PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Succession Planning

How important is it to an organization?

The recession storm seems to have settled down and IT companies are in a hiring spree, much to the trend seen in the Formula one racing, its Schumi’s re-entry and some good show by Force India team and Adrian. It all seems to be drilling down to the race line.. eagerly awaiting to jump on the gas pedals in this 2010 season.

Yes, the software industry too – is looking forward for a jump start and many IT organizations are preparing themselves for the race, the race which will win them new clients in new areas and the world economy seems to get back in its ‘once’ fruitful track.

As many of you are aware, Oracle has come up with the PeopleSoft 9.1 Version with some cool features, Lets see why one of the new features of Peoplesoft 9.1 seems to be interesting as it justifies the HR operations with its functionality. One of the reasons for Indian IT organizations to spend a lot of effort and cost in hiring new employees and especially high profile positions within an organization seems to be the lack of succession planning and career planning.

Succession planning enables an employer to organize its talent pools based on the employees person profile, job code, position and a plan that is unique to it. Initial and continous mapping of employees competency, performance and interests with the employer’s goals (position, jobcodes) makes it easier for the organization to plan and sustain its growth in the event of its new project wins. As stated in

Learning Management System drives a companies growth

Peoplesoft 9.1 brings in easier integration options with the Enterprise Learning Management (ELM) module thereby providing consistent career paths for the employees to pursue inorder to accomplish the succession planning. Both the HR Administrators and Managers are well equipped with the Visualization (user friendly reports) and Self Service  layer in accomplishing the tasks.

Features like tracking an employee’s successor in terms of number of years makes the job even easier for the HR to identify / probably mine through the talent pool of the organization.

Let’s see how IT organizations are quick in implementing the Succession planning feature of PeopleSoft 9.1 and Let’s assure them that its a vital part for a growing organization.

Know More: PeopleSoft HCM 9.1

PeopleSoft 9.1 HCM Compensation and Performance Appraisal Cycle

It’s Appraisal Season, Like the leaves which change color in fall and fall off their trees – IT Sector may witness a lot of attrition during and after the appraisal cycle. The reason being the outcome of the appraisal process .

 It is vital for a growing organization to streamline their appraisal process with planning their funding channels, organizing the pay components and administering it.

Existing PeopleSoft features of Tree Manager, Approval Workflow Engine (AWE), HCM Delegation Framework and pagelet wizards are inter woven with a streamlined process to accomplish what Oracle calls PeopleSoft 9.1 Compensation. Interestingly, the interoperability aspects with ePerformance, Core HR and variable compensation adds more value and increased ROI for the organizations which would implement PeopleSoft 9.1 HCM Compensation.

The first thing that an organization eyes is their budget/Funds for an appraisal / Compensation cycle, followed by the planning and allocation of collective Compensation aspects. Embedded analytics and user friendly interface enables Compensation Administrators or Managers to build what peoplesoft terms it as “Compensation Cycle”.Initial Setup would involve defining proration rules, rounding rules, salary plan, action reason,.. and Configuring compensation matrix.

Example Appraisal – Compensation Configurable matrix:
Rating             Funding Pct       Min Percent     Max Percentage
————-     —————       —————     ——————–

6                               42                       42                            42

5                               30                       30                            30

4                               19                       18                            19

3                                8                          8                             8

2                                2                          2                             2

1                                2                          1                             2

For a compensation cycle, the funding overview for salary plans  summarizes the total number of head count which would be involved in the appraisal cycle along with the calculated total salaries, calculated amount, calculated percent, qualified headcount, qualified salaries, funded amount, funded percent, proposed amount, proposed percent.

Once the compensation cycle (01JAN2009 to 31DEC2009) is defined, the appraisal team works with the variable compensation plans and compensation rules to manage the available funding for an appraisal cycle. The Pay out periods as well as the Pay out types are also defined using the cash or available stock options. It is one of the features in which many employers tend to provide stocks instead of a cash hike. Followed by the compensation team, the manager self service of PeopleSoft is used by the managers to update appraisal info of an employee or a group (direct reports / Indirect reports) along with their review ratings. The Approval process plays a vital role in approving the planned / updated compensation details using the delivered roles of “submitter” “reviewer” and “Confirmer”.

On the other hand, the administrator is equipped with the compensation dashboard which constitutes the Process flow Build->Open->Load->Close and status history which manages the manager’s access rules (notification period, default, review period, update period)

PeopleSoft 9.1 Compensation also allows employers to handle exceptional cases during an appraisal cycle by incorporating “Key Resource Bonuses” on the Award Plans present with the compensation module.

In total, PeopleSoft 9.1 HCM Compensation seems to be quiet promising in bring in transparency and streamlined appraisal cycle within a growing organization.

Know More About: Peoplesoft 9.1 HCM

Raising SaaS OnBoarding Solution and Dominant PeopleSoft HR

2010 seems to mark a new begining in both the IT Services and F1 Racing. Cool,.. we are awaiting the growth in SaaS, SOA,… and some great adrenaline rush as Schumacher returns.. For People who still believe that PeopleSoft is leading the HR Services market, Lets remind them of the advent of Kronos Workforce (Application Service Provider), KMS XpressHR (Software as a Service – SaaS Solution), Open Text Recruiting Management Solution for Microsoft Sharepoint 10.0 driven by the Enterprise Content Management Solution like Livelink and Document Center respectively. The Clientele are really happy to spend for what they use unlike the age old model of fixed pricing.

Let’s see how KMS OnBoarding XpressHR SaaS Solution attracts the clientele with their functions when compared to Peoplesoft,

• In PeopleSoft, the SSN entered while adding a new person to the system is not validated or verified with the Department of Homeland Security or Social Security Administration(SSA). This had enabled Clientele to incorporate the XpressHR product for onboarding which constitutes the e-Verify Functionality.
• In PeopleSoft, the unavailability of the features like e-Signature & Digital content management in HR had enabled XpressHR to provide 100% Compliance with the State & Federal data related to the pre-hire process within an organization.
• SaaS based Onboarding Process & Document Center Model would enable clientele to leverage the increased ROI.
• Implementation effort seems to be less with the use of web services.

It’s these few aspects which drive the present day software investments, As posted in Service Oriented Computing Platform for Shared Services Model , the service providers whose verticle solutions(XpressHR) which are built on horizontal solutions (ECM) are undoubtedly growing 

Service Oriented Computing Platform for Shared Services Model

It is the need of the hour for business entities to revisit their growth plans and to perform consistent checks on their performance and operational utilization. One of the driving factor for the transformation of Application Service Providers (http://blogs.hexaware.com/pitstop/application-service-provider-vs-software-as-a-service-asp-vs-saas.html )to Software as a service is the change in the Information Technology Trends.

 Human Computer Interaction and Interoperable applications seems to be the cloud where the future software investments would be. Let’s look into the evolving service oriented computing platform which answers a lot of the present day business needs.

The Product based companies were quick to incorporate the service orientation in their product designs by mostly following the agile software development methodology whereas the Service based companies were quick to incorporate the shared resource pool to evolve the Shared Services Support.

Initially, the shared services model was spotted within organizations as specialized groups of system and vendor specific administrators and later evolved as ESSA (http://www.hexaware.com/shared-services.htm). The proposed service oriented computing platform for such shared services model would further enhance the customer satisfaction as the service design principles are followed.

Goin by the tag “If resources are not retainable, Let’s retain their knowledge within the organization” – the service oriented computing platform goes one step further from the traditional vertical solutions(CRM,TAM,.) by providing an SOA based solution utilizing the present day horizontal solutions(Livelink ECM ). This Open technology solution is vendor independant and can accomodate the existing applications of Oracle(Peoplesoft, Siebel), Microsoft(sharepoint),SAP,Kronos Workforce Timekeeper,.. by establishing a meta data driven knowledge solution for the shared services resource pool to work on.

Few Key advantages of this service oriented solution for the shared services model are

a.Reusabilty – the reduntant support (technical/Functional) effort is minimized.

b. Service Governance

c. Discoverability

d. Less Time consumption in performing a support activity

e. Knowledge Service Composition – enabling the maintenance of organization wide service data irrespective of their source department or technology.

Like the Peoplesoft Person Model which was based out of SOA, the service oriented solution design for the shared services model would make a huge difference among the corporate cube warriors. Let’s wait for more such innovative solutions to surface soon.

New Mile Stone in Workforce Modelling and Intelligence – Orgplus

It was the last quarter of 2007 when we had a discussion on the workforce modelling and intelligence(refer -”workforce modelling and intelligence” post) in our pitstop. Now, the news is – Orgplus enterprise is named as the top HR product of the year 2008.


Yes,.. In a latest news release by pressreleasepoint, the author states that ““OrgPlus allows managers to easily visualize and understand their talent data, and if an organization is growing, reorganizing or merging, OrgPlus rapidly models these changes using accurate financial, workforce, and budget data so HR, finance and executive teams can make better decisions to impact overall corporate objectives.”

The Integration between the PeopleSoft HCM 9.0 and Orgplus was much awaited to be validated by Oracle and now Orgplus had recieved the integration validation. In short, the integration revolution within the HR IT Products seems to win the race.The importance of such integrations were realised by companies who concentrated on their ROI few years back and I would suggest them even in our present financial crisis term. 

Enterprise Content Management – Livelink Vs SharePoint

Do you feel that the growth of an organization is directly proportional to the content mangement within the organization ? or vice versa? Let’s look into one of the driving force behind a companies growth – It’s the Enterprise Content Management. ’Collaboration’, ‘Goals’, ‘Processes’, Business Data Analysis are the words frequently uttered across; when a company revisits its own growth.

The ECM suites provides a better way to organize, reuse and share data across the organization. To name a few, Livelink ECM Suite and Microsoft SharePoint provides an interactive space for document management, version management, auditing, business workflows, business intelligence and many other interesting search features with a user friendly – ‘web site’ style application.And also Microsoft’s BDC and Web Part technologies plays a vital role in third party integrations.(the details of which can be seen in our future posts)

By now,one can define in simple terms that a place where documents are managed can be termed as Enterprise Content Management Suites.In reality, the ROI’s are too high for organizations that have implemented SharePoint or Livelink. Livelink goes one step further by handling the retention management process for documents and incorporating a seemless workflow approval chain along the organization tree. This enables an organization to setup the time period for which a document can be accessible and then purged. In comparision, Livelink seems to be DoD certified and SharePoint may be in the process of getting one…