T&L New Features: Templates Made Available

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

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"

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.