Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Peoplesoft Time and Labor: My wishlist - I

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.

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