere to these restrictions will be able to post content in the store.

Categories:
The following categories can be provided in the app store. Each app posted in the store can be put under these general categories and customers will be able to search for apps under these categories:
1. HCM 2. FSCM 3. CRM 4. Campus Solutions 5. Security 6. Reporting 7. Integration 8. Portal 9. Mobile Apps 10. Upgrade

General website features:
The following general features can be provided in the app store:
1. Utility to rate an app by customers.
2. Utility to ask for peer customer feedback on a certain app.
3. Feature to share an app with a friend.
4. Feature for customers to suggest apps that they would like to have.
5. Feature to compare apps so that customers can compare apps with similar functionality for price, customer rating, number of times downloaded etc.
6. Utility to find an app that the customer wants. This can be done by a series of questions which the customer can answer and at the end of the process will be presented with a list of apps that suit their requirement.
7. List of top rated developers/development houses.
8. App of the week.
9. Regional focus - I think it will be great to have apps that have local/regional focus and even apps that cater to local language. This will greatly enhance the attractiveness and compatibility of apps to customers.

All of this can be supplemented by having offline conclaves of developers, providing an app challenge etc. that should help foster the developer community.

Revenue sources:
A percentage of sales of each app can be withheld by the app store management. Relative pricing should be adopted. That is, the fee withheld will vary with the price of the app - with lesser fee being taken for cheaper apps and more for costlier apps.
A flat fee can be charged to qualify as an app store certified developer/development house.
Ads of development houses can be put on the web or if this might dilute the usability/branding of the store, a separate section/link can be provided where featured companies/products can be displayed. This is more like a pure advertising page of PeopleSoft companies/products. Sure that there will be takers for this as the app store will generate good amount of traffic.
Developer platform - independent developers who do not have sufficient support/infrastructure to qualify as a certified development house could be provided a platform/environment for developing apps. The store will retain a higher percentage of the sales proceedings of such developers.

Random Idea: Using Wikis for project documentation

2011-04-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: The idea being detailed below is not new and I am sure is in practice in a number of organizations, but documenting it as I am yet to come across companies that have used this.

I strongly feel that it would be great to adopt wikis as the primary medium of project documentation, especially when it comes to support/maintenance projects. The features and convenience offered by a wiki product is much more and superior to the conventional practice of using word processing documents as the documentation media and a content management site like sharepoint as the central documentation repository. The major advantages of using a wiki are:
1. Easier access (or discovery) to documentation as a wiki is web based and no need for users to remember folder navigations and file names.
2. Easier editing and maintenance.
3. Pages can be logically linked to each other - this is the biggest advantage that I see. The major drawback I experience with traditional documentation is that one document does not link to another and it doesn't provide a continuous reading experience. In a wiki, linking of interconnected documents/pages is possible and this will lead to a far improved user experience.
4. Tagging would be possible in wikis.
5. Wikis are much 'lighter' than traditional documents and would take up much lesser storage space.

Q&A: Creating default payable time for exception time reporters

2011-04-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

Q: "I have some question on the setup of the exception time handling. Our req is to default the hours for all salaried employees and only report their vacation and sick days. We used the WorkGroup and setup a schedule and defaulted the hours. And ran the time admin process..Is there something we are missing. can you please throw some light"

A: "You are missing a rule in your rule program to default all hours to a particular TRC. When you setup Exception time reporters and assign an Elapsed schedule to them (or to the workgroup), Time Admin will generate the hours, but there will be no TRC attached to it. Unless there is a TRC for the rows in IPT1, Time Admin will not generate payable time.
Use the delivered Default Hours rule template to create a rule to default all hours without a TRC to a particular TRC and add this rule to the rule program of the workgroup"

Principal goes live on Oracle Fusion HCM

2011-04-13T16:02:00.000-07:00

As news goes, the financial services giant, Principal Group has gone live on Fusion HCM. Follow the media release below:
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/358769

DMS script to export T&L rules

2011-04-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

Time and Labor rules can be moved from one environment to the other using DMS scripts. Oracle support site has a complete DMS script listed for the same purpose. For quick reference I am documenting here the list of scripts that I commonly run to migrate rules. Do remember to append necessary 'WHERE' conditions for each statement.

EXPORT TL_RULE_DEFN
EXPORT TL_RULE_STEPS
EXPORT TL_RULE_CONDS
EXPORT TL_TMPLT_RULE
EXPORT TL_TMPLT_RULE2
EXPORT TL_SQL_BINDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_INSERT
EXPORT TL_SQL_JOIN
EXPORT TL_SQL_JOINFLDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_OBJECT
EXPORT TL_SQL_SEL_FLDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_TABLES
EXPORT TL_SQL_UPDATE
EXPORT TL_SQL_UPDBINDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_WHERE
EXPORT TL_SQL_WHRBINDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_EXPRESSN
EXPORT TL_RULE_PGM
EXPORT TL_RULE_PGM_DTL

Note: In version 9.1 PeopleSoft has come up with a utility to export and import rules between environments. Using that will eliminate the need to remember and manually execute the above mentioned DMS scripts

Infor report on Mobile Workforce Management

2011-04-10T16:37:00.001-07:00

http://blogs.infor.com/workbrain_watch/assets/RIS_Infor_CR_081710.pdf

Random Idea: A Facebook 'Like' or 'Share' on PeopleSoft pages

2011-03-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

The 'Facebook share' and 'like' buttons are commonplace in most websites today. I think it will be a wonderful idea to have this feature in some of the PeopleSoft pages, especially the candidate facing pages in Recruitment. This will allow candidates to share the job postings on their Facebook/Twitter profile and should help spread the word!

Absence Management Forecasting Errors

2011-03-11T15:40:00.000-08:00

Errors received during Absence Management forecasting process can be confusing. Utilizing this post to note some of the errors and resolution for future reference. Will keep adding to this list. Do leave a comment if you want to contribute to this post!Peoplebooks has a section on these errors, but the cause of the issue is not correctly/completely documented in most cases.

477 - No Absence event present error. Check the forecasting template and ensure that a workflow status of 'Saved' is part of the forecasting template.

480 - This error is mostly caused by an issue in the setup. Revisit especially your process list setup to ensure that all elements are present in the process list and that all formulas are validated.

487 - This issue has been resolved by adding a finalized calendar to the forecasting calendar group with a period that starts before all possible retro start dates.

ERP App Store - The Salesforce.com story

2011-03-05T08:19:00.000-08:00

I had mooted the idea of having an app store for PeopleSoft modeled in the lines of the apple app store. Questions were raised whether this is a practical idea and how customers would evaluate third party products and plug in applications to their existing PeopleSoft installations. Valid questions all. But, it turns out that we already have a perfect and successful example of an enterprise app store, that run by salesforce.com. You can find the details here - http://appexchange.salesforce.com/home
This is a working model from which one can take a lot of ideas. As I had mentioned in my earlier post, they have used web2.0 features like community rating and all applications come with details on live as well as offline support.
Let me re-emphasize my underlying conviction about this idea - customers badly need innovative, productivity enhancing, pre-built tools to aid their existing PeopleSoft installations. There is a real need for this (there are very few companies like Grey Sparling, SmartERP etc. who have exploited this need and I am sure that they are doing extremely well! Succeed Consultancy in the UK is another organization I have seen having some innovative tools, but not sure if they have commercialized any of them). Such an eco-system of the product and independent developers is required for products to grow and offer exceptional features to customers. I really hope that some company that has the resources to make this happen would take up this idea and make it a reality!

Integrating inclement weather prediction in Time and Attendance applications

2011-03-04T12:19:00.000-08:00

Caution: The below post is the result of some runaway thoughts on a nice sunny Friday evening, you might want to plug your ears because I am about to think out LOUD here!

The weather has been particularly unpredictable and surprising in 2010-2011. We've seen devastating floods in Australia and extreme winters in Europe. My question is, what are companies doing pro-actively to prepare for inclement weather from a workforce management perspective? It goes without saying that inclement weather has a direct impact on the ability of employees to turn up for work - this in turn results in unplanned absenteeism, late arrival at work, early departure from work and lost productivity. So the ability to effectively manage workforce during an event of inclement weather is an important one. More so with the extreme unpredictability of weather conditions that we have been seeing over the last few years.
I have rarely seen an organization having a clear inclement weather policy, so do they have any tools that help them manage this? (Working remotely seems to be a perfect solution, but unfortunately this will not work for all industries).
My premise is that, this is an area that has great impact on workforce management and the workforce management tools should be able to aid supervisors plan their workforce in case of unfavorable weather. So what am I hinting at? My thoughts are that it would be great to have real time weather forecasts integrated with the workforce management suite (especially for locations that are prone to unpredictable weather) and alert supervisors when there is a warning of inclement weather. Here are some features that I would love to see in the WFM products:

1. Ability to integrate with weather forecasting information.
2. Ability to look at historical trends on weather and it's potential impact on workforce planning.
3. Ability to alert in case of potential inclement weather.
4. Identify employees at risk due to inclement weather. This is a tricky part as the ability of an employee to attend work in the event of unfavourable weather conditions depend greatly on the location where the employee stays (what if the weather is going to turn bad for the place where the employee stays rather than the actual work location?), distance the employee has to commute and means of commute.
5. Ability to plan and generate schedule for days with inclement weather.
6. Ability to integrate with the Leave Management/Time and Attendance systems if required to support any inclement weather policies of the organization.
7. Ability to alert employees regarding the change in schedule.

I am sure that the dollar value of lost productivity due to inclement weather is high enough to justify the adoption of formal workforce management strategies/tools to manage this ever increasing unpredictable phenomenon.

The 100th post: Look at the LinkedIn discussion on PeopleSoft future

2011-03-04T10:13:00.000-08:00

A highly opinionated discussion has been raging over the last 8 months in the PeopleSoft Community group on LinkedIn on the future of PeopleSoft. You can find the details here. It's an excellent read for all PeopleSoft consultants/organizations invested in/planning to invest in PeopleSoft. I hope you enjoy reading that!
My personal opinion on the subject: The question posed is 'Is PeopleSoft Alive and kicking' and to answer that by looking at the market at this point of time, the only answer is yes. The adoption rate of PeopleSoft version 9.1 amongst customers has been phenomenal (a lot of die hard skeptics have raised the point that there are no new PS9.1 implementations, but just upgrades. This is absolutely not true) and the product is very much alive and kicking today. But, if you were to ask me about the projected future of PeopleSoft, I am convinced that the product will surely lose ground to other progressive products in the years to come. There are a number of reasons for my inference:

1. It will be impossible for Oracle to continue focusing on multiple product lines. The stated strategy of Oracle is to converge towards one single product - Fusion and this will surely mean that funding and focus on other products like PeopleSoft will surely go down. I am sure that Oracle will continue to support customers who are already on PeopleSoft long after Fusion comes out, as maintainance fees represent a healthy part of Oracle's revenue pie.

2. If you follow industry thought leaders like Naomi Bloom, it is very evident that the entire HCM product architecture/code base/data model is undergoing a complete overhaul. I do not think that it will be possible for PeopleSoft to shrug off it's entire product architecture and move towards the new HCM product model - that would be akin to developing a completely new product. This would put the product out of favour with potential customers, who I am sure would prefer the new age HCM suites rather than PeopleSoft.

3. With better integration technologies, organizations are moving towards picking the best vendor for each area of business and integrating data across the various enterprise systems. Given this, we might very well see the disintegration of one vendor providing complete HCM end to end solutions and move towards a model where niche vendors handle their areas of expertise. This would mean that companies that are agile, innovative, fliexible and specialized will gain edge in the future. I am not convinced that PeopleSoft would fit this bill.

Well, these are purely my personal thoughts, but I hope you read the LinkedIn post to gain more insights on this topic.

PeopleSoft Time and Labor/Absence Management Pagelets

2011-03-04T09:23:00.000-08:00

Want to take a minute and introduce to you some very powerful delivered pagelets related to Time and Labor and Absence Management. These pagelets bring together actionable T&L and AM data to a single page and it's generally very well received by customers.

1. Workforce Availability Pagelet: The workforce availability pagelet is ideal for organizations that rely heavily on scheduling, time clocking and require a real time snapshot of the availability of employees on the work floor. It takes data from schedules, time and labor, absence management and even the training information interfaced from PeopleSoft ELM. The best part of this pagelet is that it directly queries the respective transaction tables and thus real time information is displayed. For example, if an employee punches in PeopleSoft Time and Labor, the 'Currently Clocked In' row will get updated. So, it's a pretty useful source of real time Time and Attendance information for shift managers. A sample screen is shown below:

2. Time Management Alerts pagelet: This one is a must have for any T&L/Absence Management implementation. This pagelet displays any pending approval that is required from a manager and is a great addition on the manager's portal homepage. Note that I have found an issue with this pagelet related to the 'Absence Approval Required' field in version 9.1/tools 8.50. The alert for the absence approval gets turned on only after an absence is approved!! I hope there is a fix coming for that sometime soon. But overall it's a very useful pagelet that consolidates approval information from both T&L and AM. A sample screen of this pagelet is shown below:

Note that these pagelets are configurable and fields that are not used/required can be hidden using a configuration page available that lets supervisors turn off rows that are not required.

Dynamic Groups in T&L: Going beyond direct reports security

2011-02-21T21:54:00.000-08:00

In a post sometime ago, I had made a blatant statement that the utility of Dynamic Groups in Time and Labor was reduced by the introduction of a flexible core HR row level security definition as well as the adoption of AWE in version 9.1. As I have been making some analysis on my current assignment, it has become clear to me that my initial analysis was premature! I had always wondered why Time and Labor adopted a security structure that was way different from all other modules in PeopleSoft HCM. While most modules have gone towards adopting the direct reports functionality for Manager Self Service pages, Time and Labor stuck to it's ground using core row level security and T&L dynamic groups. What could have been the rationale behind this design of the product and why does T&L still use Dynamic Group security when no other module in HCM uses the same? The answer could lie in the fact that time management as a business process is not done by the direct supervisor/people manager alone and thus cannot use the same security logic used by other Manager Self Service components. Let's take an example. In a manufacturing environment, shift management is mostly done by shift supervisors/shift leaders who may not necessarily be in the managerial job family. On the other hand transactions like performance appraisals, initiation of promotion, transfer and even absence approvals are traditionally done by a people manager or an employee falling in the managerial job family. The supervisor id assigned at the job data level or the reports to position used in job data is mostly that of a people manager. So, if T&L also adopted the security definitions of other modules, it would have greatly constrained the flexibility of the module. So, I have to agree that Dynamic Groups give an extra layer of flexibility to the T&L product in terms of defining the security and goes a long way in satisfying the requirement of businesses to have non managerial employees manage shifts and approve worked time.

Learning of the day: Group Build and Future effective dates

2011-02-21T21:15:00.000-08:00

Group Build functionality in PeopleSoft HCM can be used to group employees together based on flexible parameters. But, one limitation of Group Build is that it does not consider future effective dates, even if the parameters used to build the Group is designed to return future effective date. As mentioned in support.oracle.com (or customer connection or metalink, whatever you might want to call!), Group Build is designed to only consider current and historical effective dated rows. This is an important point to keep in mind while designing any process that involves Group Build - "Group Build does not consider future effective dates".

On PeopleSoft Feature Packs

2011-01-21T19:49:00.000-08:00

Oracle had announced the decision to come out with more frequent functionality updates to PeopleSoft during Open World 2010. These off cycle feature releases are termed Feature Packs (the first FP for HCM 9.1 has already been released last month). Feature Packs are supposed to complement Bundles and Maintenance Packs and provide customers with a direct upgrade path 9.1 with the additional features. A quick look at the 'features' delivered in 9.1 FP1 does not convince me that major functionality improvements are being delivered through Feature Packs (this is contradictory to the major marketing cry behind feature packs - customers not having to wait for 2-3 years for major functionality releases) and it leaves me with the question whether this is just a marketing fad to counter the feature release frequency of SaaS products. Well, will wait for the next release before coming to a conclusion.
Below is an excerpt on Feature Packs found in support.oracle.com site which I hope will throw more light on this topic:

Question 1:

What are Feature Packs?

Answer 1:

Feature Packs are a new off-cycle delivery mechanisms in addition to the existing off-cycle delivery mechanisms of bundles and maintenance packs. Feature Packs will consist of a roll-up of capabilities and updates previously delivered in bundles and maintenance packs. In addition, at the delivery of Feature Packs Oracle will re-cut the CD to include the roll-up of capabilities and updates previously delivered in bundles and maintenance packs as well as re-certify upgrades and integrations

Question 2:

Why is Oracle introducing Feature Packs and additional capabilities delivered off-cycle?

Answer 2:

Oracle is introducing Feature Packs as a means to:

Continue delivery of value add capabilities on to release 9.1 which is showing strong customer adoption and becoming the release of choice for PeopleSoft customers
Provide capabilities more frequently rather than having customer wait 2-3 years for the next major release
Allow release 9.1 customers to adopt capabilities without upgrading, because additional capabilities are being delivered off-cycle release 9.1 customers need not upgrade to get them but rather merely need to apply bundles and maintenance packs

Feature Packs specifically make it easier for net-new PeopleSoft customers to deploy to the most current point of the latest release.
Feature Packs also make it easier for existing non release 9.1 customers to upgrade to the most current point of the latest release.
If you have access to support.oracle.com, you can read more of this article here.

Extended Absence functionality - Why not in normal Absence Request page?

2011-01-12T05:29:00.000-08:00

The Extended Absence functionality introduced by Oracle in version 9.1 of PeopleSoft Absence Management is a very welcome product enhancement. It provides very powerful tools to do absence eligibility checks (especially when the eligibility rules are complex) and the much anticipated mechanism to upload documents (thanks to the new attachment framework) while requesting a leave. All said and done, I am disappointed that this functionality is not available in the normal Absence Request page. Customers really want to have features like uploading documents, having links to leave policy documents etc. on the absence request page and it defies my logic that Oracle did not think of putting this feature in the absence request page. Moreover, it is not acceptable to most customers to make employees go to different pages to report different types of leaves. So I hope that the Absence Management product development team integrates the Extended Absence functionality into the normal absence request page, so that customers can make use of this really good feature.

Kronos video on the Future of Work

2011-01-08T23:19:00.000-08:00

A distinct flavour of posts in this blog over the last few weeks has been on the changing nature of work and it's challenges on Time and Attendance systems. You can find related articles here, here and here. Here is an excellent clip by Kronos on the same topic. I love it for the questions it raises, I am sure you would too. (Double click the video to view in You Tube)

A truly mobile ERP suite - will we see that in 2011?

2011-01-04T10:22:00.000-08:00

We had discussed previously about the imminent penetration of mobile devices in enterprise applications (refer here and here). The increased popularity of mobile devices, the level of engagement of the user with the mobile device, changing demographics of the workforce and the sheer usability and quality of mobile applications are strong drivers for enterprise applications moving to social and mobile devices. But it made me sit back and take note of the true potential of this trend as I read through the various tech predictions for 2011 and the next decade. I have to state here that invariably every single article on tech trends that I've read over the last week has talked about IT consumerization (Gartner identified this trend as early as 2005) and it's impact on enterprise applications. Sample some of the links below for details:

1. Predictions from Gartner
2. Predictions from techrepublic
3. 2011 trends in Enterprise Irregulars
4. Thoughts by Vinnie Mirchandani
5. Predictions in CIO.com

Exciting times indeed! So what does this mean for PeopleSoft customers? Interestingly PeopleSoft had launched a Mobile Agent way back in 2001 which allowed users to use the PeopleSoft application on mobile devices. PeopleSoft also offered Time and Labor on mobile agent with simple mobile specific screens to report and approve time. Unfortunately the support for mobile agent has been discontinued lately. We have not seen any announcement from Oracle on providing a mobile app for PeopleSoft HCM, but it is interesting that an iPhone app was released by Oracle for iReceipts! Most of the focus I have seen over the last few releases as well as the future direction has been on talent management and usability improvements like what we have seen with 8.50 tools - but we have not seen any guidance on a focus on mobile/social application from the PeopleSoft development team. (The Fusion HCM applications offer a module called Network At Work which I reckon is about collaboration within the enterprise and does not extend to mobile devices and the popular social networking sites). This is not enticing news for PeopleSoft customers and consultants. Is there any alternative that we can look up to as PeopleSoft customers? I reckon the answer lies in Developer Generated Content. I had briefly touched upon this topic in this post where I had talked about the viability of an app store for PeopleSoft. The core idea is for developers and more importantly for IT consulting and service providers/companies to come up with innovative mobile and smart phone applications for PeopleSoft and make it available for customers as downloadable apps. For example, here is a post from Succeed Consultancy who have created an absence management app for iPhone and other smart phone platforms - I am envisaging a new business model where developers and service providers would generate PeopleSoft related content which will be delivered over the web. Customers would further be able to 'shop' for these products online and purchase the products they are interested in. This signals a sea change in traditional enterprise software delivery models and opens up a completely new revenue stream for consulting/IT service companies. I foresee the following benefits for this business model:

1. Better and innovative products/extensions available for customers which will incrementally increase the value of their PeopleSoft investments.
2. Harnessing the creativity and innovation of developers which will lead to a large number of products coming to the market which will in turn be beneficial for all stake holders.
3. New delivery model for enterprise applications which is best suited for a market where enterprise IT is consumerized.
4. New revenue stream for consulting/IT service companies.
5. Subscription/Usage based pricing model that will be attractive for customers.
6. Democratization of enterprise products that will bring out innovation and better products for customers. With such a concept, any developer with good skills and ideas will be able to generate content and upload their product(s) to the app store.
7. Ready made products available for customers which will cut down development time and costs to minimum.
8. Leveraging web2.0 features like rating applications, 'liking' applications, tracking the most downloaded apps etc., the best applications will easily come out on top and the inefficient ones will be weeded out by the community. Moreover, customers could post a wish-list of applications (similar to the concept in Oracle Mix), which can further lead to tailoring apps required by customers.

The first questions that will be raised will be about control over the quality of the applications, impact on upgrades, compatibility with tools and application versions etc. But, these are all concerns which can be effectively addressed. If Wikipedia could do a Britannica Encyclopedia by harnessing the power of the community, why not PeopleSoft? Why can we not deliver better value for our customers and tap into the creativity of the developer community by leveraging on developer generated content? I hope that this post will act as a catalyst for this change.

(Another) New Year!

2010-12-31T20:21:00.000-08:00

Wishing all of you a very wonderful new year! May 2011 be a year full of professional and more importantly personal fulfillment and happiness!
I am sure that the past year was a pleasant one for most PeopleSoft consultants - with renewed investments in HRIT projects by companies, large number of 9.1 implementations/upgrades and the announcement by Oracle of continued investments in PeopleSoft.
2011 bodes to be more exciting and might even turn out to be a 'tipping point' year for the product. The major highlights that I look forward to in the year will be:
1. Release of Fusion HCM product line - features, adoption and it's impact on PeopleSoft.
2. PeopleSoft in the 'cloud' - PeopleSoft has indeed been slow to move to the cloud. Given that adoption of 'cloud computing' is touted to be a major focus point for organizations, it is just a matter of time that PeopleSoft applications are also hosted in the cloud. Already Amazon and HP have solutions that let companies host PeopleSoft applications on the cloud. It is to be seen how vendors and organizations adopt this for their PeopleSoft applications. Hopefully this will make PeopleSoft more attractive for SMEs.
3. Effect of the new workplace and mobile applications - I had discussed briefly on this exciting and sweeping change happening in workplaces over the world in a previous post. With organizations embracing a more flexible work culture, the way enterprise applications are delivered and accessed need to undergo a sea change. I expect to see lot of innovative products coming up in this area and 2011 will only be the start!
4. Release Value Proposition for 9.2 - PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 is touted to be released in 2012 and I hope that we get to know of the features through the RVP sometime in 2011.
5. Progress of the new generation players - The HCM solution space is getting crowded and there are a number of solid products in the market. It will be interesting to see how new generation players like Workday and Successfactors maneuver in a resurgent market and how this will affect the adoption of PeopleSoft.

Well, the underlying current of all the above points is the immeasurable ability for innovation by the human mind and an often scary ability to take risks and venture into the unknown. That makes any prediction (like 10 tech. trends to watch out for in the new year!!) meaningless and mere wishful thinking! So, here's me signing off by wishing to see more of the wonders of the human mind in the new year!

T&L Best Practice - Value Lists and Reporting

2010-12-24T00:09:00.000-08:00

The below presentation examines how Value Lists can be used in the design of Time and Labor reports that require the grouping of Time Reporting Codes.

T&L Best Practice - Value Lists and Reporting

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**Note that a similar approach in Absence Management would be to use Element Groups to group Absence Takes together for reporting.

Robots at workplace and Time and Attendance systems

2010-12-21T05:21:00.000-08:00

What would be the place of a Time and Attendance system in the workplace of future where robots would be pervasive and would be handling most of the tasks done by humans at present? Sample the below video first:

A 'human-less' factory, supermarket and hotel (to take examples of industries with maximum human employment) looks a possible certainty in the near future. As machines replace humans in the workplace, what challenges does that bode for a Time and Attendance solution software? (The question of the effect on the entire HCM product line is more mind boggling!).
I would like to examine two aspects introduced by this new paradigm:
a. The effect on the way time capturing and attendance tracking is done for employees.
b. Applications of a Time and Attendance system for Robots.

A workplace where Robots have predominantly replaced humans will alter the very fundamentals of the current Time and Attendance and Workforce Scheduling market.At present, the main business drivers of Time and Attendance solutions is the fact that employee wages represent a major part of an organization's expenses and the legal requirements related to wage hour compliance. Every idea and product in the Time and Attendance market revolves around addressing these two business drivers. But, both of these needs will become obsolete in a post-Robot workforce world. With the reduction in the number of human workers, the strategic importance of optimizing wages and the overall wage related expenses to the organization will go down. This very fact clearly eliminates the most important pillar on which the Time and Attendance industry has been built - the need to check, control and optimize employee wages, especially those of the hourly employees. Robots on the other hand will not need breaks, need not be paid overtime (unless and until there will be labour laws for Robots!), will not need tracking of absences, may not need clocking time as they can work round the clock. Well, in such a scenario what is the strategic importance of a Time and Attendance system? This will undoubtedly lead to re-writing the fundamentals of the industry (I do not intent to ponder on an answer to this ground breaking question in one single post!).
One significant change I see happening due to this is in the way human employees will report time. With robots taking up the blue-collared jobs, human workers would be relegated to the office. Here again, I foresee the pervasiveness of the ROWE (Result Only Work Environment) culture in the future. The anthem of ROWE is for employees to 'work anywhere, anytime without any fixed schedule'. With the improvements in collaboration technology and with machines (robots) grinding it out in the shop floor, companies should be able to adopt a flexible work culture like ROWE, allowing employees to work from any location. This shift in the workplace will necessitate the evolution of new mechanisms of capturing time/absence information. Fundamentally, time and attendance systems will have to be available in mobile and social networking applications. This is in tune with recent research suggesting that the market for mobile office applications will be around $6.85 billion by 2015 with more and more organizations moving enterprise applications to mobile devices. This is undoubtedly the 'blue ocean' for Time and Attendance systems and I would be surprised if the major Time and Attendance vendors do not latch up to this trend. Thus, the first major trend that I foresee due to the introduction of robots in the workplace is a paradigm shift from the traditional mechanism of tightly tracking time and attendance to a more flexible time reporting environment where the emphasis would be on collaborative and social devices for recording and reporting time.

The second aspect was about the application of a Time and Attendance system for Robots. This is completely uncharted waters and will be an interesting ride!

I see two primary ways in which robots will be deployed in the workplace:
1. Treat a robot as an immovable capital investment like any other machinery and the company decides to buy robots for use.
2. Lease robots for use on a monthly or even hourly basis. I foresee the possibility of large scale robot leasing houses which would have an army of robots specializing in various tasks and deploy the robots at a fixed monthly/hourly rate to customers. Specialization of skills for robots will of course be pre-dominantly important when we are talking about these machines replacing the multitude of tasks and skills done at present by humans. This will introduce a 'job market' for robots with relative demand for various skills and these robot leasing houses will play an important role in supplying 'talent' to the market.

If the second idea that I detailed becomes a reality, we could potentially see robots coming in and going back from work everyday (especially in an environment where operations do not take place 24*7). Further, if the robots are leased on an hourly rate to the company, it might become important to track the time worked by the robot. Thus, we could potentially see the need to track the time worked in a shop floor by robots and this is indeed an opportunity and challenge for the Time and Attendance vendors. The area where I see maximum impact is on Workforce Scheduling. The dynamics and parameters used for workforce scheduling at present will have to be uprooted in a post-Robot workplace environment and the possibility of a robot executing a task will have to be taken into consideration while scheduling and generating work schedules. This will also entail the need to feed back the work schedule generated to the robot. Thus, there is a distinct possibility that in the future, Time and Attendance systems will have to interact with robotic systems and possibly even an IT system that controls the administration of robots. This will entail technological changes and challenges to the Time and Attendance vendors and opens up an entirely new and non-existent possibility.

In conclusion, I feel that the signs of the workplace of the future bodes a fundamental shift to the Time and Attendance systems market. Even if the idea of Robots in the workplace might be futuristic, it is fast dawning upon us and we should be prepared for the tremors that will come with it. More importantly, the shift to a more virtual workplace and adoption of ROWE or ROWE like concepts present a more imminent challenge to the industry and calls forth for innovative products and a re-think of the very fundamental business drivers of the Time and Attendance industry.

Time and Labor rules and WRK_ADHOC_TAO table

2010-12-20T22:42:00.000-08:00

WRK_ADHOC_TAO is one of the most useful temporary tables used in the Time Administration processing. This table (conspicuous by the absence of a TL_ prefix as it is a scheduling table used!) is primarily used as the reference point for the schedule data of employees (output of the schedule resolution routines in Time Admin). This table is commonly used in most of the delivered rule templates, especially those that track attendance infractions like Late In, Early Out etc. Handy uses of this table are:
1. HOLIDAY_IND field that says whether a particular day is a Holiday as per the holiday schedule.
2. OFFDAY_IND field that says whether a particular day is an off-day as per the work schedule of the employee.
3. SHIFT_ID field that gives the shift of an employee for a day which can be useful while tracking shift premiums.
4. Field that give the scheduled In and Out time for a day that can be useful while checking tardiness.

So, the next time you want to check whether a particular day is an off-day or holiday in Time and Labor rules, you know which table you need to refer!

Quick tip: Delegation in PeopleSoft Time and Labor 9.1

2010-12-14T09:32:00.000-08:00

For Time and Labor delegation transactions to appear in the Manage Delegation page, ensure that the delegation transaction ids have been setup in the Self Service workflow transaction page. This page can be found under:
Setup HRMS >> Common Definitions >> Self Service >> Workflow Transactions.

Processing employees on LOA in Absence Management - enhancement request

2010-12-07T10:02:00.000-08:00

As per the current design, the Absence/Payroll calculation process does not pick up employees with an Inactive status. As the LOA action is setup to turn the employee Inactive, naturally employees on LOA are not processed in Absence Management/Global Payroll. This is a common requirement from clients and I recently noted in support.oracle.com that Oracle has raised an enhancement request for this very issue. According to the Oracle support site, ICE 1910876000 has been created for this request. That should be a welcome news for Absence Management customers.

Handling blank values in Excel to CI template

2010-12-07T09:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes blank values in an excel spreadsheet in the Excel to CI template can cause issues while staging the data. Workaround for this issue is to put " " (yes, two " separated by a space) in each cell that has a blank value).

Proactive Analysis and Selecitve Application: A proposed approach to PeopleSoft maintenance

2010-12-03T22:51:00.001-08:00

When the phone rang at three in the night (or was it already morning*, long days at work incapacitates the brain for sure!) Bernard said to himself, 'Oh God, not again'. The ring tone ('alarm' would be a better term!) was distinctive, slowly rising in pitch from a sweet whisper to an ear piercing shrilling - it was the support phone crying to be attended to. Bernard reached out for the phone and he was right, it was the IT helpdesk calling. 'Hello, this is Bernard from PeopleSoft support team. May I know who is on line?'
'Hi Bernard, this is Anand from IT Helpdesk. We have received around eight incidents in the last one hour saying that employees are not able to apply for leave. When they try to click on the forecast button, they are getting the error message 17000,483. As this is preventing a large number of employees from applying leave, David has authorised this to be a Priority 2 ticket. Could you take a look? I will call back in 30 minutes for an update'.
'Ok. Sure Anand. Please pass on the incident numbers to me with the exact error details reported by the employees'.
Bernard analyzed all the reported incidents and noticed that in all cases employees were trying to apply retroactive leaves. He knew that there were no issues with the retro setup in Absence Management and was perplexed about this issue. As he had the error number, he quickly logged into Oracle metalink to gather more details about the error. 'There you go, another product bug fixed in a future bundle!', Bernard sighed. This was not the first time that such an issue had come up, they had not applied bundles for the last one year and a number of critical issues were finally nailed down to being part of one or the other bundle. It was not that the project manager was complacent on the need to apply bundles, but the cost and effort concerns always reigned in. The story goes on that Bernard was able to downgrade the severity of the ticket and later got the DBA to apply the specific fix for this issue. This incident went in as yet another entry into the 'business case' for a bundle upgrade. Last heard, the customer realised that it is better for them to upgrade to the latest version of the product, rather than apply close to 20 outstanding bundles!

Couple of weeks back, there was a very interesting discussion on ITToolbox regarding the best practices on applying bundles and maintenance packs. Even though staying current on bundles and patches is the ideal scenario, practical considerations make it a very difficult state to be in. For shops that have a small PeopleSoft team, supporting multiple applications and in times of stringent HR IT spending, spending effort and money to stay current on bundles is not always a top choice. Organizations would rather spend on new projects with tangible business impact.
But a careful analysis of the bundle fixes will show that a number of critical issues are often fixed in these releases, so completely ignoring bundles and adopting the strategy of 'don't fix it if it's not broken' can turn out to be counter-productive.
Thus, I would advocate a middle path of proactive analysis and selective application. The steps in this approach is illustrated below:
1. Proactively analyse bundles for fixes that are relevant to the customer as soon as they are released. This first step is very important because it will immediately bring to light potential issues in the system that have either been not identified or have been identified but not resolved. This activity of proactive bundle analysis for relevant fixes will surely help the customer pre-empt some of the issues before they arise and is thus a very powerful support tool.
2. Try to replicate the relevant bugs in the customer's environment. This is to confirm that the issue as reported by the bug exists in the customer's environment also. A number of times I have found that this kind of an analysis brings forth issues which were never identified in the system and has helped to fix them before they arose.
3. Rank the fixes in terms of business impact. It's a no-brainer that bugs with maximum impact has to be taken on priority and fixed and this process should help to come out with the priority list.
4. Debate the possibility of a work around vs. applying the fix. There could be certain scenarios where the effort of applying a fix provided by Oracle is very high and a customized work around could be put in place with lesser effort. This can typically happen in environments where certain parts of the application has been heavily customized and high degree of retrofitting is required to apply a fix provided by Oracle. In these cases, a decision has to be made whether it is better to put in a customized work around or the Oracle provided fix.
5. The final step in the process would be to extract the specific fixes from the bundle release and selectively apply them in the customer's environment.

I believe that the above is a very effective strategy that can be adopted effectively by PeopleSoft support projects. While the cost of applying entire bundles can be very high, the cost of not being aware of the bugs fixed by bundles and waking up to critical system issues can be equally damaging (especially when it affects time and pay. I know of organizations that have lost thousands of dollars in terms of payroll overpayments due to bugs in Time and Labor/Absence Management!). This process of proactive bundle analysis has to be an integral part of every PeopleSoft support process, to the extent that I would advocate measuring the compliance to this activity.

*At the heights of it's colonial powers, Britain was referred to as the 'Empire on which the sun never sets'. This would be an accurate reference to the Indian IT companies of the current era. With work and support being provided round the clock, the sun indeed doesn't set for these companies.

Tomorrownow, $1.3 billion and the Oracle-SAP-HP conundrum!

2010-11-26T22:18:00.000-08:00

Watch details of the verdict against SAP to pay $1.3 billion to Oracle for IP violations done by Tomorrownow, which SAP acquired in 2005:

What about a PeopleSoft App Store?

2010-10-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

I've been mulling the idea of having an app store for PeopleSoft applications, similar to the Apple app store. Wouldn't it be great to have an online store where developers can upload bolt-on pieces and applications that have been created which customers can download and install in their PeopleSoft systems? I know that this is completely different from a typical ERP solution delivery, but I envision that such a concept will greatly help in enhancing PeopleSoft's popularity among customers. Fundamentally, this will also breed a group of developers or companies which would be pure app/product developers and I am sure that PeopleSoft customers will get to have some high quality add-ons which will enhance the usability experience. I am sure that this will happen some time, some day!

Roadmap for PeopleSoft HCM product line

2010-10-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

Here are two insightful slides from the Open world presentation on PeopleSoft HCM product line. It clearly underlines the commitment from Oracle to support PeopleSoft and come with newer releases more often. The adoption of 9.1 has been phenomenal as seen from the first graph and the decision by Oracle to deliver quicker feature changes bodes really well for the customer.

Figure 1: Adoption rate comparison between 9.1 and 9.0

Figure 2: Investment strategy on PeopleSoft product line - 9.2, 9.3 etc.

Enterprise Time and Attendance product challenges

2010-10-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

Most enterprise Time and Attendance systems (by enterprise T&A systems, I refer to time and attendance modules present in the larger HCM product line of an ERP suite and not stand alone time and attendance products) are mature products doing a very fine job of collecting and processing time. But recent advances in technology as well as changing patterns of employment and workforce present some very interesting challenges to traditional established Enterprise Time and Attendance softwares. An enterprise Time and Attendance system can no longer survive with a one-product-in-all strategy, simply because other systems have evolved over the last many years which are capable of performing certain aspects of time management much better than an enterprise Time and Attendance system. One of the major trends shaping the workforce today is the paradigm of the mobile/flexible workforce and the widespread influence of mobile devices and social networking. What is the best way to report/record time for a mobile workforce, living in the virtual social networking world? It is my solemn belief that the interface to report time will move to mobile devices or even social networking sites (think of recording an absence from a Facebook app! Weird, but in the current context an absolute probability) and the role of an enterprise Time and Attendance software as a time recording tool will fade to insignificance. To enable this shift, enterprise time and attendance products should come up with robust APIs for time reporting which any third party can consume and use.
Another major shift is in data analytics - traditionally time and attendance softwares come with very minimal data crunching and reporting abilities, while one of the major advantages of a T&A system is the insights time data can give into labour productivity and payroll costs. This is also a task better done by specialized data warehousing products, rather than the T&A product. This also makes sense as organizations are moving towards an integrated data warehousing strategy.
In short - enterprise time and attendance systems will mostly assume the role of a time processing engine and act as the critical bridging point between the time reporting layer and the reporting/analytics and other enterprise components like payroll and workforce scheduling systems. Below are my predictions on how enterprise T&A modules will evolve to meet the new challenges:

Separation of time reporting layer and time processing layer. Time reporting layer will move out of the enterprise T&A product, while the core strength of the T&A product will be time processing.
APIs for integrating time data with time reporting interfaces. This should enable organizations the flexibility to report time using any mobile/social networking utility.
Verticalisation of time and attendance solutions. Unlike other HCM processes, time management processes vary greatly across industries and a single configurable solution does not fit well. Enterprise T&A modules will have to verticalize their solutions.
Stronger time based reporting and analytics and APIs with data warehousing products for time analytics. As organizations are moving towards a central data warehousing tool for all products used within the organization, I would like to see enterprise T&A module vendors forging stronger alliances with datawarehousing vendors and coming up with pre-defined data models, dashboards and reports.

I have roughly sketched my view of the landscape of an enterprise Time and Attendance system:

KABA BCOMM integration with PeopleSoft Absence Management

2010-10-16T12:27:00.001-07:00

KABA is one of the two certified time clock vendors for Oracle PeopleSoft Time and Labor. There is a bi-directional integration between KABA and T&L, with T&L sending the TCD (Time Collection Device) and time reporter data to KABA and KABA sending the punch/elapsed time data to T&L. The integration of KABA and Time and Labor is pretty seamless and my experiences with the product has been very satisfactory. In a recent product demonstration by KABA, I got to know that they are developing an interface with PeopleSoft Absence Management, which will allow users to book absences directly on the clock. According to the KABA account manager who was giving the product overview, the integration with Absence Management should be generally available by Q2 of 2011. This is an interesting development as it will ease absence reporting for employees in operational industries (like manufacturing/retail/hospitality etc.), integrate time and absence reporting to a single application, authenticate employees based on a badge/biometric data (thereby eliminating the need for employees to remember the username and password for various applications) and possibly eliminate the need for employees to spend time in a computer kiosk (with associated authentication, caching and security concerns). But, absence reporting is completely different from time reporting and it will be interesting to see how the product from KABA is positioned to deal with all the challenges. Nevertheless, it is a feature which customers would want to evaluate while deploying PeopleSoft Time and Labor and TCDs.

Towards an IT Application Support Model

2010-09-07T23:55:00.000-07:00

A proposed model for carrying out IT application support. The model has hues of Business Process Management and emphasizes on a phased maturity leading to business transformation. Business transformation is not a process that has to wait till an application upgrade (from an ERP perspective), especially in an age where the rate of change of technology is tightly intertwined with changes in the way business is done. This is exactly why we need to move from an IT support model that measures IT and Business continuity and SLA adherence, to a model that leverages information technology for changing ways business is done.

Towards an it support model

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I have specific ideas from a PeopleSoft HCM perspective around moving towards Orbit 3 and would be more than willing to share and build the same with anyone who is interested!

GP Formula Text Builder

2010-08-25T01:54:00.000-07:00

The application package GP_FORMULA_PARSER can be utilized to generate the Formula Text of a Global Payroll or Absence Management formula. This is the base package that is used in the formula definition page as well as in the rule package compare utility, to expand the seemingly 'cryptic' GP formulae. The method ConvertRowsetToText takes the GP_FORMULA_DTL rowset as one of the input parameters and returns a string containing the parsed formula definition. The only problem I found with the output was that it contained HTML tags which had to be stripped off for use in a non-HTML context. This can be a very handy utility to quickly generate the formulae text for comparison and documentation purposes.

Reusable methods in Peoplesoft Time and Labor and Absence Management - 9.0/8.49.15

2010-08-06T00:40:00.000-07:00

I have compiled a short list of delivered methods in application packages for both T&L and Absence Management. I believe that it is important that developers know and understand these methods as it can be reused to save development effort as well as increase quality of coding. You can find the list in the below location:
Time and Labor Methods for Reuse

Recruitment Solutions and Social Networking

2010-05-02T04:29:00.001-07:00

A major feature that separates the recruitment business functionality from other HR business areas is the fact that it interacts heavily with people outside the organisation through external job postings, career sites, job boards etc. Reaching out to the right candidates with information regarding open positions is thus a strategic challenge for the recruitment function. With the almost cultural assimilation of social networking tools across the world, it would be anachronistic to stick to the old world strategy of posting job openings in career sites and job portals alone. The use of social networking tools in recruitment is well documented and more and more organisations are relying on LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogger and Orkut to zero in on desired candidates.
I strongly believe that software used for recruitment should have a strong social networking component to it for organisations to truly achieve a higher ROI on their investments. It's imperative that the organisation reaches out to potential candidates through this channel and further utilize the wealth of information that is present in these tools to screen candidates further.
I want to present two ideas I have in this regard and hope that organisations will be able to build further on them to achieve higher ROI on their recruitment systems:

1. Job postings to Twitter: In a latest survey, a whopping 87% of Americans have heard of Twitter! Another staggering fact is that close to 50 million (yes you heard it right!) tweets are generated each day (that is close to 600 tweets in a second). Another significant statistic is that close to 50% of Twitter users are from USA. Considering all of this and especially if your company is look at talent in the US, your organisation has to seriously look at leveraging Twitter to reach out to potential applicants. Now, how does it all relate to Peoplesoft? Well, if you are using Peoplesoft Recruitment solutions then I propose that you integrate that with Twitter to enable external job postings created in Peoplesoft to be posted as tweets. This should be part of a larger recruitment marketing strategy of using Social Networking sites to position your organisation as a preffered employer. There are a number of APIs (including this Javascript API that can be utilized in Peoplesoft) that can be utilized to integrate Peoplesoft and Twitter. The simplest start though is to use Twitter Mail (a third party application that posts emails as tweets) which your Peoplesoft technical team should be able to implement in quick time.

2. Enterprise Applicant profile aggregation tool: I envisage a tool that will crawl various social networking sites to aggregate a 'social networking' profile of a candidate which can be further utilized in the selection process. In an excellent paper, Sam Gosling of the Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin and others have claimed that Online Social Networking Website (OSNW) profiles provide more information regarding the personality of an individual than most other sources, including physically meeting the individual. I am convinced that an aggregated social networking profile of an individual will greatly help organisations assess the fit of the person to the ethos of the company and make more accurate hiring decisions. It would be wonderful to have a tool (which can further be embedded in the recruitment module) that will create such a profile and may be even draw up personality traits of individuals from the profile information. There are arguments against the use of OSNW profiles to select/reject candidates, but I am of the opinion that an aggregator written for enterprise use can be used as a decision enabler in the recruitment process. (A number of social networking aggregators exist in the market, but I do not think any of them can be utilized for enterprise use. The ideal enterprise aggregator should not just be a mashup product, but should utilize research in social psychology, human behaviour etc. to identify patterns and personality traits through social networking profiles).

A typical issue with large ERP products like Oracle Peoplesoft is it's lack of flexibility to adapt to changing business environments (well a new release comes out just once in two years or more!!) and any call for large scale customizations would again create issues with upgrade! But, while the entire industry is caught in that conundrum, I see no point in being rigid and missing critical opportunities to take your business to the next level. Are you getting the right ROI on your HR systems or is it a large clumsy dino?

Invalid Date in function AddToDate - A common T&L error

2010-05-02T03:57:00.000-07:00

A common error you encounter in a fresh environment while accessing T&L pages is shown below:

This error occurs due to the T&L Dates table and T&L Calendar tables not being built for the period in question.
Use the Build Time Period Calendar process available in the following navigation to build calendars for the concerned date:
Setup HRMS --> Product Releated --> Time and Labor --> Periods --> Build Time Period Calendar. After the calendars are built, you can check the View Time Calendar link to see the dates for which the calendars have been created.

Also ensure that the Load Dates process has been run. For this, go to Setup HRMS --> Installation --> Product and Country Specific --> Time and Labor installation. Go to the second tab in the T&L installation page and click on the link called Load Dates.

These are mandatory checks while setting up T&L for a fresh environment. While we are on this topic, let me also mention that it will be required to create TimeZone offsets for the Time Administration process to run correctly.
This can be done via: Peopletools --> International --> Timezones --> Click on the button called Generate Query Offsets.

As noted in this post - add the above setups into your annual maintenance checklist for T&L. These tables will have to be updated for the product to work correctly.

File layout converting spaces to blanks - UseSpaceForNull

2010-04-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

Ran into a peculiar problem while writing to a file using File Layouts today. Fields that had
a space in the database was being converted to null while writing to the file. Did all the obvious
checks like ensuring the Trim Spaces and Strip White Spaces properties of the FileLayout were unchecked.
Then ran into the File Class property - UseSpaceForNull. This property was introduced in Peopletools 8.48 and does the neat job of ensuring that spaces are printed in the output file instead of nulls when attempting to print fields that indeed had a space in database. It is a read-write property and has to be used immediately after instantiating the file layout as shown below:

If &FILE1.IsOpen Then
If &FILE1.SetFileLayout(FileLayout.FL_NAME) Then
&FILE1.UseSpaceForNull = True;

Another use-case for PS-Microsoft Outlook Integration

2010-04-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

I was walking towards my workstation when I heard an animated conversation between a manager and her reportees. The manager was instructing her reportees to make an entry in her Outlook calendar when they are on leave, so that she could plan her resources better. That just struck me that this was another potential area where we could use the integration between Peoplesoft and Microsoft Outlook on which I had written about here. That also got me thinking about the need to provide better views of team absences to managers. There are some excellent Calendar Views in Time and Labor, that gives complete information of scheduled hours, reported hours, exceptions etc. It is really imperative that such views are also delivered from the side of Absence Management - so that managers have a holistic view of their team's attendance.

P.S.: It's wonderful that Peoplesoft HCM 9.1 comes with an integration with Microsoft Outlook.
P.P.S: The Calendar views in Time and Labor does show reported absences, but only when the absences are brought to the timesheet.

PS Query Classification Tool

2010-04-10T23:24:00.001-07:00

As the manager of HR Shared Services one of the major initiatives Anand took up was to streamline the auditing processes of each business activity. This was needed as the organisation was growing bigger leading to larger HR transaction volumes, higher employee churning leading to the need to have documented processes to enable business continuity and the need for data accuracy. The biggest factor playing in Anand's mind was Payroll accuracy - given that his company was using Peoplesoft Global Payroll which had multiple feeder systems like Peoplesoft Absence Management, Time and Labor and Benefits - it was a nightmare for his team to ensure data consistency across the various modules. Anand worked closely with Praveen from the IT team to build audits at every stage of the payroll process and overtime the sheer number of audit queries became too large for the team to handle manually. With no tools at his disposal, Anand was forced to maintain the list of audit queries in an excel sheet which again had to be updated everytime a new query was added or retired. Praveen came to realise this constaint while working with Anand's team and thought why he could not develop a simple tool that will help Anand map a PS Query to the appropriate business process and also provide another page which would list all the PS Queries corresponding to a business process and let the users execute the query directly. He immediately got working on the idea and came up with the PS Query Classification Framework which he christened - QBox.
Anand just loved the tool as it helped him manage his audit process much better, his team mates could just access the QBox page and view all the up-to-date queries for a business process, now there was no way anyone would miss running a query and maintaining the query list was as easy as clicking a button!

Query Classification Tool

View more presentations from jijucvengal.

Absence Leakage Decision Chart

2010-04-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

Praveen was visibly frustrated, well not without reason, as the lead Absence Management consultant he was bombarded with multiple calls from the business team - most of them talking about the same issue of users having reported absences but the same not getting paid out in payroll. These issues were serious because it affected the pay of the employees and had to be investigated on priority and it took a good half day to investigate, document and communicate the fix to the users (even though he was an expert in the module!). Couple of months into this routine, Praveen realised that better user training and tools could help HR users to troubleshoot this issue at the first level itself and he decided to prepare a decision chart for the same.
Praveen had long realised that Peoplesoft absence management was a complex module for business users to comprehend and better tools and charts were required to simplify navigation through the module. He conceptualised a simple seven step process to help users identify where the booked absence went missing. The below presentation details the decision chart prepared by Praveen:

Peoplesoft Absence Leakage Decision Chart

View more presentations from jijucvengal.

As a matter of fact, not even a single call came to the IT team regarding missing absences after introducing this tool and Praveen has been smiling since then!!
Well, even today most customers and users are trying hard to wade through the issues and complexities presented by Peoplesoft Absence Management and does not have any tool or dashboard to see what is actually being paid out and whether any payroll over or underpayments are being made. If you feel you fall under this category of customers and would want better auditing and dashboards to track your Peoplesoft Time and Attendance and Payroll systems, it is time to get in touch with us!

After a long hiatus - Looking up to 2010!

2010-04-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

Time lost is lost forever - true and I've had three full months without any new posts....Personally it's been an exciting period for me - moving out of the lax groove of bachelorhood, being married to the woman I love and finding that the 'life' in 'work-life balance' indeed does exist!
Eventhough it's three months into the new year, let me wish all of you a wonderful year ahead - a year full of new and fruitful experiences and learning!
I am sure that 2010 is going to be more exciting than the last two years which saw companies freezing investment on HR projects eclipsed by the worst recession since 1930s. Things have already started to look up - companies are hiring Peoplesoft consultants in scores and dozens, organisations have lapped up version 9.1 in a big way and HRIT projects seem to be getting favour once again!
So, what is going to be my theme and focus in the year ahead? Undoubtedly it's got to be about finding better ways to give customers a better deal in Peoplesoft Time and Pay implementations. I believe it's time for us to offer specialised and holistic solutions in this space to our customers and look beyond words like 'deployment' or 'implementation'. Undoubtedly, any time and pay HR suite (includes Time and Labor, Absence Management and Payroll solutions) has a direct impact on the company's financials and it's extremely critical to get it right the first time. I am convinced that we have a long way to go in this space - simply implementing certain modules will not work in this case as any time and pay implementation requires extensive integration between the modules as well as with external systems, requires tight audits and most importantly, the real life scenarios are extremely difficult to simulate in a test environment. I will not be exaggerating when I say that there are a number of customers out there who are bleeding thousands of dollars every pay period due to the issues with their time and pay systems - don't they require a better deal? I am convinced that they do and it will be difficult to achieve that with the current approach to Peoplesoft implementation.
My focus over the next few months will be on conceptualising a better framework and approach to time and pay system adoption and this blog will be my mouthpiece!

Peopletools 8.50 supports UK English!

2009-12-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

UK English has been added as a new language option available in Peopletools 8.50! I am sure that my folks in UK will be happy to hear that!!
Cheers to that!

Peoplesoft HRMS 9.1: Changes to Time Approval setup and Functional Implications

2009-11-22T10:02:00.000-08:00

I had discussed in my previous posts about the introduction of Approval Workflow Engine for Time and Labor in version 9.1. This post discusses the functional implications, changes and challenges this change poses in comparison to the Approval Process prevalent in previous versions.

A note on Time Approval in Time and Labor: Time can be approved at two levels - Reported Time or/and Payable Time. Whether reported time/payable time requires approval can be setup at the Workgroup as well as TRC level. If a TRC is set to have Reported Time approval, then the Time Administration process will not pick up time reported under that TRC unless it is approved. Similarly if a TRC is setup to have Payable Time approval, then a payable time row under that TRC will not be sent to any payroll system unless the payable time is approved.

How Approval Used to happen prior to 9.1: The approve reported time/payable time component in versions 8.9/9.0 was designed to retrieve all rows requiring approval for employees a user's security had access to. The logic used to derive the employees a user can see in a T&L MSS page is explained in this post. This meant that the user could approve the time of all users that he/she had access to as per the security settings.

What has changed in version 9.1: In 9.1, time approval is driven by the approval workflow engine (AWE). Oracle has delivered a number of approval definition ids - for example - approval by position management, supervisor id, department manager, position department manager, position supervisor, T&L approval group etc. Also, the approver in an AWE definition is determined by the 'User List' attached to the defintion id as shown below:

A 'User List' can be a SQL/Application Package code/Query or a Role that determines the operatorids to which the request should be routed for approval. Thus, the approvers of a certain request are determined by the user list attached to the AWE definition id. This means that HRMS security/T&L security no longer plays a role in determining the approver - and more importantly the fact that a certain user has security to view a particular employee in Time and Labor does not guarantee the fact that he/she will be able to view the time requiring approval of those employees.

What is the functional implication of this change:

> The biggest functional implication of this change will be the way Time and Labor administrators approve time. In previous versions, administrators could approve time of all employees they had access to by their core row level security or time and labor security. This will no more be the case in version 9.1 - even if the administrators will be able to view the employees' timesheets, they will no longer be able to approve reported/payable time by default. The user list logic of the AWE process definition will have to be customized to return administrators also as legitimate approvers if they have to have access to approve reported/payable time. In effect I would say that from version 9.1 - search security and approval security have been differentiated in Time and Labor with row level security controlling search and AWE user list controlling approval security.

> There is an option to 'Push Back' reported time in version 9.1. In previous versions, managers could either Approve or Deny reported time, but with version 9.1, managers can even push back reported time. This is a useful feature especially in case of an elapsed time configuration and users can make use of the notification functionality of AWE to notify the requester when an approver has pushed back the request.

> Challenges in data migration to version 9.1: In versions 8.9 and 9.0, there were only two tables related to reported/payable time approval and they were TL_RPTD_TIME and TL_PAYABLE_TIME. The SUBMITTED_STATUS and PAYABLE_STATUS fields in the respective tables were enough to pick out rows requiring approval and no special logic was required to find the approver of a request as approval and search security were unified. But this has undergone a sea change in version 9.1. With 9.1, there are separate AWE tables that store the 'header' and 'line' information of each transaction done in time and labor and the approval details will be picked from these header and line tables. For example, assume that you are moving from version 8.9 to 9.1 and at the time you are going live with Time and Labor 9.1, there are a bunch of Payable Time entries that have not yet been approved. How do you bring over this data to 9.1 and ensure that when the managers log into the 9.1 application, they will be able to see the pending payable time entries for approval? It will not be enough to just migrate the TL_PAYABLE_TIME table to 9.1, but the AWE tables will also have to be populated to ensure that time entries pending approval show up in version 9.1. Note that the AWE tables related to Time and Labor are newly introduced in version 9.1 and are not present in any previous version. I am noting below the important AWE tables for Time and Labor in 9.1:

Payable Time Approval:

Cross Reference Table: TL_APP_PAY_XREF

Header Record : TL_APP_PAY_HDR

Line Record : TL_APP_PAY_LINE

Note that this change could potentially affect any custom reports/processes that were designed around time approval in Time and Labor also.

Peoplesoft 9.1 - Time and Labor: Dynamic Groups are dead, long live Dynamic Groups!

2009-11-01T19:48:00.001-08:00

The pronouncement of the title does not hint that Oracle has taken away the definition of Dynamic and Static groups from Time and Labor, but it's significance is greatly reduced with the introduction of approval workflow engine in 9.1 and by the improved row level security framework in 8.9. In pre-8.9 days, the entire row level security in T&L used to be driven by Dynamic Groups and it used to be a design nightmare to arrive at the best security strategy as various modules drove security differently (at that point of time, frankly dynamic groups offered a pretty flexible way of driving security as it's design is distantly similar to the current robust row level security structure). But with the introduction of the very flexible and configurable row level security structure in 8.9, the need to use Dynamic Groups for row security in T&L, almost died down and now with the introduction of the AWE framework in 9.1 - I really do not see any more need to use Dynamic Groups for security purposes. This is more a message for current 8.9 and 9.0 Time and Labor implementations - you should discourage the use of T&L security driven by Dynamic Groups as much as possible and adopt the HRMS Row Level security in Time and Labor. The focus of Oracle has been towards adopting common frameworks across various modules for driving aspects like Security, Approval, Delegation etc. and it will be great to keep that point in mind while designing solutions in these areas if you are on versions lower than 9.1/9.0.

So do we need Dynamic Groups anymore in Time and Labor?
There are two areas where the use of Dynamic Groups are significant:

1. As a parameter for running the Time Administration process. Dynamic Groups will still remain to be a very useful run control parameter for running the time administration process.

2. Grouping approvers together for use in some of the T&L specific AWE definition Ids. This is a change introduced in version 9.1 in the definition of a dynamic group. A new field called 'TL Approval Group' has been introduced in 9.1 as shown below:

When a Dynamic/Static group is selected as a 'TL Approval Group' - it will be used only as a group of potential approvers and not for row security. Row Level security cannot be attached to these groups and they can be used in the AWE Definition Ids for Time and Labor to specify the user list that approves time.

Peoplesoft 9.1 - Time and Labor: Changes to TRC Setup

2009-11-01T19:24:00.000-08:00

The setup component in Time and Labor that has changed significantly in 9.1 (more in terms of layout and additional features and less of fundamental data structure changes to the TL_TRC_TBL) is the TRC Setup page. Considering that the TRC is the fundamental building block of the module, it is imperative for us to understand the details of the change. The salient enhancements to the TRC Setup is as below:

A completely new page called 'Approvals and Comments' has added to the component. This is in conjunction with the introduction of the Approval Workflow Engine (AWE) framework in Time and Labor. The introduction of AWE is a major change and changes the way approvals are handled in Time and Labor. Earlier, the field called 'Approval Option' (where one could choose 'Reported Time', 'Payable Time' or 'None') controlled the way in which the TRC had to be approved. But this field has been taken off the page in 9.1 and a completely new page has been provided to fill in the AWE details for each TRC. This setup is similar to the familiar 'Country Take' setup in Absence Management, where we attach an Approval Process Id to each Absence Take that is exposed in Self Service.
The fields that were present in the page called 'TRC2' in prior versions have been moved over to the first page of the definition. These fields include Effect on Comp/Leave, Hours Represent, Interface options etc.
The tabs have been renamed to Definition and Approval and Comments from TRC1 and TRC2.

The new pages are shown below:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The major change as seen above is the introduction of the approval framewok settings. The adoption of AWE in Time and Labor has far fetched consequences, especially when one considers security and integration with Absence Management (it will now be imperative to synch up T&L security, Approval framework and Absence Approval framework). I am studying the technical architecture of the approval framework in T&L and will post about it in detail soon.

Peoplesoft 9.1 - Time and Labor: Changes to TRC Category Setup

2009-11-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

TRC Category was introduced by Oracle in version 8.9 and I had written about it in a previous post. Oracle has given a face lift to this definition in 9.1 adding two new fields in the TRC Category definition - Reported Time Approval Display and Payable Time Approval Display. The new page is shown below:

A maximum of three categories can be chosen to be displayed in the reported time and payable time approval pages. We can classify this change more as a cosmetic one impacting the layout of the time approval pages and the structure of the TRC Category changes - all in all, goes one small step in improving the usability of the application.

Peoplesoft 9.1 - Time and Labor: Viewing Unprocessed Time

2009-11-01T17:10:00.000-08:00

Oracle has strategically combined Time and Labor, Absence Management, NA Payroll and Payroll Interface into a category called 'Time and Pay' modules (interesting that Global Payroll has been maintained outside this classification!). One of the thrust areas of 9.0 as well as 9.1 has been about improving the integration and audit around these modules. Oracle took a visionary step in integrating absence self service into Time and Labor in 9.0, which I reckon is singularly the most important and useful feature upgrade from a T&L perspective after the changes to the schedule definition architecture in 8.9. For a shop that runs Absence Management, Time and Labor and Payroll for North America, the biggest challenge is to reconcile the interconnected data between the three modules - I've seen major glitches in the integration between Absence Management and Time and Labor in 8.9, which invariably leads to data inconsistency between the three modules and worse, has a negative impact in terms on Payroll compliance. While I expect much of the loose ends to be tied with the enhanced integration of Absence Management and T&L in 9.0 and above, it was really heartening to note that Oracle has provided two new pages to review unprocessed reported and payable time in 9.1. I am sure my folks in the payroll team would love that - to see which all rows did not get over to Payroll from Payable time and to see the rows in reported time not processed by Time Admin (it's not great drooling into PS Query reports all the time!).

The new pages can be found under the following navigation:
Time and Labor --> View Time --> View Unprocessed Time.

The page to view unprocessed payable time is given below:

On the flip side - I am slightly let down by the fact that Oracle did not come out with more delivered reports in 9.1 - we are still stuck with the same old Time Card, Scheduled Hours, Payable Status and TCD Usage reports. Any area related to Payroll requires extensive reporting and auditing and it would be great for Oracle to come out with something like a Payroll dashboard that would integrate data between AM, T&L and NA Payroll. The job to audit the data consistency between these three modules is not straight forward and easy, while it is critical for business to get the numbers spot on - wouldn't it be wonderful to have an off the shelf suite to audit the entire payroll data and certify that what is being paid out is the correct amount? I would love to see that!

Peoplesoft 9.1 - Time and Labor Rule Utilities

2009-11-01T16:39:00.000-08:00

When I wrote my wish list for Time and Labo r in April, one of the features I really wanted to see was a utility in T&L to migrate rules across environments, as currently it was a cumbersome process of writing manual export and import DMS scripts and manually recompiling all the rules in the target environment. I am really happy to note that Oracle has included that utility in the 9.1 release (surprising though that they never highlighted that feature in any of the pre-release announcements or transfer of information sessions). So what is new in 9.1 related to rule migration?

Oracle has introduced three new pages for exporting, importing and recompiling rules. This is pretty similar to the Rule Packager utility in Global Payroll and can be found under the familiar navigation of:
Setup HRMS --> System Administration --> Utilities --> Build Time and Labor rules.

The utility uses an Application Engine program to create DMS scripts in the location mentioned on the page. The utility used for exporting rules is shown below:

The page used for recompiling rules is shown below:

My thumps up to Oracle for providing these very needed utilities in 9.1 - this is something the developer community was longing for a long time. In hindsight, projects that are not yet on 9.1, should be looking at building a custom process mimicking the ones mentioned above to automate the process of T&L rule migration, may be I will write on this in detail sometime later.

The deceiving case of the 'Exceptional Scenario'

2009-10-18T01:05:00.000-07:00

Two weeks back I had to drop my dad in the railway station for a night train. This particular railway station was one where very few trains had a stop and thus it's location was not familiar to many people.The first time I had to go to that place, I looked up Google Maps and it presented me with three alternate routes. Two routes were through small and confusing roads and were shorter than the third route where I had to take the national highway and then turn to local street roads which were much clearer than the first two options. I picked the third option, irrespective of it being longer, because there was an element of 'risk' involved in trying out small and confusing roads especially when you have a train to catch! The story goes on that I had to go to the station thrice (before this incident of dropping my dad) and all the time I took the national highway route, the route was perfect and hassle free except for a small stretch of road, about 200 meters which connected the main road to the station. That final stretch was through a slum like area, the road was just wide enough for a car and bike to go and I was confused whether it was a public road at all as the residents seemed to treat the road as an extension of their houses. The place had a unique co-existence of , Hindu, Christian and Islamic places of worship next to each other and every time I drove through that lane, the people used to have some celebration or the other (I appreciated the element of religious harmony, but not the prospect of having to drive through that narrow piece of road with people dancing around!). One day while I dropped my parents and was going back, I was forced to take another route (one of the first two options given by Google Maps) and found that even though I had to go through dingy roads, it was much shorter than the highway route as prescribed by Google Maps, but I could not exactly correlate the roads and the turns I had to take to reach the station as it was night time.
Now let's pan back to me dropping my dad! The train was at 9:30 PM and the drive takes around 45 minutes. We started from my home at 8:15 PM and I was juggling the two routes I could take - through the highway or through the shorter new route which I found the last time I came back after dropping my folks. The highway route was longer and I had to go through that last 200 meter stretch where I had the 'risk' of the entire road being blocked because of some celebration or the other. But nothing of that sort had happened anytime when I went there before - where the entire road was blocked and I could not reach the station, yes there was an outside possibility that it could happen, but that 'scenario' had never happened and was very 'rare'. The alternate route on the other hand was indeed shorter, but much more 'uncertain' and 'complex' than the highway route - there was a pretty high probability that I could take a wrong turn and lose my way and eventually my dad could end up missing the train, but that road did not present me with any possibility of being blocked - which mean that if I was able to find the correct way and take the correct turns, I had an almost 100% probability of reaching the station.
Which option should have I taken and why?
Well, this is not a suspense thriller (though it came close to it, my dad did not have to turn superman and chase the train to board it!!), so no spoilers in here - I took the 'tried and tested' highway route, had a smooth ride on the highway and reached the last 200 meter stretch in almost 30 minutes, I turned into the small road, drove for around 50 meters and tragedy struck! The entire road ahead was blocked by an idol of Virgin Mary and people were dancing and singing around it!! The station was just 150 meters ahead and I could not let my dad walk in the night through that area, there was only one option left - take a U turn and find a new way!! Finding a new way at the eleventh hour was a risk I did not want to take, so I had to do the most deplorable act of asking my dad to take a rickshaw and go to the station. The story had a not-so-tragic ending with my dad reaching the station before the train arrived and I kissed him goodbye (I followed the rick to reach the station! Shame on me!!).
That incident made me reflect on some of the design decisions and risk evaluations that we make in our projects. This is a very typical scenario - two alternate solutions are proposed for a problem. Solution 'A' is pretty straightforward using proven technology and easy to implement, the developers vouch that it will work for nine out of ten cases and the one case where it will fail being a very rare one. Solution 'B' on the other hand is a more complex and difficult one (but not impossible), using technology and methods which are not commonly used, but it will work for all scenarios. I have seen that majority of the time, Solution 'A' will be chosen and signed off by even the business team, vouching that they would handle that one exceptional scenario manually. The usual justifactions for this decision is the time saved by going for 'A' and the opinion that the incremental advantage accrued by fixing 1% of the exceptional cases cannot be justified by the increased effort and cost involved in developing solution 'B'.
I am convinced that the risk of the 'rare case' or 'exceptional condition' can be under-evaluated during the design phase and could strangle the entire operations if it does happen sometime (statistically it will!!). Even if it does not disrupt the operations, it could turn out to be an administrative menace over the long run for business users. This is something I have learnt during my support experience in TESCO, that seemingly trivial issues ignored during the development phase becomes a headache once the system goes live and once the organisation grows and the number of transactions increase. At this stage, extra effort will have to be spent in finding a solution to the problem, which in turn increases the cost of ownership of the product (the IT Support/ Maintenance team on the other hand would be happy, because it represents an opportunity to 'improve the system' and they can flaunt the 'savings' accrued by the fix in their quarterly metrics! It really doesn't speak volumes when you fix a defect downstream, though it is a great help for the business plugging holes in the system, it is highly undesirable and should be ideally captured during the development phase).
The argument that the cost involved in solving 1% of the issues is not justified stands true only when cost is calculated over the development phase. But if one considers 'Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)', which would be the cost of developing as well as supporting the system over it's entire life time, it can very easily be understood that the extra cost and effort incurred during the development phase to develop a fool-proof solution will lead to lesser maintenance issues and thus lesser TCO. (Considering the fact that typical development phases extend somewhere between 8 months to 2 years, while support phases will run into years and decades).
So in conclusion, I would like to state that when presented with alternate solutions, the choice should always go to the fool-proof one, even if it will take more effort and cost - because the money saved in the development phase by going for a quicker fix that works 99% of the time, will be lost during the support phase handling 1% of the exceptions over the course of the system.
P.S.: This issue and many others bring to the fore, the need for 'System Thinking'. I think that it is one of the most powerful management thoughts ever, but unfortunately is more linked to the way you look at a problem and is not a 'tool set' that can be easily implemented, which should explain why this great idea finds very little practical application. The fact is that IT projects are driven in such a manner that development and support are done by completely different teams and in many cases by different organisations - this takes away the accountability of developers and the organisation that carries out the development on the issues that prop up during the support phase and most developers have only done development and have never been in support, which cripples their ability to foresee possible issues and their impact. The way I see it, it is the customer that loses out it in the end - the IT teams, let it be development or support comes out clean in the whole act - once the product has been implemented the development team moves on to other engagements, while the support team gets more work fixing the issues left over unattended during development - it is the customer that gets caught in between. The world is not perfect nor ideal and from an ethical point of view, these are all not deliberate decisions that people make (in most cases) ('they signed off the design, so don't blame me!!', 'we had brought up that risk during the design phase, but even the business agreed to it', 'it is important that we meet the deadline, so considering the fact that the solution meets 99% of the cases, we should go with it' etc) - but can't we take small steps and decisions to improve the probability of perfection, not of the world, but atleast of the IT systems that we design?

Can you implement T&L without Absence Management?

2009-10-02T02:34:00.000-07:00

I found this very interesting question in ITToolBox yesterday and thought would 'type in' (I would have scribbled or jotted few years back!!) my opinion on this. Let me restate the exact question as it appeared in the forum:

"We are trying to do an analysis of using Absence Manager without Time and Labor. We already have a customized module that feeds online timecards to payroll in peoplesoft. First, is this possible? If so, what functionality would we be missing out on? Everything I have read talks about them together. Is AM just the workflow piece?"

Though the user did not mention their actual requirement, the obvious answer is yes - traditionally over the years T&L has been implemented as a different module from Absence Management. May be the understanding of what these two modules do might help the user take an informed choice.
Absence Management is a module that is specifically designed to manage leaves - that's all it does. It is a very elegant and powerful module that can handle all types of leave accruals, carry forwards, prorations, workflows for approvals etc. It is interesting to note that before AM gained the popularity that it enjoys today, organisations have used Benefits, Monitor Absence in Workforce Admin and even T&L to manage leaves. Absence Management is an independent module and can be implemented standalone with core HRMS.
Time and Labor on the other hand is a much more diverse module that can handle time reporting of employee, track compensatory time offs, enable task based time reporting, calculate overtime and shift premiums etc. If there are no complex rules, T&L can also double up as the module handling leaves of your organisation.

The interdependence of the two modules has to be a thing of version 9.0. With version 9.0, T&L and AM have been coupled very tightly, where entire absence self service has almost been integrated in the timesheet. This could be the reason why it looks as if they cannot be implemented separately.
But the fact remains that both of them are independent modules and the choice of which module to use should completely depend on the depth and nature of your organisation's requirement.

Support.Oracle.Com is here

2009-09-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

How I welcome the new site for product support from Oracle! https://support.oracle.com is a very very welcome change from the clumsy erstwhile metalink website. For users who were comfortable with the Peoplesoft's customer connection site, navigating and raising a Service Request in Oracle's Metalink site was a night mare, it was terribly slow and required tons of clicks to get somewhere, add to add, finding the required information and product was incredibly difficult on Metalink.
But the new site for product support is an excellent one by my initial experience. Oracle has really gone in for flashy Web 2.0 features and Ajax and DHTML are heavily sprinkled all over the site. User friendly pagelets, saner page layouts, DHTML driven menu bars and an extremely improved process to raise Service Requests gives a rich experience to the users. I am particularly impressed with the redesigned SR creation process. A new window which summarises the information and points out the fields that a user has missed to fill are extremely handy. The image below shows the new Ajax enabled Oracle support site with a refreshing layout and design, note the small bar on the left side of the page alerting the users of the status of the IR. All in all, a neat job from Oracle!

Peoplesoft 9.1 - Release Value Proposition for Time and Labor

2009-09-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

Oracle's coming out with some welcome enhancements to Time and Labor in the 9.1 release. The release value proposition (RVP) document which highlights the major feature additions to the various modules talk about the following enhancements to T&L:

Integration with Oracle Workforce Scheduler: I had mentioned this in a previous post and it will be a major product enhancement and offering from Oracle. I am raring to see how this integration works in 9.1 and I am sure a number of customers would love to have this feature in their enterprise application suites for workforce management.
Adoption of Approval Workflow Engine for T&L approvals: A number of HRMS modules like Absence Management has been using AWE from version 8.9, while the T&L application development team stuck to the traditional row security and time and labor groups driven approval. It is good to bring T&L to the fold of modules using AWE as organisations will be able to maintain the approval rules under a single framework. It will be interesting to see though how customers who are using custom T&L Dynamic group driven approval routings will migrate to AWE - I see some retrofit work there.
Adoption of Delegation Framework in T&L: Oracle started offering the delegation framework in version 9.0 and it is a welcome move that even T&L has moved over to that fold.

I also read about a very interesting and welcome enhancement is a bi-party integration with Microsoft Outlook 2007 (they have not mentioned whether they will be supporting older versions of MS Outlook) - I had mulled about this possibility while piloting the one way integration with MS Outlook from Peoplesoft. It is exciting to note that in 9.1, the Outlook Calendar and events can be read from Peoplesoft - it's high time that enterprise products integrate with desktop applications and this is a move in the right direction.

Mass Loading Time into Timesheet

2009-08-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

Last week there was a question on ittoolbox on how we can mass upload time into Time and Labor. I had mentioned in an earlier post that one of the features I would love to have in T&L would be one to upload reported time through a spreadsheet, because it is quite a common requirement to have a feature to mass upload time (especially during conversion projects). Here are the options one can mull over if ever it's required to mass load time into time and labor:

1. If you want to quickly enter time from PIA for a group of employees, then use the 'Report Rapid Time' utility. This can be found under the navigation - Time and Labor --> Report Time --> Rapid Time. Ensure that you run the 'Submit All Rapid Time' process after the above step. The only disadvantage with the above process is that you still need to key in the time as it's done online/
2. If on the other hand you want to automate the process completely by using an AE, you could explore the following options:
(a) Write a CI on the Report Rapid Time component and load time directly into the rapid time table and then run the Submit Rapid Time process.
(b) Use a File Layout and insert data into the TL_ST_ELPTIME table if you are loading Elapsed Time or TL_ST_PCHTIME if you are loading Punch time and then run the TL_ST_LIB Application Engine. The TL_ST_LIB AE will insert the data into the reported time table.
(c) Or if you want to directly insert into the RPTD_TIME table, then use the CI 'TL_RPTD_TIME_CI'

Deciphering the skeleton of Peoplesoft HRMS modules

2009-08-05T14:14:00.000-07:00

The more I get to work on various modules, the more I find similarities between their basic architecture. For example, sample the architectural similarity between Payroll for North America, Time and Labor and Absence Management.

NA Payroll T&L Absence Management
Paygroups Workgroups GP Paygroups
Earning Program TRC Program Element Group
Earnings/Deductions TRCs Absence Takes
Calendars NA Calendars
Pay Run ID NA Calendar Run ID
Company NA Pay Entity
NA T&L Rules Formulas

It has also been my experience that almost all modules in Peoplesoft HRMS is designed to link the smallest functional unit of that module to the employee. For example, the smallest unit in T&L in TRC and everything that we do in Time and Labor is designed to link the correct TRC and quantity to an employee. The same would be the case for Absence Management and NA Payroll where the smallest unit would be an Absence Take and Earnings/Deductions respectively. Once you have this fundamental understanding, everything else will automatically fall in place.
Another powerful analogy is to an inverted pyramid where the smallest unit of the module will be at the tip at the bottom and the employee on the flat base at the top. The architecture of most modules I know builds up like an inverted pyramid from the smallest unit to aggregate in size and finally attach itself to an employee.

A simple example from Time and Labor would be the case of how a TRC is linked to an employee. At the bottom of the pyramid there is the TRC, above that is the TRC Program, above that there is the workgroup and finally at the base there is the employee. You can seamlessly extend this analogy to other modules as well.

A quick list of Absence Management Tables

2009-08-05T13:35:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of writing a short yet extremely useful post and the first thing that came to my mind is Application Tables....For a table driven product like peoplesoft, getting to know the main records and their function is a huge plus.
So here is a very quick list of important tables in Absence Management.

1. PS_GP_PIN - Table that stores the pin details of all elements in GP/AM. Use to retrieve the Pin Name or Pin Code corresponding to a pin number.

2. PS_GP_ABS_EVENT - Major transaction table in Absence Management. All absences reported get stored in this table. The data in this table the raw reported absence. This table is analogous to the TL_RPTD_TIME table in Time and Labor.

3. PS_GP_RSLT_ABS - Table containing the calculated result of reported absence takes. The source for this table is GP_ABS_EVENT. This table is analogous to the TL_PAYABLE_TIME table. This table will contain one row for each day of the absence event. For example, an employee might report sick leave from the 1st to 5th of a month. GP_ABS_EVENT will have a single entry for the above event with a start date and end date. But, GP_RSLT_ABS will have five rows with each row containing the number of hours or days of absence.

4. PS_GP_RSLT_ACUM - Table containing the results of the accumulators in GP/AM. Accumulators can be used to track absence balances, cumulative takes, cumulative paid hours etc. This table is populated only after the absence calculation COBOL is run.

5. PS_GP_CAL_RUN - Table containing details regarding the Calendar Group ID. The Calendar Group ID is the major run control parameter used for running the absence processes and is a collection of various calendars.

6. PS_GP_PI_GEN_DATA - Any absence event that need to be sent to payroll will require a positive input (in terms of an Earning Code) to be defined. The positive input can be attached to a take in the Absence Take setup page. This table contains the corresponding positive input for the processed absences.

7. PS_GP_ABS_SS_STA - This table is coupled with the GP_ABS_EVENT table and is a workflow table. This table can be used to know the workflow status of an absence event. A separate entry is created for each workflow actions like Submit, Approval etc. This table can be very useful to track details regarding the approval/workflow status of an absence event.

A short T&L quiz for the starters!

2009-08-02T00:26:00.000-07:00

We recently started off an initiative that would fall under the category of 'Knowledge Management' (well using these terms are such a fad, but it helps to brand the initiative. Put simply it's just a quiz!!) to publish short quizzes/trivias on Peoplesoft every Thursday. I think it does it's small bit in building knowledge within the team - as it's short and simple, generates interest amongst the people, it's attached to a small rewards and recognition scheme and most importantly makes people go back to the basics of the things they work with every day.

So here is a small Time and Labor quiz that I prepared, it would rate 'easy' of the difficulty scale and we had a couple of people getting all the answers right. Why don't you give it a shot?

Question	Answer
Field that identifies whether time has come from TCD or Absence Management
What happens in Time and Labor when an employee goes on Maternity Leave?
Where can you configure the fields that appear on a timesheet?
Name the view that gives schedule details for each day
Name the table that contains the mapping of schedules and employees
Can you save a workgroup without specifying a TRC Program and Rule Program?
Field that can be used to identify whether payable time has been approved or not
After successful completion of time admin, the earliest change date of an employee is reset to which date? (Assuming there are no exceptions)
Which table contains the earliest change date field?

Goldplating vs. Great Customer Experience

2009-07-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

Steve McConnell's classic mistakes in Software Project Management defines Developer Goldplating as following:
"Developers are fascinated by new technology and are sometimes anxious to try out new features of their language or environment or to create their own implementation of a slick feature they saw in another product--whether or not it's required in their product. The effort required to design, implement, test, document, and support features that are not required lengthens the schedule."
I find the entire concept of developer goldplating and it's classification as a 'classic mistake' extremely amusing. This is because the unfounded fear of goldplating restricts the creativity and realms of a developer and nips the chances of delving out outstanding customer service. Almost all the projects that I have worked on has had the customer coming back with his/her own 'wishlist' at the very last moment and traditional software engineering theory would say that it has to be treated as requirement creep and will have to be carried out as separate change requests in the future. Well that might sound judicious from the point of view of project management, but not from the view of customer experience management. Any project dedicated to providing a great customer experience should try to address even the last minute requests from the client - this is no goldplating and it will be something the customer will rave about. I know that may be nine out of ten people will not agree on this - but for someone who values a happy customer above anything else, requirement creep management can never come in the way of customer satisfaction!!

Auto-Displaying Search page results

2009-07-27T14:10:00.000-07:00

What do you do if the customer comes up to you and says that they find clicking the 'Search' button on the search page cumbersome and would 'love' to have the search results defaulted when the search page loads.
This is where the SetSearchDialogBehaviour function will come to your rescue. Assign wildcard values to your search fields and call the SetSearchDialog behaviour function. This function is normally used in the context of skipping the search page. Theoretically, if a complete value is provided for all search keys before calling the SetSearchDialog behaviour function, then the search page will be skipped and the users will be taken directly into the transaction page. But the actual idea behind the function is that it will auto-trigger the search functionality. So naturally when just a wild card value is given to the search fields and the function invoked, then all the search results will be displayed. For example, if EMPLID is the only search field, the following code can be written to popualte the search results automatically on loading the search page.

/*Write this code in SearchInit.*/
REC.EMPLID.value = '%';
SetSearchDialogBehaviour(0);

Oracle MINUS function works bottom to top

2009-07-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

Remember that the MINUS function in Oracle works bottom to top and the order in which statements are written will change the result set! So select x from a minus select y from b is not the same as select y from b minus select x from a....The bottom part of the query is executed first and a MINUS function will always give those rows present in the bottom part of the query and not in the top half.

Follow this blog on Twitter!

2009-07-05T00:08:00.000-07:00

Twitter has not gained the popularity of a Facebook or LinkedIn in this part of the world - and the first time I took notice of the new kid on the social networking space was when the U.S. State department endorsed the importance of Twitter as a medium of communication for Iranians during the recent turmoil following the presidential elections there. That made me sit up andtake notice, boy if the U.S. State department had to make an appeal to a privately held dot com newbie, then it's got to be a phenomenon.
So the story goes that this blog is now on Twitter and you can follow me and all the updates to this blog at http://twitter.com/peoplesofthrms.
As a sidenote, I believe that it's time enterprise applications embrace Web 2.o applications like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Oracle is introducing a lot of Web 2.0 technologies like Ajax in the next Peopletools release (8.50), but they need to have a rethink in terms of adopting some of these social networking applications in the core product functionality. I believe that with the widespread adoption and following of these applications, the line between social portals and enterprise portals is slowly fading away - one immediate thought that comes to me is the use of tweets as a supplementary to alerts in Peoplesoft - wouldn't it be 'cool' to get tweets from Peoplesoft when your manager approves your absence request or when he completes your performance document review?

Best Peoplesoft Time and Labor blog?

2009-07-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

This might sound vane, but according to the Google Search engines you are now reading the best blog on Peoplesoft Time and Labor!

While I know that's an insignificant indicator to be proud about, but I hope that my posts have been helpful to consultants seeking information on Peoplesoft HRMS and Time and Labor in particular. I started this blog in 2008 primarily to try my part in filling the lack of quality reference materials available for Peoplesoft functional modules and after being appalled at the prohibitive cost of the training courses available for the product. Do let me know your comments and suggestions to improve the content of this blog and keep those visits coming!!

Search Page security in Peoplesoft Time and Labor

2009-07-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

I had detailed how Time and Labor security works in a previous post and today I want to touch upon how customers can configure the security on the Manager Self Service and Administrators for Time and Labor. Currently, there are three distinct ways of configuring search page security in Peoplesoft (including Time and Labor):
1. Use the highly robust and modified Core Row Level security, where any level of flexible security definition can be created with the introduction of Security Access Types in Peoplesoft HRMS 8.9.

2. Use the Direct Reports functionality which most of the MSS pages of Absence Management and e-Performance make use of. This feature will provide a standard page containing the direct reports of a user.

3. Use Time and Labor security to show to users employees in the Static and Dynamic groups that they have access to.

(You can also enforce search security through Search Init peoplecode, but this approach is highly discouraged.)

Most organisations will be designing their search security by making use of the new Row Level security design and in this context, a debatable question is whether we need to use Time and Labor security itself? Also, a number of people ask whether we can use Row Level security for the Time and Labor search pages, or whether it can make use of only Time and Labor security.

The answer is provided by the below decision chart (click on the picture to see a larger view):

All the Search pages in Time and Labor is flexible enough to utilize both Time and Labor security and core Row Level security. This decision depends on how the rowsecclass attached to a user is configured. If the rowsecclass is attached to any Time and Labor group (this can be found from the table PS_TL_GRP_SECURITY), then the user will be able to see only employees belonging to the groups the user's rowsecclass has access to. On the other hand, if there are no Time and Labor groups attached to the rowsecclass of the user, then core row level security available for the user will be used to fetch the employees.

What should be the optimum Time and Labor search security strategy?
If your organisation is using other Peoplesoft HRMS modules then it is best to utilise a common security design for all the modules. So I will always suggest using row level security for Time and Labor pages and not to configure any extra Time and Labor groups for the purpose of row level security.
Time and Labor groups can be created for the purpose of batch processing of employees. It is very useful to create Time and Labor groups and use the group as an input parameter for the Time Administration or Batch Approval or Batch Schedule Assignment processes. Note that a Time and Labor group can be defined without linking it to any row security class and used solely for the purpose of grouping employees together.

Heard of the TL_XREF_TBL??

2009-06-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

True to the Pareto Principle, 80% or more of the work in any Peoplesoft module can be done by knowing just 20% (or far lesser) of the tables in the system. But it's real exciting to explore and look at the rest of the infrequently used tables as most of them will have a very specific purpose which might come to light only under certain rare occassions. One such table is TL_XREF_TBL.

Where is it used?
The XREF table plays a critical part in the integration of Time and Labor and North American Payroll. When Payable Time is loaded from the TL_PAYABLE_TIME table to the paysheets in North American Payroll, the load program consolidates payable time entries before sending to NA Payroll. Consolidation means that the quantity for each TRC is summed up and a single entry with the aggregate quantity is sent to NA Payroll for each TRC under the period in question. During this process, the system assigns a cross reference number (XREF_NUM) to all the consolidated entries of a single TRC. The TL_XREF_TBL stores the XREF_NUM corresponding to each sequence number on the payable time table. The NA Payroll table PS_PAY_OTH_EARNS also contains a filed called XREF_NUM which can be used to find out the pay line entries corresponding to the spefic data that came from time and labor.

What is the practical utility of the table?
For most parts the XREF table is a background table which a developer may never need to use. But it will be very useful to audit the data flow between Time and Labor and N A Payroll. I have used this in scenarios where customers have reported issues with payable time data not coming over to payroll. In this case, the link between payable time entries and paysheet entries can be drawn to the minutest detail using the XREF_NUM.

Automatic Schedule assignment during hire

2009-06-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

Schedule Assignment to an employee can be done at multiple levels in Peoplesoft. With the continuous improvement in scheduling that Peoplesoft/Oracle has brought into the product, they introduced a feature to directly assign schedules to employees. This feature is available under the Manage Schedule folder in MSS. A lot of clients require the process of schedule assignment to an employee to be automated at the time of hire and I have seen specific application engines being written for this purpose. That is an unnecessary effort as Peoplesoft already provides that feature with the WORKFORCE_SYNC message. The WORKFORCE_SYNC message will assign a row in the PS_SCH_ASSIGN table with the Use Default Schedule option ticked as Yes. The message itself is triggered on the Save Post Change event in the JOB DATA components. For tools versions higher than 8.47, it will be required to write specific handler logic for this to happen. This is because the assignment was handled by subscription peoplecode in versions lesser than 8.48 and this has become defunct with the architectural changes to the IB framework in 8.48. The steps to do that is:
1. Obtain the code of the schedule assignment from the subscription peoplecode assigned to the WORKFORCE_SYNC message.
2. Create a new Application Package and extent the OnNotify method of the PS_PT App Package.
3. Call the code for the assignment in the OnNotify method. The best practice will be to create a function in a custom FUNCLIB record containing the logic for the schedule assignment and calling just the function from the OnNotify method.
4. Add a new handler to the WORKFORCE_SYNC Service Operation with an OnNotify event defintion and give the application package and method details.
5. Ensure that the service operation is active and that the queue is running. Also generate Local routing if that has not yet been done.
6. You are good to go now!

What is the purpose of a TRC Category in Time and Labor?

2009-04-24T14:47:00.000-07:00

Peoplesoft introduced a new definition in Time and Labor 8.9 called Time Reporting Category. A new field was introduced in the TRC Setup page, where a TRC could be mapped to a category. A TRC Category can be used to group functionally similar TRCs together. For example, if your organisation uses three different over time TRCs like OT1, OT2 and OT3 for different rates of overtime - you could create a TRC Category called Over Time and link the above three TRCs to this.
But where exactly is this new definition used?

The primary purpose of this new definition is to populate the newly introduced grid called 'Reported Hours Summary' in the Timesheet page. This grid gives the summary based on the TRC Category reported in the timesheet. This is specifically useful as a single snapshot view of the summary of various categories of time reported in a period. For example, suppose there are three TRC Categories like Regular, Overtime and Absence. In a week an employee has reported 4 hours of Regular time on three days, 2 hours of OT1 TRC on one day, 2 hours of OT2 TRC on one day, 8 hours of Sick Leave on one day and 3 hours of Bereavement Leave on one day. When this is summarised based on the TRC Categories - the viewer very clearly gets the picture that the employee reported a total of 12 hours of Regular Time, 4 hours of Over Time and 11 hours of Absence in the week.

Another potential use of the TRC Category definition is in reports to group TRCs together. Reports based on the TRCs reported, like overtime reports are very common in any implementation. In this case, it will be useful to create a single TRC Category called Over Time and link all the Over Time TRCs to that category and later use the category in the report rather than hard coding the TRC names.

You will also notice that this new definition has a mention in the Time and Labor installation page also, where we can control whether it should appear in the timesheet page. Even though its a very small functionality enhancement, I will advice any implementation that has more than 10 TRCs, to consider the use of well segmented, logical TRC Categories.

Peoplesoft Time and Labor: My wishlist - I

2009-04-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

I believe that Peoplesoft has done an awesome job with the Time and Labor product - it's flexibility, features and strong integration capabilities make it a very strong product that caters very well to most business needs. Yet, there are some areas I wish Oracle could improve upon, some features that I sorely miss and so here is my wish list for a future release of Time and Labor.

> Integration with HRMS: It is critical that Time and Labor data is kept in sync with the HRMS data. Most implementations require the development of a process to do this, considering the inevitability of this process, it will be a relief for customers to have this as a delivered process.

> Restore Feature on Timesheet: There should be a feature to restore the timesheet to the last saved state. This will be a usability improvement and a much asked one by many customers I've worked with.

> Online Rules as Validation Messages: There is a delivered feature that allows the users to execute Time and Labor rules on the timesheet, but unfortunately this process just generates exceptions. It would be more meaningful and helpful if these online rules could be thrown up as a validation/error message. Most implementations require varying degree of online validations during time entry - it would be great to have those configured as T&L rules rather than through Peoplecode as T&L rules can be configured from the PIA and will not have to disturb any delivered component.

> Performance Improvement: Performance is a real issue with Time and Labor. Oracle needs to take a good look at both online performance (some of the delivered pagelets perform so poorly that they cannot be used at all!) as well as that of batch jobs like Time Administration.

> Mass Upload time through spreadsheet: It would be a nice to have feature to have a page from where users can directly upload reported time from a spreadsheet. Even though Time and Labor comes with the Rapid Time feature, there is nothing like working directly with an excel worksheet!

> More Delivered Reports: Customers would love to have more delivered reports with the product. Reports on employee schedules, reported time-payable time reconciliation, absence data-reported time reconciliation etc. would be a run away hit amongst the customers.

> T&L Rule Migration Engine: Modelled in a way similar to the Rule Packager utility in Absence Management, Time and Labor should also have a simple engine to aid in the migration of T&L Rules from one environment to another.

> Manager Dashboard: As Time and Labor data talks a lot about employee productivity and discipline, it would be wonderful to have a Manager Dashboard pagelet with analysis on Employee attendance information, Employee punctuality, Overtime and Productivity, Absenteeism etc.

> Delivered Localised Rules: Similar to the country extensions of GP that cater to the local country taxation and payroll rules, it would be a wonderful idea for Oracle to deliver Time and Labor with local rules of countries/cities. Some countries and cities have mandatory time and labor rules which every organisation will have to follow and there is nothing like getting that delivered with the product. The development, testing and maintenance time that this will save is immense for customers to readily lap up this feature.

If Oracle is reading, I am sure that some of these changes will go a long way in making Time and Labor a stronger product and the developer and user community would love to see some of these propping in to future releases.

Direct Reports UI and Peoplecode Transfer Function

2009-04-22T12:18:00.000-07:00

The Transfer function is used in Peoplecode to move the users to a desired page within the same component or another component. A syntax for the function is as shown below(source Peoplebooks 8.48 - Peoplecode Language Reference) :

Transfer(true, MENUNAME.ADMINISTER_PERSONNEL, BARNAME.USE, ITEMNAME. PERSONAL_DATA, PAGE.PERSONAL_DATA_1, "U");

As shown above, the Menuname, Barname, Itemname and Page name of the target page has to be passed in this function. Rather than hard coding these values in the code, it will be a good practice if the above parameters are derived from a PIA page. Take a look at the page where we set up the Direct Reports Utility (Setup HRMS --> Common Definitions --> Direct Reports for Managers --> Direct Reports Setup).

The delivered Direct Reports Utility is designed to show the same employee selection page to the manager in various components and then is designed to redirect the manager to the appropriate page using the Transfer function. This functionality can be adopted for any custom requirement also. The parameters for the transfer function can be configured on this page and later retrieved Peoplecode by passing the component and market details (Use %Component and %Market as best practis). The only disadvantage I see is that if there are multiple transfer functions being used in the same custom component, then this is not a feasible solution. The elegance of the solution lies in the fact that nothing will have to be hardcoded in the transfer function code and is a completely maintainable and scalable solution.

Which city has the maximum Peoplesoft projects?

2009-04-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

I installed Google Analytics on this blog last month - it is really fascinating to see the amount of data the tool provides free of cost. The metrics provided include - number of visits per day, source of visitors, key words used to search for the site, language, browser, time spent by a user on the site, navigation pattern etc. Out of all the metrics, one that really interests me is one called 'map overlay' - this gives the geographical location of the visitors. Now, I've been thinking whether I could look at the data on the map overlay metrics to arrive at the places around the globe where maximum Peoplesoft activity (read projects) happens. Here is how the metrics look as of today -
The number of visits are directly proportional to the darkness of the green on the map. So undoubtedly the USA is the place to be as far as Peoplesoft is concerned - within the US, California sent in maximum visitors followed by New York. India, Canada and the UK follow suite. There was considerable activity from South American countries like Brazil, Chile and Columbia as well as from Asian countries like Vietnam, Philippines and Singapore. These countries represent a viable alternative to traditional outsourcing centres like India and the South American activity is especially significant in this regard. The geographical proximity to the US and the growing Hispanic population in US should make South American countries an attractive 'near-shoring' alternative. It will be really interesting if other Peoplesoft bloggers and especially the ivy league PS bloggers like Grey Sparling and Jim Marion could share the visitor profiles on their site as it would give a more realistic view of Peoplesoft activity from across the globe. But in the mean time, keep those clicks coming!

Time and Labor 9.1 - Integration with Oracle Workforce Scheduler

2009-04-19T03:32:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest challenges that we face in designing a time and attendance system for a retail business is the ability to accurately forecast and capture the work schedule of employees. One aspect of the problem is arriving at the work schedule itself - how does a retail store manager decide upon the schedule of the employees? A number of factors go into this - the size of the store, the sales demand forecast for a period, the availability of the workforce, employees on planned absences, legal work rules etc. Given the multitude of parameters involved, drawing up the work schedules is a complex, difficult and practically inaccurate task for the store managers. The second aspect is about keeping the time and attendance system (Peoplesoft in our case) updated with the actual work schedule details. It has been our common experience that though manager verbally communicate the work schedule details to the store employees, a manual updation of the same in the system does not take place. The third dimension of the problem is the importance of having the correct schedule data in Peoplesoft. Modules like Absence Management and Time and Labor (and ultimately Payroll as these two modules feed data to the Payroll module/system) heavily relies on having the correct scheduling data for proper processing and calculations.

This is where a Workforce Scheduling system comes into play. A Workforce Scheduler is a system that will generate the schedules for your organisation based on various rules like sales forecast, demand, labour availability, time studies for tasks etc. From an enterprise perspective - there will be a bi-directional integration between a Workforce Scheduling System and the Time and Attendance system. The Time and Attendance (or HRMS) System will send the employee and absence details to the Scheduling System and the Scheduling System in turn will send the work schedule details back to the Time and Attendance System. We have been piloting the use of such a Workforce Scheduler in TESCO and work on it's integration with Peoplesoft Time and Labor is on.
With this background, it came as a pleasant surprise for me to read that Oracle is planning on delivering an integration between Peoplesoft Time and Labor and Oracle Workforce Scheduler in it's 9.1 release.

For a retail organisation, where work schedule of employees is dynamic and dependant on a number of external factors like sales demand - having a workforce scheduling system is of strategic importance. Having a system that will accurately generate schedules and keep the schedule data in sync with the Time and Attendance System will result in huge time and cost savings. In this context, this is a brilliant service offering from Oracle and will further bolster it's Peoplesoft strategy and customer base.

Automating Release Management - the XMLP way

2009-03-26T06:11:00.000-07:00

Most organisations have a process where a document containing all the objects of a Peoplesoft project that is to be migrated to another environment is prepared. This document will be the reference point for the DBAs or the release management team who will be responsible to migrate Peoplesoft projects across environments. For a developer, the task of preparing the document is an over head especially if it's a project with a large number of objects - it's close to being a painful exercise of going through all the objects in the project and reflecting that in the document. Amongst the innovative tools developed here at TESCO we had a .NET based Automatic Release Notes generator. The user just had to input the name of the project and the tool would produce a file (again we had the choice to select the output type required - .doc or .xls) containing the details of all the objects in the project including the comments attached to each individual object definition wherever possible. But this tool had few limitations - (a) The output format was not in the template dictated by our standards (b) The tool was not available locally, we had to login to a remote desktop to access that and (c) The source code was in .NET and that was not appealing to a bunch of Peoplpesoft developers!
So the team could not use the tool and had to resort to a manual preparation of the release notes. It was then that we came up with the idea of writing an XML Publisher report to do the same. XML Publisher is a perfect tool to produce letters and documents because we directly develop the template in MS Word and that was just perfect in our case. For the initial version, we decided to just print the details of the objects in the project and not the comments for each object. Printing the comments would mean that we had to query the metadata table of each of the objects and that would be nearly impossible with a simple PS Query.
The datasource of the XMLP report was a simple PS Query that pulled data from the PSPROJECTITEM table. We added some prompts to the PS Query so that the user could input details to be printed in the release notes like the change number, name of author, change description etc. It's a very simple template which I am sure your organisation can develop with minimal effort. This tool has surely automated a non-value add area in our development process and helped our developers spent more time of development rather than documentation!
A small presentation on the report and how to use that is given below:

Release Notes generation using XML Publisher

View more presentations from jijucvengal.

My WebEx session on important Time and Labor tables

2009-03-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to upload audio visual sessions on Time and Labor on my blog for pretty long time now. This is because I strongly believe that there is a serious lack of authentic Peoplesoft training sources available and seeing and listening is any day better than plain reading! So here is the first audio cast I have come up with. It is a WebEx recording. I could not find a free tool to convert the recording to a format accepted by a video uploading site - so I had to upload the file in a free file hosting site.
The session is on my Top Six tables in Time and Labor. The session covers the structure and importance of each of the six tables and explains the context and place where they are used in Time and Labor. It should be an informative watch for any person working on Time and Labor. The audio cast is almost 60 minutes long.

You can download the session from this url - http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/browse/jijucvengal/257993

You will need a WebEx player to view the session. That can be downloaded here.
I sincerely hope that the session will be useful to you. Please leave your comments on the same here and also suggest any aspect on Peoplesoft Time and Labor that you might want the next session on.

Simulating Time Collection Devices using Peoplesoft Handler Tester Utility

2009-03-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

What would you do if you had to send adhoc punches from a TCD to Peoplesoft for testing and you don't have access to a TCD or an immediate mechanism to send offline punches? Use the Peoplesoft Delivered Handler Tester utility. Handler Tester is a tool where you can feed the XML file and simulate the invocation of the handler of a Service Operation. It is an excellent utility while you are developing any service operation.
Any punch time interface that comes from a TCD calls the PUNCHED_TIME_ADD Service Operation. Extract the XML of the message (this can be easily taken from the Service Operation monitor) and make appropriate changes to the XML file (like adding the correct EMPLID, PUNCH_DTTM, PUNCH_TYPE etc.) and submit the XML to the tester using the 'Provide XML' button. To fire the handler - click on 'Execute Event'. If the handler was fired a text - 'Done' will be displayed below the Execute Event button. Check the Process Monitor to see whether there is an instance of the ST_LOADER AE. The handler calls the ST_LOADER AE that actually loads the punch time to the TL_RPTD_TIME table. I found it to be a very handy mechanism to simulate the action of TCDs.
A snapshot of the Handler Tester page is given below:

Innovation is a matter of culture

2009-03-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

Innovation is undoubtedly the most overused cliche ('value addition' would be a close competitor) in modern management jargon. Infinite media and printing space has been dedicated on this single subject and I am sure many companies and individuals have made millions selling that idea! But I believed that getting an entire organisation to innovate together was almost an impossibility until I joined TESCO.
Read the rest of the post here.

Leaving it to XSL to do the dirty work!

2009-03-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

The biggest misconception I had about XML Publisher was it's ability to do any logical processing - for me it was merely a presentation layer when I initially saw the product and far inferior to anything SQRs could do. How wrong I was! And this post is about the power of using XSL to do the programming logic within the template of XML Publisher to design faster and better reports.

When we initially started designing XML Publisher reports we stuffed in most of the calculations and logic in the data source itself - majority being PS Queries. This meant we had pretty bulky and costly queries with a number of PS Query expressions. This was not helping the cause at all with the reports taking an unacceptably long time to run. But as we got to understand the tool, we started doing more and more of the calculations and logical processing within the template using xsl - the groupings, summations, summaries etc. This has lead to dramatic improvements in performance and we believe that's the right way to approach XMLP reporting.
For example in one of our reports we had to print the total scheduled hours for all employees in a department along with some other information. The xml schema consisted of individual employee's data along with the deptid. A normal for-each-group:row;DEPTID tag was used to print individual departments, but to retrieve the total scheduled hours for a department an expression was used in the PS Query. This lead to significant performance drop, the query itself was taking over 30 minutes to execute. By eliminating the expression and summing up the scheduled hours for the department in the template itself the report was running in less than 5 minutes. A further grouping was done inside the DEPTID grouping to sum the scheduled hours of each employee (note that there were multiple rows for a single employee in the data set, but grouping by emplid would result in a single distinct row) and the set_variable function was used to add the scheduled hours to a variable.

In short keep the data structure of your data source as flat as possible and leave all the dirty processing work to the XMLP template! (And keep learning more of XSL to leverage the capabilities fully).

Experiences in T&L-Absence Management Integration

2009-03-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

It's always exciting to work on cross module assignments and this post details some of the learnings I've had piloting the T&L-AM integration for my present organisation.

The integration of T&L and AM can be again divided into two distinct categories - integration with NA Payroll as the pay system and integration with GP as the pay system. One of the biggest drawbacks we found with the delivered integration is that it doesn't work if you've decided to use PI (Payroll Interface) as your pay system. This was a problem as we were not using Global Payroll and an initial design decision was made to use Payroll Interface as the pay system of all employees in job data. We had to reverse this decision and forcefully use GP as the pay system in job to ensure that we could leverage the delivered integration between AM and T&L.

The purpose of integrating these two modules is two folds:

Bring AM data into T&L and display the same on the timesheet.
Feed the absence data to NA Payroll through Time and Labor.

With 9.0, absences can be reported in the timesheet itself and is a major enhancement, but this post is about versions lower than 9.0.
There are some limitations with the display of absences on the timesheet. Absences will not be loaded on the timesheet grid, so a user cannot see an absence TRC on the timesheet grid per se. Just a greyed out row with a reported status of approved and the number of hours of absence will appear on the timesheet. This can be pretty confusing and sometimes even useless for the users. Absences are shown in the grid called 'Reported Hours Summary' that is just below the timesheet. But if it's the punch timesheet page, only the time reporting category is displayed here. This is where the TRC Category which was introduced in 8.9 plays an important part. If one creates appropriate TRC Categories for each category of absence and link the category to an absence TRC, the data appearing on this grid can be useful for the users.
Another limitation with the integration of the two modules with NA Payroll as the pay system is that the integration program can be run only for finalised AM calendar groups. This is a significant limitation as the users will be able to see the absence data on the timesheet only after a calendar is finalised which happens at the end of a period. To overcome this limitation, we had to customise the process to enable it to run for any absence calendar that is open.
On the other hand, the integration with GP as the paygroup can happen after a manager approves an absence and need not even wait till the absence calculation is run. This means that the data that is seen in T&L can be inaccurate and incomplete.
We faced interesting challenges while designing the payroll interface (custom interface to local payrolls) in taking T&L and Absence data because of the above design. There was no way we could take the entire 'payable data' from time and labor though it contained the absence data too. This was because the absence data in time and labor was inaccurate and incomplete. This necessitated the design of two interface programs - one to take T&L data from the TL_PAYABLE_TIME table and another to take AM data from GP_PI_GEN_DATA table.
Also note that any system that has the integration of these two modules will have to closely tie any setup change to one module with the other. For example, any change to the absence code setup or the creation of a new absence code etc. will require similar actions on the T&L TRC end too.

Calendars related to T&L that needs periodic update

2009-03-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

This was a question posed today in the popular forum ittoolbox. The question was about all the calendars related to T&L that required periodic update. This should be on the checklist of every implementation to have a yearly check to ensure that the following are up to date:

1. T&L Time Period Calendars which can be found in Setup HRMS --> Product Related --> Time and Labor --> Periods. Time Period Calendars are critical for the Time Administration process to find the Period of Interest (POI) and for T&L rules. These calendars will have to be built on a periodic basis.

2. Holiday Schedule has to be updated every year to reflect the statutory holidays of a year. The Holiday Schedule is a common HRMS definition shared across various modules like AM, GP, NA Payroll, T&L etc.

3. Time and Labor dates table which can be found in the second tab of the Time and Labor installation page will also have to be built periodically.

4. Time Zone Offset table found in Peopletools, International folder also has to be updated as necessary. The Time Zone offset table is used in a number of T&L processes and they will not run unless and until the table is populated by using the 'Generate Query Offset' feature.

The case of the missing exceptions

2009-03-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

Peoplebooks say that if an exception is defined with the 'archive' checkbox ticked, then once an exception is resolved, it will remain in the TL_EXCEPTION table. But does that happen always? The answer is no. If you make any manual change that nullfies the criteria of an exception, time administration will clear the same from the table.

Time and Labor and Day Light Savings

2009-03-10T13:38:00.000-07:00

This was a very interesting piece of change for me - to understand how T&L handles the reported and payable time of time reporters working across the time when day light saving starts or ends. I was surprised to find that despite being on the latest tools version, T&L was not completely error proof handling DST changes. We have a large number of employees working in PST time zone and PST moved ahead by one hour (from GMT -8 to GMT -7) at 2:00 AM on 8th March, so what happens to employees who started work before 2:00 AM and ended work after 2:00 AM? For example sample the following punch timings:

In: 7th March 10:00:00 PM
Break: 8th March 1:00:00 AM
In: 8th March 1:30:00 AM
Out: 8th March 3:30:00 AM

Though it appears from the punch timings that the employee has worked for 5 hours and 30 mins, the actual hours worked is only 4.5 as at 2:00 AM the clocks gained an hour and became 3:00 AM. There are many implications of this scenario which every organisation that is using T&L has to be aware of:

1. A high severity exception (TLX10076) will be generated if any punches are done during the DST change window - in the case above, the window would be between 2:00:00 AM and 2:59:59 AM. Though this is very unlikely if your organisation uses TCDs - this can happen if any manual change is made to the timesheet.

2. For employees who are working across the DST change window - the difference between the last Out and the first In will not add up to the punch total on the timesheet. In the example above, the punch total on the timesheet will come as 4.5 hours. This is Peoplesoft doing the right timezone calculation and should not be taken as an issue.
This caused considerable confusion among the users where they even manually adjusted the timesheets in an effort to bring the reported time difference equal to the punch time total.

3. Payable time will be affected by this change. When the clocks move ahead by an hour - the payable time generated will be one hour lesser than the actual worked time and when the clocks move back, the payable time generated will be one hour more than the actual reported time (yeah Peoplesoft overpays your emplyees!). On 8th March, we found that all employees who worked during the DST change were paid one hour less.

So how do you prepare for the DST change?

Its advisable to have audit queries prepared before hand to identify all employees who worked across the DST change. Track the reported and payable time of these employees to ensure that there are no discrepancies.
Have a communication plan in place telling the users to not edit the timesheet on a DST change date/time if possible. Also let the users know that a high severity exception might be generated which is due to the DST change. There is nothing much an employee or a manager can do to resolve that exception so it's better to get the HR support team to do it.
Payable time will be affected by this change. This means that there are chances of overpaying or underpaying employees who worked across a DST change. I prefer to correct this in T&L itself before passing data to downstream systems. When the DST change happened on March 8th, we had employees who had payable time one hour less than the actual worked hours. This difference was offset by reporting 1 hour of Regular TRC on the elapsed timesheet.

In conclusion, I feel Time and Labor handles DST time changes pretty well. The most important thing is to monitor the system properly to identify the affected employees and ensure that their reported and payable time are as expected.

Dynamic Views as Prompt Tables

2009-02-19T01:17:00.001-08:00

Dynamic Views are an excellent object type provided by Peoplesoft - a pseudo view that can take any shape! They are excellent candidates where the SQL condition of a view changes dynamically according and are not even a database object.
But as many might already know, one has to be extremely careful while using dynamic views in prompts. There are two major limitations I have come across when you use a DV as a prompt:

1. If the SQL of the dynamic view contains joins and if the search fields are used in the join.
2. If the SQL of the dynamic view contains joins.

What causes the failure is that the component processor takes the search fields from the prompt and appends to the SQL statement like 'and = '. Now, unfortunately the processor does not do any aliasing which causes the common 'ambiguous column definition' SQL error.

To overcome this, either put the SQL in a view and query from the view or better, treat the SQL as an inline view and query from the inline view.
For example, if the initial SQL of the DV was something like:
SELECT EMPLID FROM PSOPRDEFN UNION SELECT EMPLID FROM PSOPRDEFN, for this to work in a dynamic view, it has to be called from an inline view like:
SELECT EMPLID FROM (SELECT EMPLID FROM PSOPRDEFN UNION SELECT EMPLID FROM PSOPRDEFN)

Peoplesoft-Microsoft Outlook Calendar integration

2009-02-14T04:02:00.000-08:00

This was one piece of work I wanted to try out for a long time. With all the makeover that Enterprise Products are having with the introduction of Web2.0 features, SOA capabilities etc.- it is only natural that a synergy between desktop applications and ERPs are introduced. A lot of pioneering work has already gone into this area and I noticed couple of blogs and discussion forums mulling over the integration of Outlook Calendars with Peoplesoft. Considering the central role played by a mail client in scheduling meetings and events, it is an exciting possibility to send notifications from Peoplesoft as meeting invites to a mail client and extend the boundary of the application to the user's desktop.
Jim Marion has an excellent post here which gives the framework for the integration. It's a great place to start off from. (You can get some tip off from this forum also.)
These discussions throw up couple of options to implement this feature. Jim talks about providing the users a link to view the invite while another forum talked about creating an invite file and sending it as an attachment to the e-mail of the user. I piloted both these features and believe that in a real time environment, the latter option of sending the invite to the mail is a much better option than Jim's approach.
The implementation per se is pretty simple with very minimal coding, but I had two very important learnings during this pilot.
> The standard protocol used in the exchange of calendar invites is called iCalendar. This is an inter-operable protocol accepted by most calendar/scheduling systems. A working paper on the iCalendar framework can be found here. iCalendar files contain all the necessary information for the scheduling of an event and can be send across applications as a '.ics file. To test this, create a new appointment in MS Outlook calendar and save the appointment in the iCalendar format as shown below:

Open the iCalendar file is a text editor and you can see the details of the protocol. Thus, any invite that is sent out from Peoplesoft to a mail client has to be in the iCalendar format. This makes the task pretty clear - we need to build a mechanism that will generate a file in the iCalendar format with the correct details of the meeting.

> The content type of the file/response sent to the mail client should be "text/calendar". This means that before sending the iCalendar response to the mail client, the content type of the response has to be set to "text/calendar".

The fundamentals of my approach are heavily drawn from the blog of Jim Marion, yet I believe he did not give the actual implementation details which I intent to furnish here. The steps involved in this integration are as follows:

1. Create an HTML object with the iCalendar framework skeleton and assign the begin time, end time, summary and attendees tag to HTML bind variables.

2. Create a funtion or an iScript (create an iScript if you want the users to view the ics file from a link) which will call the iCalendar HTML object and pass the necessary bind variables using the GetHTMLText function. Jim has given details regarding the iScript and that can be directly implemented.

3. Jim's iScript is designed to show the ics file on the click of a link. But, I was turned on by a better approach of sending the ics file as an attachment to the e-mail of the correct users. To do this, bind the iCalendar HTML object with the correct parameters and save it as a .ics file and send that as an attachment. One point to be kept in mind for this approach is that the content type of the attachment has to be set as "text/calendar". If you are on tools 8.48 or above, use the delivered mail class functions which can be found in the App Package - PT_MCF_MAIL. The SetAttachmentContent or AddAttachment methods in this package has the capability to override the content-type of the attachment.

All discussions regarding this topic talks about only the above mentioned approaches, but I tried the same integration using the XML Link Registry utility. This can be useful when the users need to view the meeting invite through a link from an external (non-peoplesoft) site. I first came across the XML Link Registry utility while reading about running a PS Query from the desktop without signing into PIA. You can find details of that here. An XML Link Registry function is a mechanism whereby we can expose the methods in our web libraries (the iScript functions) to a non-peoplesoft system and the beauty of it is that the methods can be called from a URL. It's a pretty phenomenal utility to execute Peoplesoft functions from an external system if IB is not being used. Any iScript function can be exposed as an XML Link Registry function - for this, an XML Link Registry function need to be defined in: Peopletools --> Utilities --> Administration --> XML Link Registry.
I exposed the iScript created to trigger the invite as an XML Link Registry function and invoked the XML Link Registry service from the external URL.
So, there are multiple approaches for this implementation:
1. Send the ics file as an attachment to the users.
2. Within peoplesoft, show a link to the users from where they can access the invite.
3. Expose the invite as a link in a third party site and invoke the invite on click of the link.

Choose the best approach for the integration based on the current notification mechanism that is in place in your system.

Time and Labor – Absence Management Integration Technical Details:

2008-11-28T01:01:00.000-08:00

This document discusses the technical details of the integration of Absence Management with Time and Labor without North American Payroll.

Map a TRC to an Absence Management Take Code as shown in the diagram below:

Table that holds the mapping details of a TRC and an AM Take code – TL_ERNCD_TBL.

All the Absence data that will be sent to Time and Labor is stored in the record – GP_ABS_EVT_WRK.
This table is populated through peoplecode (GP_ABS_EVENT.EMPL_RCD.FieldFormula) when a manager approves absences. Note that only data in the above table is taken up by the integration program. So, ensure that all the data that is expected to be sent to Time and Labor is present in this table before running the integration program.
Note that this table is purged after the successful run of the integration program – so it is recommended to take a back up of this table before running the integration process. This table will contain all Added, Deleted and Changed absence data.
Note that this table will be populated only if the employee is active in Time and Labor and has a pay system flag of ‘GP’ in PS_JOB.

Run the ‘Retrieve Absences’ process from Time and Labor, as shown below:

This process triggers the TLAGGUPDATE AE. The main purpose of this AE is to populate the TL_ST_ELPTIME work table from the data present in GP_ABS_EVT_WRK table. This AE takes all absences present in the GP_ABS_EVT_WRK table, checks for the Event Action (whether Add, Change or Delete) and populate the TL_ST_ELPTIME table. The AE also converts the reported days of Absences into corresponding number of hours for use by Time and Labor. This is done by checking the absence days with the schedule for that particular day for the employee.
The TLAGGUPDATE AE calls the TL_AGG_SECTN AE where the insertion into TL_ST_ELPTIME table takes place.
GP_ABS_SUM_WRK and GP_ABS_DTL_WRK are two other important work tables used by the TLAGGUPDATE AE. Note that all the tables mentioned above are truncated after the process runs and the presence of data in the above tables after the run of a program is an indication that insertion into TL_RPTD_TIME has not happened.

The TLAGGUPDATE AE finally calls the TL_ST_LIB AE which transfers data from TL_ST_ELPTIME to TL_RPTD_TIME. The latter AE is triggered using the CreateProcessRequest command and thus it will run as a separate process from the TLAGGUPDATE process.

The time from Absence can be identified by looking for rows with an RT_SOURCE value of AM in TL_RPTD_TIME table.

The below screenshot depicts how the Absence Data appears on the TimeSheet:

Side Notes:
> Check for data in the GP_ABS_EVT_WRK table to estimate the rows that will be sent to Time and Labor.
> Ensure that each employee is assigned to a proper schedule and that the schedules are properly set up.
> Data is loaded into TL_ST_ELPTIME table from where it is loaded into TL_RPTD_TIME by the TL_ST_LIB AE.
> If the process has not run properly GP_ABS_WRK, GP_ABS_SUM_WRK, GP_ABS_DTL_WRK and the TL_ST_ELPTIME tables will have data.
> Check for the loaded rows in TL_RPTD_TIME by looking for a RT_SOURCE = ‘AM’.

Time and Labor - Absence Management Integration in HRMS 8.9

2008-11-01T09:51:00.001-07:00

Its been real long since I've been able to post here! Thanks to the internet security at work!! Thought of writing down my experiences with integrating T&L with Absence Management in 8.9. This is one real exciting area in Time and Labor with more and more customers going in for Absence Management and T&L rollouts in the same implementation. From a business perspective, one cannot really see T&L and AM as different entities, though both have their own unique functions, they (and more so T&L) need to be tightly integrated and share data for meaningful business processing. Let's look at some scenarios where we need the integration:

> Payroll needs both reported time as well as absence data. Depending on the Pay System, T&L and AM data has to be collated for this purpose.

> Users would like to see/report time as well as absence on the same screen (this is one of the major enhancements to T&L in 9.0 with the feature to report/view absence data on the Timesheet. I think its a wonderful feature and a long awaited one).

> A number of T&L rules are dependent on Absence data (for example, don't apply certain rules if the employee was absent on a particular day).

Now, let's explore the integration of these two modules (the discussion is specific to 8.9, I know its a bit anachronistic, but I hope it will be useful to people still on this version!). The integration path varies depending upon the payroll system used. There are two separate processes - one for use if the Pay System is GP and the other if the pay system in NA Payroll (note that there is no delivered integration method if the Pay System is Payroll Interface). What both these processes do is to take absence data and put it into the reported time table. Then what is the difference between these two processes?
The NA Payroll process can be run only after an Absence Run has been finalised and takes data from the GP Positive Input table (GP_PI_GEN_DATA). This ensures that we have the rightly calculated data coming over to T&L. But, for a lot of users this is a major disadvantage of the process, for you cannot view absence data on Time and Labor before an Absence Calendar is finalised!
But, the case is different with the GP integration process. This takes data from a work table (GP_ABS_EVT_WRK) which is populated after a manager approves/deletes/changes absence requests. This means, that Absence data is available to T&L even before the Absence Run is started. But, this comes with a major disadvantage. The absence data that comes to T&L may not be the correct finalised absence data. In one sense its alright if GP is used as the payroll product. Things get murky if one is using a third party payroll system. In this case, the absence data in the payable time table of T&L might be incorrect as the data has come over before the Absence Run has taken place.
This is a major drawback of the current integration and every 8.9 implementation that looks to integrate AM and T&L need to keep this in mind.
I would be interested to know the ways people have worked around integrating T&L and AM with a third party payroll.

Post Note: How to identify the data that has come from Absence Management in T&L?
Query TL_RPTD_TIME for a RT_SOURCE = 'AM'.

On Oracle Optimisers

2008-08-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

Found this elementary document on Oracle Query Execution and CB and RB Optimisers in scribd - embedding here for posterity.

Oracle understanding optimizers - Upload a Document to Scribd

Overview of Time and Labor

2008-07-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

Time And Labor Overview

From: jijucvengal, 4 hours ago

Time And Labor Overview

view presentation (tags: time peoplesoft payroll american)

First in a series of presentations on Peoplesoft. For more information visit my blog at www.peoplesofthrms.blogspot.com

SlideShare Link

Peoplesoft popularity by numbers!

2008-07-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

Every other day I indulge in some kind of debate regarding the future of Peoplesoft and the imminent assault of Fusion on the PS breed!! I must say that its murky times for us Peoplesoft consultants though Oracle has gone overboard to support and develop the product. Considering this, it was pleasant to read this post on the Grey Sparling blog about the popularity of Peoplesoft. Some interesting numbers from the article:

9 of top 10 commercial banks are ps customers
59% of top 100 of fortune 500 companies own ps
retail - the 5 biggest use ps
6 of top 10 communications companies use PeopleSoft
60% of the top 15 insurance companies use PeopleSoft
70% of top 10 health care organizations use PeopleSoft
19 us states use PeopleSoft
50 of largest counties and cities use PeopleSoft
7 of top 10 research universities use PeopleSoft
8 of top 10 printing and publishing companies use PeopleSoft

Numbers and statistics can be misleading if not read in the correct context, but considering the features of the product, the way Peoplesoft has evolved under Oracle by incorporating so many of the Fusion middleware features and the very vocal commitment of Oracle to Peoplesoft customers tell me that we should be in business for quite some time!

Auto creation of user profiles

2008-07-29T00:47:00.000-07:00

There are multiple scenarios where its required to create new user profiles in bulk. A recent requirement I had was to create user profiles for all employees in the system during a pilot upgrade exercise. The best approach to this problem is to achieve the same by a CI built on the USER_SAVEAS component (Copy User profile component).
Was mulling over the various options to auto generate passwords for the user profiles and ran into the delivered function in DERIVED_HINT.EMAILPSWD.Fieldformula event.

SQR Migration Strategies

2008-07-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

In continuation to my earlier post on SQRs and XML Publisher, this discussion aims to arrive at a decision matrix to migrate from SQRs to other Peoplesoft/Fusion tools. A number of organisations that run on 8.0, 8.3 and other older versions of Peoplesoft have widely utilised SQRs for non-reporting scenarios like Inbound Interface processing, Mass Updates, Utility processes etc. With the very vocal recommendation of Oracle that customers should refrain from using SQRs (though its unlikely that Oracle will stop supporting SQRs on Peoplesoft any time now) in newer releases, it is extremely prudent to have in place a strategy to move all the SQR programs to an alternate tool. The decision matrix below has been prepared by taking into consideration the various type of SQRs programs as well as the capability/weaknesses of the other tools. This is a very high level illustration and your expert comments and thoughts are invited to further refine this tool.

Type of SQR	Migration Strategy
Inbound Interface – Data source: File	File Layout + AE + CI if insertion is done to a component
Inbound Interface – Data source: Peoplesoft	App Messaging/IB
Mass Data Changes (Mass hires, Mass update of a table etc.)	AE + CI if updation to a component is done. Analyse whether the Peoplesoft Mass Change functionality can be utilized.
Outbound Interface (Flat files, Dataset)	AE + XML Publisher for report generation/ Web Services if 3^rd party supports
SQCs	Custom SQCs can be replaced by Application Classes to be invoked from Peoplecode.
Utility programs (Clean up, File manipulation, Audits, Status Checks)	Audits, File Operations, OS related processes are better done by SQRs, retain them. Utilities that affect database can be replaced by AE.
Letters and Forms (online forms as well as letters that are mailed)	XML Publisher + Peoplecode notification classes for mails
Reports – Simple single data source (reports with one BEGIN-SELECT)	XML Publisher
Reports – Simple multiple data sources (reports with more than one BEGIN-SELECT and simple calculations)	Migration of these might require the use of AE to execute the calculations and XML/XSL modifications. Move to XML Publisher if the logic is not complicated, otherwise retain SQRs.
Reports – On-breaks and multiple reports	XML Publishers
Reports – Complex with multiple BEGIN-SELECTS and complex conditional logic	Do not migrate – the effort is not worth it.
Reports – Status of batch process	This category contains the production of error reports and status reports of processing done by an AE or other batch programs – move to XML Publisher.

Time and Labor Security demystified

2008-07-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

Security in Time and Labor is an area that needs more clarity to most new implementors. Almost every team I have consulted for has had the question 'how do I ensure that the employees reporting to a manager shows up in the manager self service pages of Time and Labor?'
This post aims at being a guide towards designing the T&L security setup.

T&L Security is primarily concerned with ensuring the correct access of reportees to managers as well as controlling the dates which are open to any employee to report time. We are more concerned with the first case here.
Security in Time and Labor is a two step process - 1. Grouping the employees reporting to a manager/HR administrator together and 2. Granting access to the correct groups to the respective managers. To group employees together T&L has a powerful feature called Dynamic groups (there is another category called static groups which are not practically used and thus does not deserve mention here) which is similar to the Group Build feature in core HRMS. A Dynamic Group constructs a group of employees based on an SQL selection criteria (for example - select emplid from ps_job where reports_to = ) and is thus truly dynamic. The Dynamic Group once created has to be refreshed on a daily basis to ensure that the group includes all eligible employees.
The illustration below shows how a dynamic group can be created by defining the appropriate SQL eligibility criteria.
After the group has been created, the next step is to assign this group to those managers/administrators who need access to the same. Access in Time and Labor is controlled by an Operator's ROWSECCLASS. So the groups will have to be linked to the eligible ROWSECCLASSES to enable access for managers to their reportee's data. The illustration below shows how a group can be linked to a ROWSECCLASS. Keep in mind that one group can be linked to multiple ROWSECCLASSES and one ROWSECCLASS can be linked to multiple groups.

Now coming to the important question - how does a manager get access to employees under him? Let's just look at the below process flow for that:

1. Manager logs in with his/her Operatorid.
2. The ROWSECCLASS of this Operator is fetched from PSOPRDEFN.
3. The TL_GRP_SECURITY table is queried to get all the groups that this ROWSECCLASS has access to.
4. The TL_GROUP_DTL table is queried to get all the EMPLIDs part of each group fetched in step 3.
5. The employees fetched are displayed on the MSS pages.

This is an extremely simplified definition of what actually goes behind the scenes when the system tries to retrieve the employees in a T&L MSS page. So to ensure that a manager has access to his reportees ensure the following:
a. All the reportees are part of atleast one Dynamic Group. Query TL_GROUP_DTL to get the groups of an employee.
b. The manager/administrator has access to those groups. Query TL_GRP_SECURITY to get all the groups that a particular ROWSECCLASS has access to.
c. Schedule the Dynamic Group Refresh process on a nightly basis to ensure that the dynamic groups are up to date.

Caveat: The above process requires the creation of a large number of ROWSECCLASSES and Dynamic Groups to maintain exclusivity of employee access to managers. Organisations that follow the above approach will need to custom create a program thatwill create new ROWSECCLASSES when a new manager is hired and programatically create dynamic group and assign security to that dynamic group for the new ROWSECCLASS created. This complex process can be circumvented by customising the code behind the 'Get Employees' button present in all T&L MSS Employee Search pages. The approach would be to create a single Dynamic Group and enroll all employee in the same and give access to all managers/administrators for that single group. Customize the Peoplecode behind the Get Employees button to fetch only those reporting to the manager from the entire set fetched by the vanilla logic explained above. The customisation has to be done in FUNCLIB_TL_CP.MGR_SS_FUNC.FieldFormula event.

Peoplesoft Time and Labor Setup Guide: Summary

2008-07-10T02:32:00.000-07:00

Having completed over seven end to end roll outs in Peoplesoft Time and Labor - my team recently decided to design a quick implementation package for Peoplesoft Time and Labor implementations. This package contains ready made data loading programs for every T&L setup component, a complete T&L design strategy guide which talks about the best practices in designing the various data elements, ready made Peoplesoft HRMS to Time and Labor integration program, an exhaustive Client Questionnaire gathered from our experience that will help the team capture even the smallest client requirement at the earliest stage, a Data Collection form for all T&L components and a reported time mass load program. These tools will drastically reduce the implementation time for any T&L implementation and is a ready reckoner for any organisation going for a T&L implementation.

Pasted below is a summary of the setup sequence as well as set up methodology for all T&L components, an excerpt from the setup guide.

Setup Component	Data Loading Method
T&L Installation	Manual
Time Zone Offset	Manual
Time Periods	Manual
Pay System	Manual
TRC Category	Manual
TRC	AE
TRC Program	Manual/AE depending on volume of data
Compensatory Time Off Plan	AE
Override Reason Code	Manual
Time Reporting Template	Manual
Shifts	AE
Schedule Group	Manual
Schedule Definition	AE
Holiday Schedule	AE
Value List	Manual
Template Built Rule	Manual
Rule Program	Manual
Task Template	Manual
Task Profile	Manual
Task Group	Manual
Time Administration Options	Manual
TL Permission List Security	Manual
Dynamic Group Creation	Manual
Employee Enrolment	AE
Compensation Plan Enrolment	AE
Schedule Assignment	AE