Time and Labor rules and WRK_ADHOC_TAO table

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!

Peoplesoft 9.1 - Time and Labor Rule Utilities

When I wrote my wish list for Time and Labor 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.