Quest Oracle Community took the opportunity to meet with Prashant Kocharekar, Senior Group Manager -IT, Enterprise Applications Group at WNS Global Services (P) Ltd. to learn more about his experience with Fluid User Interface. Prashant serves as the project manager for PeopleSoft HCM and Enterprise Learning Management projects, PeopleTools upgrades, PeopleSoft upgrades and PeopleSoft integrations with third-party systems.

Key Takeaways

About WNS Global Services(P) Ltd.

WNS Global Services(P) Ltd. is a global Business Process Management (BPM) company headquartered in Mumbai, India. It has more than 34,000 professionals working in 52 “delivery centers” across the world, including India, United States, United Kingdom, China, Costa Rica, Philippines, Poland, Romania, South Africa and Sri Lanka.

WNS delivers an entire spectrum of BPM services in customer interaction services, travel, banking, finance and accounting, human resources, research and analytics, insurance, healthcare and utilities, retail and consumer product industries, technology solutions and industry-specific processes.

They enable clients to outperform with their passion for service and innovation. At the heart of each client, engagement is their pursuit to understand their client’s business and create impactful solutions that can drive agility and excellence in their business processes. Their promise of out performance stems from their deep domain expertise, partnership approach and a global delivery network.

WNS Global has a technology team of around 100 people, including 20 PeopleSoft experts serving 36,000 employees across the globe. They have a long history with PeopleSoft, starting with PeopleSoft HCM 8.9 implementing Workforce Administration, Absence Management and Global Payroll. They later implemented PeopleSoft Time and labor across multiple locations. At the end of 2016 and early 2017, WNS Global upgraded to PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 to provide Fluid User Interface. They are currently on PeopleSoft HCM 9.2, PeopleTools 8.54.22 and PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management 9.1, PeopleTools 8.52.08.

What were the drivers for you to begin using Fluid User Interface?

Technology had started undergoing innovations at a faster pace than ever before and it continues to evolve. With the introduction of Android and Apple devices, the concept of “on the fly business” started gaining demand. Many questions are being raised about the following trends:

• If one could transact bank, book movie tickets and plan travel on their hand-held devices, then why must Enterprise application run only on desktops and laptops?
• Why can’t Enterprise applications adapt to the device layout like other applications?
• Why must I navigate through all the menus to go to the details I wish to see?
• How will new recruits adapt to such a complex interface?

PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface had an answer for all the above and many more questions that acted as natural drivers for the upgrade.

Where and how are you using Fluid?

We are using Fluid for Employee Self-Service and Manager Self-Service Transactions. Also, we have deployed custom Fluid modules for in-house projects like learning feedback, resignation module, ticketing system, payroll modules, etc. Something I must mention is a Transaction Approvals Fluid feature is available for different modules under a single tile.

How are you rolling out Fluid User Interface to your end users? (e.g. pilot, phased, big bang, etc)

We followed a big bang approach for rolling out the Fluid user interface in PeopleSoft. The users have already had responsive experiences on various websites. They were very much aware of how they behaved on different types of devices. So why not PeopleSoft? We made a thoughtful decision of going big bang.

What was your experience in deploying Fluid? What did you learn that other customers could benefit from?

Well, it turned out well and people were happy to see their Enterprise Application in a new appearance and that it user-friendly. We did hear some people struggle to search their business-specific components. However, educating them further did answer their concerns.

We had to upgrade the web browsers as we still had many users using the traditional browsers. This issue is something that we should have planned for well in advance. We wanted the product to look more familiar to the users, so we created our custom images instead of using the delivered once for the tiles. People should be made aware of why the system is undergoing an upgrade and what benefits they would receive from the upgrade. Thus, training is an important point that should not be taken lightly. The tiles do not come by themselves and you must define the security as per business requirements. The knowledge on stylesheets is an added advantage while creating your own business-specific Fluid components.

What obstacles, if any, did you encountered in deploying Fluid?

We had an extensive database of employee photos in PeopleSoft 9.1. We realized that the employee photos are maintained in 3 different formats to support card/ Fluid display. The auto-conversion of images did not take place during the upgrade. We had to create a program to convert the images to PeopleSoft Fluid supported images.

Are you deploying Fluid as delivered?  If not, how customized/modified are you and why?

We deployed Fluid in both the delivered and customized form. We use Employee Self-Service Fluid features as is, but made the following customizations to fit our business needs:

• Single Transaction screen for approval
• Setup driven Fluid sub-menu creation to include business – specific modules
• User group based additional tiles for their frequent activities
• Tile shortcut to shift between classic and Fluid
• Tiles for existing classic components: both delivered and custom to reduce time spent in navigating the classic menu

Since deploying Fluid what benefits have you seen for you and your company?

We had the classic version of the system on the internet. However, it’s a pain to use the classic version on mobile devices. Users struggled to perform their transactions in urgent incidents on their hand-held devices. Fluid User Interface adjusts its layout as per dimensions of the devices on which it is accessed. The transactions can be performed with ease and on the go. The turnaround time has dramatically decreased, thus, earning profits.

What services partner did you work with, if any?

We did not involve any service partners. We did this as in-house implementation.

Where do you want to take your company’s Fluid strategy in the next 2-3 years?

We are planning to create more user group specific tiles. We want to extend the benefits of Fluid User Interface to the Payroll, HR, trainers and recruiting communities as well. We plan to take full advantage of Fluid User Interface while deploying every new project.