In PeopleSoft Now! episode two, Tammy Boyles from the PeopleSoft HCM team, Medi Goker and Mike Soulier from the Oracle Support team, join to discuss hot topics like notifications and alerts, Fluid Benefits Enrollment and Recruiting, and Applications Unlimited.

PeopleSoft Notifications and Alerts

Notifications and alerts are a big part of people’s lives. They inform us when something needs our attention, and they are an essential part of how you interact with any application. PeopleSoft is no exception.

PeopleSoft already has various alerts and notifications built into it through its Notifications framework. This framework lets you personalize alerts, so you can fine-tune what your users see, how they see it, and when they see it.

This is an area of continuous investment for the PeopleSoft team.

Approvals are one of the most common alerts that PeopleSoft users want to see. Information from analytics and reports is another. Personalized Analytic Notifications, delivered in PeopleTools 8.57, is a good example of what has already been done. For analytics that are enabled, you can set thresholds.

For example, if an analytic or report goes beyond value or deviates from a specific range, the user is notified. The user can determine whether they get notified in the PeopleSoft system, by email, or both.

Users who do approvals or take action on information are typically not in the system. The days of requiring users to be in the system in order to be notified about something that is happening are over. Modern solutions need to reach out to users wherever they are. Email notifications allow you to monitor important items in the system without requiring you to be in front of your screen all the time. The notification tells you that you need to get into the system. The PeopleSoft solution is doing the work for you.

The PeopleSoft team is also working on broadening the communication channels and going beyond existing in-system alerts and emails to include text messaging in the future.

Fluid Benefits Enrollment and Recruiting

Tammy Boyles, part of the PeopleSoft HCM Product Strategy team, joined PeopleSoft Now! episode two to discuss Fluid Benefits Enrollment and Recruiting.

Fluid Benefits Enrollment

Fluid Benefits Enrollment was recently released in November 2018 in HCM Image 28, and Tammy describes it as a real game-changer for users. With Fluid, users get a modern look and feel, and they can use the PeopleSoft solution on their mobile devices.

Since Fluid Benefits Enrollment is based on the Fluid Activity Guide, benefits administrators can add steps, delete steps, reorder, etc. to make the process their own. Organizations can make it whatever they need it to be to fit their needs. It uses Benefits Administration as the base, so a reimplementation is not necessary. The templates are already there.

It’s important to realize that Benefits includes more Fluid components than Open Enrollment. It also includes Fluid Life Events, Fluid Dependent and Beneficiary pages, Fluid Confirmation Statements, and more that came out in HCM Image 29 in January 2019.

Fluid Benefits Enrollment Feedback

Tammy expressed that the feedback since the release of Fluid Benefits Enrollment has been very positive. Customers are liking the look and feel of it. With Fluid Benefits Enrollment, users have the ability to use a card view, or they can toggle to get the grid view. It is easy for users to determine what they like the best and make it their own.

Fluid Recruiting

Another area that Tammy works on is Recruiting, which went through a similar user experience modernization on the candidate side. Tammy said that it has been received well by customers and she is pleased with the number of customers who have taken it up. At least 80 customers that she is aware of have already started using Fluid Candidate Gateway.

These steps toward modernization have made it easier for applicants to navigate through the recruitment process. Customers are seeing the number of applications go up while the number of calls to the helpdesk about how to use the system go down.

However, Recruiting is not only about the candidates – it’s about the recruiters and hiring managers as well.

There have also been recent modernizations to the Talent Acquisition Manager (TAM) side of Recruiting. A Fluid Recruiting homepage has been developed, which gives the recruiter the ability to go into tiles and see any job openings that they have. They can clearly see all of their applicants. There’s also a tile that has been added for analytics.

On the hiring manager side, a tile for Recruiting Activities has been created. It gives them the ability to see the job openings and applicants that they have.

Tammy said that there is much more to come, and users can check out the Planned Features and Enhancements page on www.peoplesoftinfo.com to see what else is coming in the next 18 to 24 months.

Oracle Support

Medi Goker and Mike Soulier from the Oracle Support team joined PeopleSoft Now! episode two to talk about moving Oracle Support services from reactive to proactive.

Changing Support from Reactive to Proactive

Oracle has a large install base of existing applications customers who are looking to be supported. Medi, the Vice President of Oracle Customer Support, expressed that the opportunity in front of Oracle is to move its services from reactive to proactive services. The way Oracle plans to do so is to install certain sensors to detect faults that might happen not only in technology but also in the application layer. This enables the team to trap issues that might go wrong in critical business functions. By doing that, Oracle will decrease the time between the issue and the resolution. By detecting and solving these issues quickly, Oracle can ensure little downtime for critical business functions to complete. Through this approach, Oracle also paves the way toward automation and making the service even more seamless in the future.

How Oracle Will Achieve Proactive Support

Mike, Senior Director of Oracle Customer Support, explained that Oracle has partnered with the Advanced Customer Support (ACS) team to build an integrated solution that leverages both Oracle’s Enterprise Manager and an ACS gateway that integrates directly into the My Oracle Support (MOS) portal. This provides near real-time fault monitoring for over 150 smart centers across the applications layer and technology stack. As a result, you get a well-formed SR that gets created on your behalf that shows up in your MOS portal. Mike explained that Oracle is letting you know that you are having a problem before you even realize it yourself.

Key Features of Oracle Support Offering

Medi explained that one of the key features of this offering is the extended monitoring capability from the technology stack to the whole application tier.

Oracle will be monitoring key business functions to ensure that they reach completion when it is time for users to execute these functions.

This service uses known technologies like Oracle Enterprise Manager and ACS gateway. Medi said that these products are already active and utilized by customers in many different ways.

She expressed that the most important thing about the service is actually the intellectual property behind the smart sensors. Oracle Support engineers are going through lots of cases with the known issues and known solutions to create these smart sensors and track normal solutions. This means that Oracle’s repository for the smart sensors will expand as the service continues to be utilized.

Use Cases

Mike explained that there are about 150 processes/scenarios in which this service could come into play. He also said that the list will continue to grow over time.

One specific example that he gave was in the Accounts Payable module. Within AP, a situation that occurs regularly is when vouchers get stuck in process. What that equates to is waiting for a vendor to come looking for their payment or your company seeing a late fee on your next statement. Through these monitoring services, Oracle Support can catch instances like that. If you have something that is erroneously in that “In Process” status, Oracle will let you know, and you won’t have to wait until vendors come looking for payment or you get stuck with a late fee.

Another use case example occurs in HCM Payroll, one of an organization’s most critical business functions. Occasionally, records in payroll become out of sync either because of the timing of changes or because of a problem that occurs. Oracle’s monitoring service offers the ability to look into these potential problems.

Benefits

Customers can think of this service as an extension of the System Administrator. It will monitor for known issues is your technology and application 24/7. As it figures out additional potential problems, it will integrate at the backend as well. Oracle will handle the problems and solve them before you ever know they are there.

In summary, the service works to detect problems, create a service request for you, and resolve the issue. All the data required to solve the problem will be appended to the service request, so you do not have to collect data. The service will suggest a solution to remediate the problem, so customers don’t have to try to figure it out. Customers also do not have to wait for the critical job to run to figure out that there is a problem.

This service is available for not only PeopleSoft but for all Applications Unlimited – E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, etc.

Major Takeaway

Enterprise systems are very complex, and a lot of things might go wrong. Oracle Support is offering this service for a fee and aims to monitor and trap the majority of known issues in a proactive way that solves these issues before they ever affect business processes in your workflow. Visit www.oracle.com/acs for more information.

For more information, check out the video of the PeopleSoft Now! episode two and additional Quest resources attached below.

Additional Resources

If you’re looking for more PeopleSoft content, join us next year at RECONNECT 20, the premier deep-dive PeopleSoft focused event of the year! The event will take place July 21-23, 2020 in St. Louis, Missouri. Keep an eye out for more information on this event!

To learn from the experiences of your peers within the Quest Oracle Community, check out the PeopleSoft Customer Stories page that houses 30+ PeopleSoft customer stories about Selective Adoption, user experience, PeopleSoft in the Cloud, PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning, and PeopleSoft tools and technology!

If there are products of interest to you, join a focus group to provide feedback and help the PeopleSoft team develop best practices. You can also join the Customer Advisory Board to help review, shape, and validate the strategy for PeopleSoft HCM applications and technology.