Accessing PS Queries outside Query Manager and Query Viewer

The PS Query toolset provides the easiest mechanism to create and generate simple reports from PeopleSoft. While PS Queries cannot be used to produce highly formatted and graphical reports, it is very effective in extracting day-to-day enquiry queries which is of interest to employees, managers and administrators. Considering this, it is a bit surprising that most customers deploy this tool only for the use of administrators. One of the main reasons for the restricted use of PS Queries is that most customers are reluctant to let managers run a PS Query using the Query Manager/Viewer pages. Query Manager and Query Viewer are the standard options available in PeopleSoft to run PS Queries and there are indeed usability issues in opening up these pages to the end user community. But, the fact remains that there are easy alternatives to Query Manager and Query viewer in PeopleSoft, which can be effectively used to enable end users utilise PS Query based reporting. In this post, we take a high level tour of the methods that can be used to access PS Queries without using Query Manager or Query Viewer.

(a) Accessing PS Query as a navigation link (content reference): Managers/Employees are most familiar with navigating through the folder structure of PeopleSoft and accessing information in as minimum number of clicks as possible. So, what if your managers/employees could access relevant PS Queries just like any other page in PeopleSoft, just by clicking a navigation link? This can be achieved by creating a PS Query as just another content reference under the navigation structure that you desire. Once you create a query as a content reference, you could very well add that in a navigation collection as well, to improve the usability experience.
Here are the steps to create a PS Query as a content reference:

• Navigate to Peopletools > Portal > Structure and Content and create a new content reference definition.
• Select the URL Type as PeopleSoft Generic URL
• Enter the portal URL as q/?ICAction=ICQryNameURL={Query Name}
• Save the content reference definition and you are good to go!

By following the above steps, you will be able to expose a PS Query as just another navigation link. On clicking the link, users will directly be shown the query output (if there are no prompts for the query), bypassing query viewer/manager. The traditional query security is also skipped in this method, which is another plus.

(b) Accessing PS Query as a hyperlink on a page: I am sure that most of you have noticed certain pages in PeopleSoft which contains hyperlinks to PS Queries. This is most common in the security configuration side where there are pages with links to queries that display the roles a userid has, the pages that a certain userid can access etc. Accessing PS Query as a hyperlink is another alternative to using Query Manager. On clicking the hyperlink, the query is automatically executed, bypassing query manager and even query security. Implementing this is not as straightforward as the first option, as it will be required to do some simple peoplecoding and application designer changes to achieve this. The steps that can be done to expose a PS Query as a hyperlink is detailed below:

• Add a hyperlink object in the page where you want the query to be accessed.
• Put the destination properties of the hyperlink as a dynamic external link.
• Instantiate the value of the hyperlink to the URL of the relevant PS Query. You can get the URL of a PS Query using the CreateQueryURL peoplecode function.

The above approach is useful when you want users to directly run a PS Query from a transactional page. The downside of this method in comparison to the option of creating PS Query as a content reference is that this method will require some customisation.

(c) Creating PS Query as a Related Content: Related Content is an excellent feature introduced in Peopletools 8.50 which revolutionised the navigational capabilities within PeopleSoft. You can read more of related content and it's capabilities here and here. One of the features offered by the related content framework is that a PS Query can be configured as a related content definition. This means that using the related content framework, a PS Query that is related to a certain transaction page, can be made to appear as a related content definition. This means that your users will see the results of a ps query displayed directly within the context of a related transaction page. Given below is the setup page where a PS Query can be defined as a related content service.

 

(d) Accessing PS Query results using Feed Framework: Peopletools 8.50 introduced another exciting feature called 'Feed Publishing Framework', which enabled PeopleSoft customers to generate RSS feeds from PeopleSoft datasources. Using this framework, it is possible for users to consume information from PeopleSoft using a traditional Feed Reader/Aggregator or using the My Feeds page in PeopleSoft. This opened up yet another way to consume the results of PS Queries. The Feed Publishing framework allows users to publish a PS Query as an RSS feed, which can be consumed by end users.

 

From the above alternatives, it is obvious that PeopleSoft presents very rich alternatives to Query Manager/Viewer for accessing and executing PS Queries. These methods can be utilised to present PS Query based reporting to the end user community in a user-friendly manner, with minimal customisation.

Post Note: The above is not a complete list of the alternatives presented in PeopleSoft for running PS Queries. There are certain options which are more appropriate for administrator type users, which have not been documented above.

• The first among the options is Reporting Console (Main Menu > Reporting Tools > Reporting Console). Reporting Console is an excellent utility to organise various reports and processes based on functionality and is a must have for the administrator community.

• Another interesting alternative is the use of XMLLink registry function to access PS Queries directly from a MS Excel workbook. This is documented in detail here and goes a step further to improve the usability experience of the administrator community.

•  It is possible for external applications to create or invoke a PS Query in PeopleSoft using web services. The Query Access Service toolset provides a number of service operations that can be utilised by third parties to create or execute PS Queries.

• I had developed a bolt-on framework to organise and run PS Queries by functionality and designed to work outside the Query Manager/Viewer tools. This was developed to address the need to classify specific PS Queries that were routinely run to audit payroll results every bi-week. More details are documented here.

 If there are other methods to access PS Queries that you are aware of, please feel free to leave a comment and I will update this post accordingly.

2012: When HR Technology vendors went on a shopping spree

2012 was a monumental year for HR Technology. Late 2011 and 2012 saw massive consolidation of the market, with clear signs of a tectonic shift from on-premise to cloud, social. mobile and analytics based products. Almost all major HR technology vendors, including Oracle and SAP made significant acquisitions during this period to bolster offerings and customers in the SaaS HCM market. The M&A activities were not restricted to product companies alone, niche consulting firms were also snapped up by larger HR/Management/Technology consulting companies, signalling a shift in the skills valued by the industry as well.
In this post, we try to summarise the important acquisitions that were announced in the HR technology space from December 2011 to Janauary 2013. We hope that this compilation will be an informative read for you.

• Oracle acquired Taleo for around 1.9 billion USD in February, 2012. This was seen as a counter to SAP's acquisition of SuccessFactors for 3.4 billion USD in December 2011.
• Following up on the acquisition of Taleo and signalling the company's focus on cloud and social based HR applications, Oracle snapped up SelectMinds in September 2012. SelectMinds provides social recruiting and alumni management services, has an impressive list of customers and has pre-built integration with Taleo.
• IBM announced it's intentions to foray into HR Technology and analytics space by acquiring Kenexa for 1.3 billion USD in August 2012. Founded in 1987, Kenexa is a major player in the recruitment processing outsourcing (RPO), end to end recruitment technology, candidate assessment, strategic HR research and talent/learning management. There is an excellent assessment by Josh Bersin on the details of this acquisition, which can be read here.
• Kenexa extended it's Talent Management offerings by adding Learning Management capabilities, through it's acquisition of  Outstart in February, 2012. Here is another detailed analysis by Josh Bersin on the Kenexa-Outstart acquisition.
• Ceridian, a leader in the payroll, benefits and expenses processing space (#2 in the US after ADP and #1 in the UK) forayed into SaaS HCM solutions by acquiring Toronto based Dayforce, in February 2012. The association of Ceridian and Dayforce goes back to early 2011, when the former invested in Dayforce to bring the Ceridian Inview Workforce Management product to market. The full acquisition of Dayforce by Ceridian will bring out a unified SaaS HCM product called Ceridian Dayforce HCM, lead by David Ossip, founder of Dayforce and Workbrain (which was acquired by Infor in 2007). It will be interesting to see the evolution of a core HCM/Talent Management application from a company traditionally focussed on payroll/time and attendance and workforce management.
•  Peoplefluent, which in itself is the product of a merger of Peopleclick and Authoria, acquired Canadian LMS company Strategia in January. In May, Bedford Funding, the private equity firm that owns Peoplefluent, announced investment in Socialtext, a company facilitating enterprise collaboration with products like enterprise blogs, wikis etc.
• Cloud Talent Management company, Cornerstone OnDemand acquired New Zealand based Talent Management firm, Sonar6 in March. The Sonar6 product has now been rebranded to CSB and will cater to small enterprises.
• LMS and Talent Management major, Saba acquired HumanConcepts in March. HumanConcepts provides solutions in the organisation visualisation and org. chart space. The product line of Saba really looks to be shaping up well!
• In April, European online job board major, StepStone acquired TotalJobs group, the largest online recruitment player in the UK market.
• LinkedIn with the largest network of professionals, has made impressive inroads into the recruitment space (LinkedIn's recruitment division has reported growth in excess of 130%) and is being touted to disrupt the recruitment space. Considering this, we need to include LinkedIn very much as a player in the HCM space. LinkedIn snapped up the Youtube of presentations, Slideshare in May.
• 2012 also saw M&A action in the consulting/service space. In October, cloud technology consulting firm Appirio acquired Jason Averbook's top HR consulting firm, Knowledge Infusion.
• Staying on in the consulting space, Deloitte acquired Workday consulting firm, Aggressor in March. At the time of acquisition, Aggressor had the largest number of Workday certified consultants as well as a significant share in overall Workday implementations.
• In early January 2013, Deloitte further strengthened it's HCM consulting practise by acquiring the leading research and consulting firm in HR Technology, Bersin and Associates. This acquisition should turn out extremely valuable for Deloitte in the HCM consulting space, considering the expertise, brand value and intellectual property brought in by Josh Bersin's firm.
• Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a member based senior management advisory firm snapped up the leading employee assessment firm, SHL, in July. With over 10,000 customers, an enviable library of 1000+ assessment tests and significant talent related data, SHL was  an excellent buy by CEB and should bolster it's talent analytics practise.
• Hirevue is a company that we follow with great interest due to it's innovative on-demand video interviewing platform. To complement it's candidate evaluation/screening offerings, Hirevue acquired Codeeval in August 2012. Codeeval was a player in the automated evaluation and assessment of a candidate's programming skills. There are a number of companies that have come up in this space (screening solutions), which should see further consolidation in 2013.
• In December 2011, Salesforce.com acquired social performance management firm Rypple. Rypple has been rebranded as salesforce work.com and represented the foray of Salesforce.com into the HR Technology space.
• In September 2012, Careerbuilder announced the acquisition of EMSI (Economic Modelling Specialists International). Considering the challenges faced by jobboards in the wake of competition from sites like LinkedIn, we consider this to be an interesting move by Careerbuilder. There is indeed tremendous value in being able to offer candidates insights into career paths, suggested trainings etc. and it needs to be seen how Careerbuilder can integrate this into their service offerings.
• Much has been said about the challenges of managing a global, remote workforce and of using personal computing devices at the workplace (BYOD). Considering these challenges, we believe that the acquisition of BYOD security management firm Meraki by Cisco in November 2012, is interesting for the HR Technology space. Meraki is a cloud based computer networking startup that claims to be the first and only solution that provides device based security policies, built-in NAC, and built-in mobile device management for enterprise customers.

We are sure that the ripples caused by the market consolidation waves of 2012, will continue well into 2013 as the HR Technology industry undergoes significant changes. Interesting times to be in the HR Technology market!

Quick notes on Workday's Payroll capabilities

Here are some quick notes from a webcast on Workday Payroll that I attended:

1. Workday Payroll provides country extensions for USA and Canada, at present.
2. For non-US and Canada countries, Workday provides a configurable cloud connector that can be used to integrate with country specific payroll providers.
3. Workday also has local payroll partners like Northgate Arinso, Cloudpay etc. who provide native integration with Workday HCM.
4. The Workday Payroll, HCM and Time Tracking work as an integrated unit rather than being individual silos/modules which are integrated (a plus in comparison to PeopleSoft architecture).
5. The presenter gave a quick demo of Workday Time Tracking (similar to PeopleSoft's Time and Labor) which was released in Workday 17. Except for the advanced mobile time tracking features, I was not floored by what was demonstrated. In terms of the depth of time tracking functionalities, I believe PeopleSoft would be very much up there.
6. The product seemed to be designed around the business process of executing and administering a payroll, rather than around running a payroll engine, which is a real positive. There are a number of audits, alerts, reports and drill down charts that are provided as part of the product and most of these are executed automatically as each phase of the payroll cycle completes.
7. A lot of calculations, especially around time rules and absence balances seemed to be real time, rather than depending on a process to be run. It was pretty interesting to see the calculated payable time being displayed immediately on saving the timesheet! I should mention here that generation of payable time on submitting the timesheet is a feature that has been announced in PeopleSoft v9.2.
8. The presenter mentioned that the largest Workday Payroll customer has a headcount of 40,000 employees and that half of Workday's 400+ customers use Workday Payroll.

I do not want to delve into comparing the Workday solution with that of PeopleSoft - a one hour session is too short to make any meaningful conclusion. But, it seemed to me that usability, analytics, ease of payroll processing and a business process oriented approach are obvious plus points of Workday payroll (this is to be expected given the generational difference in technology used in the two products!). Given the tools provided and the process oriented design of the module, payroll processing should be faster and less error prone in Workday payroll in comparison to PeopleSoft. But, for Time and Attendance and Payroll processes, depth of functionality and configurability matter more than great usability. It is also obvious that payroll is not the focus area for Workday as they offer country extensions for just USA and Canada (already Oracle Fusion provides payroll extensions for more countries, including China, UK and Saudi Arabia) and have a partnership model as their global payroll strategy.
Considering the relative lack of focus of Workday Payroll outside USA/Canada, risks and effort involved in a typical payroll migration project and the proven capabilities of PeopleSoft Global Payroll, makes Workday payroll less of a direct threat to the installed base of PeopleSoft Global Payroll in the short term. Here is where I think that the co-existence model offered by Oracle Fusion is better suited to help PeopleSoft Global Payroll customers transition to a SaaS based solution (Fusion) for core HCM and Talent Management while utilising the HR2HR integration to retain PeopleSoft Global Payroll. This option gives customers the time to phase out their HR and Payroll system transformation roadmap with lesser disruptions.

Update on 17/01/2013: There is an interesting discussion in the Workday HCM group in LinkedIn on Workday payroll and comments from customers who are already live on the product.
You can follow it here.

And here are some screenshots depicting Workday's Global Payroll model and partners:

Payroll partners of Workday with integration to Workday HCM/Time Tracking:

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! I wish you a very fulfilling year ahead.
Thank you for your support and visits to this blog in 2012 and I hope to have an engaging year of sharing knowledge and collaboration, in 2013. Keep those visits coming!

New Oracle acquisition - Instantis

Oracle has announced the acquisition of Instantis, provider of cloud based project portfolio management solutions.
Oracle has stated the intention of merging Instantis with Primavera and Fusion.

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

SelectMinds - Strengthening Oracle Talent Management offerings

Oracle announced in September this year, that they are acquiring SelectMinds - a company offering social recruitment tools. Browsing through the whitepapers available on the SelectMinds site, it is clear that SelectMinds operate in a niche space of tapping into a trusted online community of talent to source candidates using their proprietary referral marketing engine. They also have an impressive list of blue chip customers. Interestingly SelectMinds' TalentVine product already has a validated integration with Taleo Enterprise recruiting module and we also found a customer reference by Macgraw-Hill for this integration.
This acquisition indeed brings interesting solution options for customers using Oracle Talent Management/Taleo and again underlines the thrust organisations are putting on social (a quick look at the recent applications acquisitions by Oracle shows that most companies operate in the social/cloud space) and HR technology (especially Talent Management).

PS Gotcha - Group Build and Aggregate functions

Group Build is a commonly used functionality within PeopleSoft HCM (I prefer Dynamic Groups in Time and Labor better for the extended flexibility, but that does not extend to the whole HCM product line). We had documented a limitation of the Group Build framework, earlier in this post.
And here is another gotcha while working on Group Build. The PS Queries that you use as an input to a Group definition cannot contain an aggregate function or unions.
Another interesting tip is that you can give Group build security access to only those OPRIDs that have an EMPLID attached to the OPRID. So, next time you login with a maintenance super-user id (like an id used to run scheduled batch processes) and do not have access to Groups in the Security by Group page, you know what is wrong!

And if anyone has questions on where to define a Group Build group, here is the navigation:
Setup HRMS > Common Definitions > Group Build

Extra reference document (requires Oracle support login):
Troubleshooting Group Build issues

https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=655288.1

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