Cleaning up AWE entries for Absence Management and Time and Labor

This post is a response to a query that was raised in ITToolbox today. The query concerned a need to delete entries created by the Absence Management AWE (Approval Workflow Engine) process definitions. We have seen this requirements being raised at a number of customer sites, where it is needed to cleanup 'orphaned' AWE entries. Orphaned AWE entries are those transactions that are present in the AWE specific workflow tables, but not having the actual transactional data in core absence management tables.
So, here is the list of tables that need to be cleaned up, if ever this requirement arises:

1. GP_ABS_SS_DAT
2. GP_ABS_SS_STA
3. GP_ABSSS_V_XREF
4. EOAW_USERINST
5. EOAW_STEPINST

If the above requirement arises for Time and Labor, the following list of impacted tables need to be cleaned up:

Reported Time Approval:

1. TL_APP_HDR
2. TL_APP_RPT_LINE
3. TL_APP_RPTD_XRF
4. EOAW_USERINST
5. EOAW_STEPINST

Payable Time Approval;

1. TL_APP_PAY_HDR
2. TL_APP_PAY_LINE
3. TL_APP_PAY_XRF
4. EOAW_USERINST
5. EOAW_STEPINST

Note that this post only lists the tables involved in the AWE processes of PeopleSoft Absence Management and Time and Labor. Ensure that correct SQL scripts are written and tested, prior to executing the actual cleanup. If necessary, consult support.oracle.com where there is good amount of documentation on this subject, as well as sample delete scripts.

How is the personal work schedule id derived?

Work Schedules play a central role in both PeopleSoft Absence Management and Time and Labor. Work Schedules can be assigned directly to an employee and there are the following assignment methods possible:
1. Assign a pre-defined work schedule
2. Inherit a default work schedule. If you are interested to know how the default work schedule is decided, read this post.
3.  Assign a personal schedule. A personal schedule gives the user flexibility to define a work schedule pattern that is specific to one assignment of an employee.

When you define a personal work schedule, the schedule id is automatically derived by PeopleSoft and is non-editable.

The figure above, clearly illustrates that when an assignment method of personal schedule is selected, the schedule id is defaulted and greyed out.
So, what is the logic used by the system to derive the schedule id?
The system uses a combination of Employee Id and Employee Record number to derive the personal schedule id. This is done so that it will enable users to create unique personal schedule for different assignments of an employee id. The personal schedule id is derived by concatenating the employee id to a five digit number derived by adding the employee record number to 100000.
The code used to come up with the personal schedule id is given below:

EMPLID | Substring(String(100000 + EMPL_RCD), 2, 5);

The code can be interpreted as a two step process:
The first step is to derive the last five digits of the personal schedule id. This is done by first adding the employee record number to the numeral 100000. The first five digits starting from the second digit of the result is then retrieved. This new five digit number is concatenated to the employee id to derive the personal schedule id.
Let us sign off this post with an example.
What would be the personal schedule id of an employee with employee id 100000345 and employee record number 3?
Step 1:
Add employee record number to 100000. This results in 100003
Retrieve the last five digits of the schedule id by substringing the above result. So, the last five digits of the schedule id will be 00003.

Step 2:
Concatenate the final result from Step 1 with the employee id to have the personal schedule id.
This will result in a personal schedule id of 10000034500003

PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 - Time and Labor new features Part 1

In this two part series, we want to examine and highlight the various new features proposed in version 9.2 of PeopleSoft HCM for the Time and Labor module. We had reviewed the features for Absence Management, in a previous post. While we were disappointed with the proposed feature changes for Absence Management, Time and Labor tells a very different story.
The Oracle PeopleSoft Time and Labor product team has come up with an impressive list of enhancements for PeopleSoft 9.2, many of which have been critical pain points during a Time and Labor implementation. What impressed us the most was that, while there are certain brand new high value features like Time and Labor Workcenter, a number of features address existing product gaps - which is exactly what we have missed in Absence Management. Without taking more time, we would like to highlight the main enhancements to existing functionalities in version 9.2 of Time and Labor. In the next part, we will cover details of brand new features.

1. Enhanced display controls for TRCs: It is proposed to bring in enhanced features to control the display of Time Reporting Codes (TRCs) in Employee and Manager timesheet pages. Using this feature, it will be possible to control the list of TRCs that need to be displayed in the ESS/MSS timesheet pages as well as the order in which it should be displayed.
Our opinion:  A big thumbs up for this enhancement as it addresses an important pain point during implementations. This is a very common requirement in a Time and Labor implementation and most customers address this through a customisation.

2. Timesheet lockdown feature: We had hinted in a previous post that there is a planned enhancement to allow administrators to lock down edits on timesheets during critical periods like payroll runs. That feature is proposed to be delivered in v9.2. This feature supposedly allows administrators to select group of employees and choose to lock or unlock timesheets.
Our opinion: The T&L product team have been listening well to the customers! This is indeed a feature requested in most implementations which need to be addressed through a customisation. One thing struck us while seeing the screenshot of the proposed page to lock down timesheets - the group of employees for whom timesheet has to be locked was identified by the 'Company' and 'Paygroup' fields. This structure is compatible only for customers using Payroll Interface or Payroll for North America products, in conjuction with Time and Labor. Does this mean that customers who are using Time and Labor as a standalone product or T&L with Global Payroll as the pay system, will not be able to make use of this timesheet lockdown feature?

3. Enhanced display control of Timesheet page: The timesheet page in PeopleSoft Time and Labor is a complex one with a lot of fields and functionalities present in it. While the Time Reporting Template allows us to configure the fields that should be displayed in the timesheet page to a certain extent, ofcourse it does not extend to all the fields on the page. In a very useful extension, PeopleSoft 9.2 will come with extended Time Reporting template configuration options, that can be used to control the display of most fields and group of fields on the timesheet page. For example, it can be decided to show or hide 'Show All Punches' field, 'Leave and Compensatory Time' section, control the options in the 'View By' field etc.
Our opinion: Very useful enhancements. Eventhough we would not call these changes as strategic or high value, they help to increase the configurability of the system and ofcourse decrease customisations.

4. Print timesheet and controls on Timesheet edits: A new link will be provided on the timesheet page to enable printing the timesheet. There will also be feature to control who can edit an employee's timesheet and also ability to send notification to employees if their timesheet is edited by another user.
We also noticed that the Earliest Change Date (ECD) is now displayed on the timesheet. Excellent that the all important ECD has been brought out of obscurity and made easily referencable.
Our opinion: Printing of timesheets is another frequently requested feature. We have seen many custom, javascript based solutions that have been implemented for this. Another very useful feature!

5. Generation of Payable Time on Timesheet submission: There will be a configurable option on Time and Labor installation page, to allow the generation of payable time (and ofcourse exceptions, if configured) on the submission of timesheet or on clicking the Apply Rules button. This clearly implies that the system can react faster to reported time changes and payable time can be in sync with reported time in a more real time manner.
Our opinion: Reported time is converted to payable time when running the time administration process. There are operational issues with this process, because this introduces a delay in the generation of payable time. With this new enhancement, it becomes possible to generate payable time, as soon as the timesheet is submitted. This should ofcourse help increase the productivity of time and payroll administrators. We do have questions on the performance impact of this process as it will be required to invoke sections of the time administration process to generate payable time and it could get a bit heavy, especially during payroll cut-off dates when there will be increased traffic on the timesheet functionality.

6. Combined view of Payable Time, Absence, Exception on timesheet: In another enhancement, there will be new sections within the timesheet page that displays Absences, Payable Time, Exception, Attendance details etc. in different tabs. This will help the user to have a consolidated view of most elements related to time in one single page, i.e. the timesheet.
Our opinion: This is an excellent enhancement and will be well received by customers and users alike.
We would like to point out to customers who are on v9.1 (and excellent if you are on 8.52 tools as there are significant enhancements to related content framework in 8.52), that they should be making use of the related content feature to build similar usability enhancements. The 'related actions' framework delivered in 9.1 Feature Pack 2,can be further used to develop enhanced usability features, even within version 9.1.

These are the enhancements to existing features of Time and Labor that we identified from the various resources available on PeopleSoft HCM v9.2. In the next part of this series, we will discuss some of the brand new features for Time and Labor in v9.2.

For more information on PeopleSoft HCM and Time and Attendance modules, get in touch with us at partner@hroiconsulting.com

More posts on PeopleSoft 9.2 here - http://peoplesofthrms.blogspot.be/search/label/PeopleSoft%209.2

References:
1. https://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/entry/new_support_news_for_peoplesoft
2. https://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/entry/peoplesoft_hcm_and_fscm_9

HR Decibel Soundcast - Enrolling employees in PeopleSoft Time and Labor

Quick introduction to PeopleSoft Time and Attendance modules

Quick walkthrough of PeopleSoft Time and Attendance modules from HRoi Consulting

PeopleSoft Absence Management v9.1 - Navigation Guide

The navigation maze!

With the myriad pages available in PeopleSoft HCM, navigating through the system and finding the correct page for your requirement can be confusing at times. This is especially true for HR and IT super users of the system, who need to use as many features of the product as possible, to support their customers effectively.
Sensing this need, we have brought out a 'Navigation Guide' for PeopleSoft Absence Management v9.1. This easy to use spreadsheet is organised into different worksheets based on role and summarises the most important navigations in PeopleSoft Absence Management. Our focus has primarily been on summarising the important navigations for the HR Administrators and the IT team maintaining a PeopleSoft navigation. During our interactions with both these teams, we commonly get asked questions like, 'In which Absence Management formula is this variable used?', 'How do I exclude an employee from Absence Management processing temporarily', 'How do I troubleshoot an absence management formula', 'Where do I see the approval details of an absence request' etc.

This navigation guide is an attempt to summarise the important functionalities and it's navigations in PeopleSoft Absence Management, grouped by operational roles.
In the current version, navigations are summarised for the following roles:

1. Employees
2. Managers
3. Absence Administrators
4. IT Team (with links to setup and troubleshooting pages)

Here are some screenshots of the guide -

Figure 1 - A snapshot of the links under the Troubleshooting worksheet. These are pages available within PeopleSoft Absence Management, that can be used by the IT team to troubleshoot issues.


You can download a copy of the navigation guide from here -
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_RWy46tAwYmY2RHZ1pyTTVNVXM/edit

For questions/suggestions and clarifications, reach out to partner@hroiconsulting.com

PeopleSoft HCM Security Fundamentals - Future Dated Security and Actions

Assigning Paygroups to employees in Job data is a required task in a PeopleSoft Payroll/Absence Management implementation. A common issue we have seen being reported after this activity is that business users have lost security access to certain employees after the paygroup assignment job. More often that not, we have seen that this issue can be attributed to the 'Actions that trigger future dated security' setting in core HR row level security. This setting controls whether a user has access to an employee becoming effective under the user's row security critiera in a future date. In the 'Actions that trigger future dated security' setup, the actions in Workforce Administration module that trigger the insertion of a future effective dated row into the security tables can be setup. Only those actions that are present in this setup page will enable future dated security.

In the case of paygroup assignment, it is required to use the action, Change of Pay System (PSF) for a number of customers and this action is not in the list of delivered actions that trigger future dated security. So, a miss to add this action in the security installation settings can cause row level security issues. We have also noticed this during Workforce Administration implementations, after data conversion of Job data.

We always recommend adding this check as a step in the data conversion activities, so that this is tracked effectively.