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 2

In a previous post, we had discussed enhancements to existing features for PeopleSoft Time and Labor in v9.2. In this post, we want to examine and evaluate some of the brand new features being delivered as part of v9.2 for Time and Labor. Here is the list:

1. Time and Labor workcenter: v9.2 will see separate role based work centers for managers as well as Time and Labor administrators. This work center should act as the one-stop page for activities related to Time and Labor. Analytical reports using the new pivot grid functionality and alert aggregation will also be part of the work center. The work center will further have a collection of commonly used links as well as processes. We would like to note that a similar work center will also be available for Global Payroll and Absence Management in v9.2.
Our opinion: This is an excellent addition to the product as workcenters go a long way in increasing the usability of the product. Administrators of Time and Labor should especially find this feature appealing as it will add to their operational efficiency and increased productivity.

2. Alert and Notification framework: It has been proposed to deliver an alert and notification framework for Time and Labor in v9.2. This framework will help organisations setup one-time or recurrent notifications to different users in the system as well as setup alerts based on system data and monitor the thresholds. Examples where this could be used are - alerting managers of time approval prior to payroll cutoff, alerting administrators of system anomalies like employees exceeding an overtime limit etc.
Our opinion: This will go to a long way in addressing some critical business requirements with respect to compliance and measurement of Time and Attendance discipline/cost. Taken together with the Time and Labor workcenter, the alert and notification framework will augment Time and Labor operations in organisations, which in itself is a compelling business case for the adoption of this product.

3. New reports for Reported Time audit and Compensatory time: New XML Publisher based reports will be delivered for Reported Time Audit and details of Leave and Compensatory time.
Our opinion: Reporting is an area that has glaring gaps in PeopleSoft Time and Labor. Most mature Time and Attendance systems come with a number of out-of-the box reports, but the set offered by PeopleSoft Time and Labor is very limited. The new set of reports do not cover commonly requested reporting requirements and will be of limited use to customers.

Overall Analysis
 We want to give a thumbs up to the product team of PeopleSoft Time and Labor for the new features adopted in version 9.2. It is obvious that the product team has spent time listening to customers as well as practitioners to understand and address common pain areas and requirements. I cannot remember of a recent previous release which has addressed so many of real customer needs.
A lot of focus has also been put into easing the administrative operations related to Time and Labor, which is excellent! It goes without saying that for a highly transactional module like Time and Labor, the administrators are the true heores and deserve as much product assistance as possible to ease out their operations. Features like the workcenter, alert and notification framework, locking of timesheets and generation of payable time on submission of timesheet are all geared to streamline Time and Labor administration processes.
There are indeed many other areas which we hope to see improvement on, with future releases or feature packs. Some of  them are -

a. Better real time integration and validations between Time and Labor and Absence Management.
b. Mobile time reporting capabilities. Time reporting/approval are traditionally the first applications to get a mobile extension, but there has been no action from PeopleSoft Time and Labor on this front.
c. Better out-of-the-box reporting capabilities - It is extremely important to have reporting capabilities on work schedule information, payable time information, overtime analysis etc. This is an area we hope to see improvement on.
d. Country extensions/localisations - It goes without saying that most time in a Time and Labor implementation is spent analysing and configuring statutory labour rules. There would be a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership, if Oracle were to deliver statutory rules (just like its done for Global Payroll and Absence Management country extensions) for Time and Labor as well.
e. Light scheduling capabilities - Most organisations who are heavy users of Time and Labor, ask for some kind of workforce scheduling capabilities. It is not a feasible solution to suggest customers to purchase and use Oracle Workforce Scheduler (OWS), especially when they have light requirements at PeopleSoft side. We believe that a light version of a workforce scheduler that helps users to manage the availability of employees will be a great addition.

More posts on PeopleSoft 9.2 here - http://peoplesofthrms.blogspot.be/search/label/PeopleSoft%209.2
For more information or questions on PeopleSoft Time and Attendance, reach out to us at partner@hroiconsulting.com

Post Script -

Making use of non-9.2 features to replicate some of the proposed 9.2 features:
We believe that a number of tools available in existing releases can be effectively used to mimic some of the features that are proposed in version 9.2. We encourage customers to investigate the use of related content, relatred actions, workcenters, pivot grids, pagelets etc. that are already available on peopletools 8.52 to provide users of the system with a superior user experience.

Given below is an example of a pivot grid designed by us in HCM version 9.1, for drill down analysis of Payable Time

Pivot Grid used to analyse payable time details - PT8.52 and PS HCM v9.1

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

HR Decibel Soundcast: Time and Attendance capabilities in PeopleSoft HCM

What are the Time and Attendance capabilities in PeopleSoft HCM? Which are the modules to be licensed and what are the various components of an integrated T&A solution in PeopleSoft HCM? In this soundcast we explore these questions and more. This soundcast covers introduction to PeopleSoft Time and Attendance modules including PeopleSoft Time and Labor, Absence Management and Oracle Workforce Scheduler (OWS)


For more soundcasts, visit http://soundcloud.com/hroiconsulting

Time Clock vendors for PeopleSoft Time and Labor

Integration with an external time collection device or a time clock is an integral piece to a Time and Labor solution. Time clocks can be used to collect the work punch time of employees, collect task level information, enforce schedule restrictions etc. PeopleSoft Time and Labor provides a bi-directional integration with third party time clocks that allows T&L to send and receive data from time clocks. The interfaces related to time clocks are XML based and utilises PeopleSoft's integration broker technology. This facilitates an open framework where other third party time clocks can consume the time clock related messages from PeopleSoft and send punch data to PeopleSoft in the desired XML format.
It is to be noted here that Oracle has verified integration with some time clock vendors. The advantage of partnering with the time clock vendors with an Oracle verified integration is that there will be a ready made interface supported by both Oracle and the time clock vendor. The time clock vendor will further support any changes that result from upgrades as well. Thus, there are significant advantages for customers to choose time clock vendors that have an Oracle Verified Integration to PeopleSoft Time and Labor.
The vendors with Oracle verified integration are:

1. Accu Time Cesium
2. KABA
3. Timelink

We strongly recommend customers evaluating the implementation of a time clock in a PeopleSoft HCM context, to consider partnering with one of the above three time clock vendors.

Disclosure: Accu Time is a past client of HRoi Consulting, but this post is neither sponsored nor endorsed by Accu Time.

Time and Labor enrollment through Template Based Hire

Enrollment of employees into Time and Labor is a pre-requisite in every PeopleSoft Time and Labor implementation. Most implementations have a custom enrollment process to automate the assignment of Time and Labor attributes to employees. We want to present the option of using Template Based Hires (Smart Hire) to drive the initial Time and Labor enrollment of employees. Template Based Hire is a powerful functionality in PeopleSoft Workforce Administration module, that can be used to fasten the data entry related to hiring an employee in PeopleSoft. Using Template Based Hire, we can create custom templates containing only the fields that are relevant to a company/position. Defaulting of values can also be done for the fields and this helps in reducing the data entry requirements. A Template Based Hire template is made up of multiple sections. Each section contains a list of fields pertaining to a certain functional area. There are delivered Template Sections related to Time and Labor enrollment functionality, that can be added to a Template Based Hire template. If employees using a certain Template have common Time and Labor attributes, the values of the T&L attributes can also be defaulted through the Template Based Hire setup.

This solution of using Template Based Hire templates for Time and Labor enrollment can be applied to implementations where the Time and Labor enrollment details of employees do not change frequently. In such cases, customers might have a lower Total Cost of Ownership using Template Based Hire templates rather than developing a custom process to automate the entire enrollment. 

a screenshot of a Template section related to Time and Labor is given below:

Template Section related to Time and Labor added in a TBH Template

This post is authored by HRoi Consulting - The PeopleSoft Time and Attendance experts.

Design Flaw in PeopleSoft Work Schedule Defaults and design in Oracle Fusion HCM

For a Human Resources ERP suite, PeopleSoft HCM has excellent Time and Attendance features. One area that is highly under-appreciated (but lauded by customers when they see the complete potential!) is the Schedule Management features in PeopleSoft Time and Labor and Absence Management. Some of the features, like the ability to define flexible work schedules, ability to create work schedules on the fly, integrated Time Calendar views with Time, Absence and Training information etc. are very exciting and useful. In this post, I want to highlight a glaring flaw in the design of the work schedule defaulting feature in PeopleSoft. A Work Schedule can be attached at multiple levels in PeopleSoft HCM, for eg:
a. At the employee level in the Assign Work Schedule page (underlying datastructure is SCH_ASSIGN)
b. At the Absence Management/Global Payroll Paygroup level
c. At the Payroll for North America Paygroup level
d. At the Time and Labor workgroup level

If a work schedule is not directly attached to an employee, PeopleSoft follows a specific hierarchy to resolve the work schedule that has to be assigned. In this hierarchy, Absence Management/Global Payroll paygroup takes precedence over Payroll for North America paygroup, which takes precedence over Time and Labor workgroup.
In our opinion, it is not a good practice to default a work schedule from a Paygroup or Workgroup. The primary purpose of a Paygroup/Workgroup is to group employees with similar pay/absence/time characteristics together and is not to group employees working similar schedules. The fact that Absence Management/Global Payroll paygroups take precedence over other definitions makes the case more rigid in our opinion. This is because, the Global Payroll/Absence Management organisational and processing frameworks are extremely flexible. It is possible to define very generic paygroups and then drive application of specific rules to concerned group of employees through the use of conditional processing elements or even payee level overrides. An optimal design of Absence Management/Global Payroll frameworks should make use of this inherent product flexibility and design simple,lean and flat frameworks. The simpler the configuration, the more generic will be the assignment of paygroups, i.e. most employees will share the same paygroup. But, most often it is required to have more specific groupings for the purpose of work schedule defaults. So a simplistic Absence Management/Global Payroll framework design will not help in proper defaulting of work schedules. We have seen many legacy Time and Attendance applications (applications from which the client moved to PeopleSoft Time and Attendance) where the time processing rules were tightly tied to the work schedule of employees. This is our mind is similar to the concept of tying a work schedule to a paygroup/workgroup. But, all these systems suffered from the complexity introduced by the tight coupling of rule processing groups and schedules and the same deficiency exists in PeopleSoft as well.
My suggestion to the PeopleSoft Time and Labor/Absence Management product managers would be to take a relook at the schedule default options in PeopleSoft and provide a mechanism to default work schedules from a data definition that is more attuned with the actual business process of wok schedule assignments. In our opinion, Jobcodes and especially Positions are excellent candidates for this. From an operational point of view, employees in a certain jobcode or position have more probability of sharing a work schedule that those in the same paygroup (ofcourse the challenge of global implementations and shared jobcodes/positions do come in here, but we believe that these definitions are better candidates for work schedule defaults than a paygroup).

In this context, we want to introduce the work schedule defaulting features available in Oracle Fusion HCM. In Fusion HCM, the hierarchy of work schedule resolution is given below:

1. Primary assignment of the worker
2. Position
3. Job
4. Department
5. Location
6. Legal Employer
7. Enterprise

It's excellent to see that Oracle Fusion HCM offers a more flexible and elaborate work schedule assignment mechanism, which in our opinion is more in tune with the business requirements. We do hope that the PeopleSoft design team takes a cue from the Oracle Fusion HCM design and provides a more flexible work schedule defaulting design.

Effective California Meal Penalty management using Time Clocks in PeopleSoft

Wage and Hour legal requirements in Calfornia necessitates that all non-exempt employees should get 30 minutes of uninterrupted meal break after working for 5 hours. If there is a violation of this law, employers are supposed to pay a penalty to the employee. It is a common requirement to encode this rule into PeopleSoft Time and Labor for CA based implementations. We have seen instances where employees get around this rule by cleverly clocking in 2 or 3 minutes prior to the 30 minute meal break period (that is, taking a meal break for 27 or 28 minutes instead of 30) and thus getting entitled for the meal penalty payment. For companies with a significant non-exempt population, this can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in payroll leakage. An effective way in which we have reduced the abuse of this rule is to take advantage of the capabilities at the time clock level. In PeopleSoft Time and Labor implementations with an integration to a Time Clock (or a Time Collection Device in PeopleSoft parlance), we have got the time clock vendor to put a restriction at the clock side to prevent employees from clocking In from their meal breaks prior to 30 minutes. This means that if an employee tries to clock in after 28 minutes of meal break, the clock will issue an error message to the effect that 'You have not completed your 30 minutes of stipulated meal break' and prevent the employee from clocking in. If there are scenarios where it is required by business urgency for the employee to clock in, we can designate a supervisor who can override this restriction.
When you are designing your Time and Labor system, make sure that all potential areas of Payroll leakage is being addressed and an integrated system solution can surely help prevent these costly leakages!

This post is authored by HRoi Consulting - The PeopleSoft Time and Attendance experts

Locking timesheet during payroll run: Planned Oracle enhancement

Customers (especially those using punch time reporting) have always had the need to lock out timesheets during payroll processing period to prevent changes to processed time related data. There have been some interesting discussions on ITToolbox regarding this as well. Traditionally, there has been no delivered mechanism to achieve this requirement. But, looks like good news is round the corner! Reading some of the product direction documents from Oracle tell me that Time and Labor product development team is envisaging incorporating a feature to lock out timesheets during a payroll run. I hope this feature comes out in version 9.2.

Ongoing maintenance processes to be run for Time and Labor

Most rule based modules in PeopleSoft HCM require maintenance jobs to be run in the system, especially during the start of a new year. PeopleSoft Global Payroll or Absence Management would require the calendars for the new processing year to be created, Absence Management would require the processing calendars and even forecasting calendars to be created, core HR would require the Holiday Schedule for the new year to be created etc. This post details the various maintenance processes that will need to be run in Time and Labor:

1. Build Time and Labor calendars: Time and Labor calendars are extensively used in Rule, Online and Time Administration processing. The Calendar table contains the detailed start and end dates of various Time Periods defined in Time and Labor. As the entire T&L module relies heavily on accurate and up to date values in the T&L Calendar table, it is essential that the calendars are built to cover all days of processing. The Time and Labor calendars can be built using the delivered utility found in the navigation: Setup HRMS > Product Related > Time and Labor > Time Periods > Build Time Period Calendars

2. Load Dates: The Time and Labor dates table is a critical table used extensively in almost every rule template. As this table contains a row for each calendar day with useful details like day of week etc., this table can form a very useful reference point while building certain system wide queries. Just like Time and Labor calendars, it is extremely essential to ensure that the T&L Dates table is also up to date to cover the days being processed. The T&L Dates table can be loaded by the delivered utility in:
Setup HRMS > Install > Product and Country Specific > Time and Labor Installation > Configurations

3. Timezone Offsets: Timezones are extremely important for accurate time processing in Time and Labor. It is used in storing time in the TL_RPTD_TIME table, retrieving the correct time to display on timesheets, day light savings processing etc. Timezone offsets can be created using the 'Generate Query Offset' utility available in the navigation:
Peopletools > Utilities > International > Timezone

The above list more or less capture all the processes that need to be run on an ongoing basis in a PeopleSoft Time and Labor system. We believe that it's important to dwell upon the considerations that need to be given to the above processes during the system solution design. Some important questions to be raised are:

a. Who will have the responsibility of running these processes on a periodic basis? Will it fall under the Business umbrella or will this be an IT maintenance activity? This will also have implications to the security design of the implementation.

b. Should there be any automatic alert mechanism if any of the above tables are not accurate or will it be a manual process to check the data sufficiency of the above tables?

c. For how many years should the above tables be built during the initial implementation?

Time and Labor/Absence Management Integration – Part I

 This is the first part of a two part article dealing with the integration of PeopleSoft Time and Labor and Absence Management as well as implementation considerations to reduce ‘time’ leakages between the two modules. This series is published by HRoi Consulting and sponsored by Accu-Time Systems’ Cesium Solution. - Time clocks for PeopleSoft Time and Labor.

Prior to the introduction of Absence Management as a standalone module, customers who wanted a complete Time and Attendance solution in PeopleSoft were limited by choice. Time and Labor was of course designed to handle ‘worked time’, but did not have specialized capabilities to handle absence management requirements. It lead to most implementations using either the Monitor Absence module in Workforce Administration or Leave Plans in Benefits to handle the absence management requirements. Needless to say, these were not optimum solutions and often entailed heavy customization to make these modules work like a true absence management module.

The Time and Attendance system design in PeopleSoft took a critical turn with the introduction of Absence Management. Now, customers could use specialized modules for handling both ‘worked time’ as well as ‘absences’ and it meant that sites could now implement a comprehensive Time and Attendance solution using PeopleSoft Time and Labor and Absence Management. It is noteworthy to mention here that the Time and Attendance solution got re-inforced in version 9.1 with the out of the box integration to Oracle Workforce Scheduler (OWS).

Overview of the integration

The integration between Absence Management and Time and Labor can be broadly classified to fall under the following categories:

1.  Integration of absence reporting and approval on Time and Labor timesheets. 
2.    Integration of absence management and time and labor data in the various MSS Schedule views.
3. Integration of absence event data in Time Administration processing. 
4.   Integration of absence management and time and labor data for payroll processing.

The nature and extent of the integration is primarily dependent on the payroll system attached to the employee in Workforce Administration. This integration is only supported if the payroll system is either Payroll for North America or Global Payroll. This means that if the payroll system is selected as Payroll Interface, you lose the ability to integrate these two modules in an effective manner. This is indeed an important decision point in the design of the entire solution for an implementation having a third party payroll vendor.

Let us examine the integration details with Payroll for North America and Global Payroll as the pay systems.

Global Payroll:

With Global Payroll as the pay system, the following integration points are possible for Time and Labor and Absence Management:

1.      Report and Approve absence requests on Timesheet.

2.      Absence Event data brought over to payable time by Time Administration process.

3.      Absence Management and Time and Labor data available as an integrated view in the various MSS scheduling pages like Manage Schedules, Monthly Calendar, Weekly Calendar etc.

4.      Payable time data integrated back to Global Payroll as positive input for payroll processing.

The diagram below gives a high level overview of the various integration points between Time and Labor and Absence Management using Global Payroll as the pay system.

Payroll for North America:

When using Payroll for North America as the payroll system, the integration points between Time and Labor and Absence Management remains almost same as that for Global Payroll but with the difference that absence management data is brought over to Time and Labor for payment in Payroll for North America. In this case, absence management related positive input that is generated in the GP_PI_GEN_DATA table is sent over to Time and 

Labor by the “To Payroll for North America” conversion process at Absence Management side. The conversion process populates Payable Time table with data from Absence Management and this is further sent to Payroll for North America when the “Load Time and Labor” data process is run in the Payroll for North America module. The other integration points like absence event entry in Timesheet, integration to the various scheduling views etc. remain the same as that for Global Payroll. Thus, the various integration points between the two modules with Payroll for North America as the pay system can be summarised below:

1. Report and Approve absence requests on Timesheet. 
2.   Absence Event data brought over to payable time by Time Administration process. 
3. Absence Management and Time and Labor data available as an integrated view in the various MSS scheduling pages like Manage Schedules, Monthly Calendar, Weekly Calendar etc. 
4. Absence Management positive input paid through Payroll for North America after being first brought over as payable time in Time and Labor.

Handling the integration with a third party payroll system

With payroll outsourcing gaining popularity, a common configuration is to have PeopleSoft Time and Labor and Absence Management with a third party payroll system. As mentioned in the article earlier, the integration between T&L and Absence Management is not well supported if you select “Payroll Interface” as the pay system of the employee. In this case, what are the options available for integration?

1. Consider if you can use “Global Payroll” as a dummy pays system. Even if you are not actually using GP, you can select Global Payroll as the payroll system for an employee. This decision gives you the added flexibility to turn on the Global Payroll related integration points between these two modules. Note that this may not be possible if the customer is using the Payroll Interface engine to generate files for third party payroll systems.
2. The second option is to choose Payroll Interface as the payroll system and then customize the system to make the delivered integration points work for Payroll Interface. A good cost benefit analysis will have to be done to ascertain the exact benefits of this customization before treading this path.

In this post, I have tried to give an introduction to the various integration points and possibilities with Time and Labor and Absence Management. The next post will deal with unique challenges in implementing an integrated Time and Labor and Absence Management system, especially with regards to reduction of payroll leakages.

This post is sponsored by Accu-Time Systems’ Cesium Solution. -  the latest Oracle certified Time Clock vendor for PeopleSoft Time and Labor.

This post is authored by HRoi Consulting  - the PeopleSoft Time and Attendance experts.

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

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

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

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

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"

Integrating inclement weather prediction in Time and Attendance applications

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.

PeopleSoft Time and Labor/Absence Management Pagelets

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

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.