As part of PeopleSoft Industry Day 2019, Jian Wen and Madhavi Makkapati, Product Strategy Directors from Oracle, spoke about new paradigm shifts, innovative frameworks, and features and functionality within PeopleSoft Financials that can help users work more efficiently and with more visibility.
PeopleSoft Financials Investment Strategy
The PeopleSoft Financials investment strategy mainly focuses on the three areas:
- Simple collaboration
- Efficient solutions
- Proactive insights
Some of the business considerations and drivers for reimagining and redesigning PeopleSoft Financials included a desire for simple navigation, a focus on the user community, and the ability to get work done quickly. Tools like navigation collections, homepages, and WorkCenters made achieving these goals possible.
Navigation Collections
Navigation collections were delivered in FSCM Image 18 and are utilized for Financials, Projects, Assets, Procurement, and Supply Chain. They are a set of navigation menu options that are usable for most users. Navigation collections allow users to navigate into pages and keep a collection of components that they frequently navigate to in one area. They also allow users to reflect security access, reduce training efforts, and focus the business users.
Fluid Homepages
Fluid homepages are designed to be more user-friendly and easier to use. They reflect business needs, reduce training efforts, and implement best practices. Homepages serve up focused content and work and are a great starting place for both functional and operational users.
Some of the internal-facing Fluid homepages for PeopleSoft Financials include:
- Cash Management (Image 10)
- Credit to Cash (Image 24)
- Payables Operations (Image 24)
- Finance and Accounting (Image 26)
- Procurement Operations (Image 10)
- Project Management (Image 10)
- Expenses (Image 19, 23)
- Asset Tracking (Image 16, 26)
- Mobile Technician (Image 24)
- Grants Home Page (Image 24)
Some of the external-facing Fluid homepages for PeopleSoft Financials include:
- Supplier Portal Public Facing (Image 23)
- Supplier Portal Secure Access (Image 23)
- Supplier Invoices and Payments via eSettlements (Image 28)
- Customer Portal via eBill Payment (Image 24)
Most of the delivered Fluid homepages are designed for managers, supervisors, or specialists who are managing financial operations in their organization. They can leverage these homepages to help with effective management and faster decision-making. They provide deep operational insights with team metrics and access to operation actions. Fluid homepages can also be rolled out to users by functional area, so you can focus on rolling out one area at a time. This helps businesses leverage Fluid and its benefits while maintaining a low impact during an incremental rollout.
WorkCenters
WorkCenters deliver workloads and actions. You can leverage them to help you save time and money through prioritized daily tasks, reduced navigation, and one-stop transaction processing for your users. They are both functional and operational and can be utilized by day-in and day-out users. They also allow access to processing and reporting.
WorkCenter pages are divided into two general areas:
- The pagelet area
- The transaction area
The pagelet area is a collection of application-defined pagelets that contain links, task lists, and other content. The area itself is part of the PeopleTools framework but the pagelet content is defined by individual product needs.
The transaction area can display various items such as a welcome statement, transaction pages, and grids, dashboards, or pivot grids.
For a demonstration of the Credit to Cash homepage, Billing WorkCenter, and how to set up simplified analytics through Pivot Grid Wizard, check out the video below.
Powerful Tools for PeopleSoft Financials
There are some additional features in PeopleSoft Financials that will help empower users.
- Drop Zones
- Page and Field Configurator
- Page Composer
Drop Zones
Drop Zones were introduced in PeopleTools 8.57 as a way to provide visibility into related information. Users can add personalized fields to Fluid pages or change field or label names without adding customizations to the system. You can use them to embed custom content directly on a transaction page rather than placing the content in a separate window or in the related content frame.
Utilizing Drop Zones can help lower your cost of maintenance and increase flexibility within your PeopleSoft Financials processes. Using Drop Zones will not affect the lifecycle management process of your PeopleSoft application.
PeopleSoft adds standard Drop Zones to the top and bottom of Fluid pages. Additional Drop Zones can also be strategically added to the middle of a page. You can request additional Drop Zones for your application through the My Oracle Support community webpage by entering your request on the Ideas page.
Page and Field Configurator
Page and Field Configurator can help reduce erroneous entry and remove customizations. With this tool, you can address simple form changes through configuration as opposed to customization. The changes that you make can be applied to components uniquely for different transaction criteria or user role. Page and Field Configurator helps you:
- Modify labels for fields in a component
- Hide and disable fields in a component
- Specify a default value for a field
- Make multiple configurations for a component based on structure/transaction data
- Select a field for enforcing required edits
- Change field labels for only selected languages (in a multi-lingual environment)
Planned features on the roadmap for Page and Field Configurator include:
- Default system variables for a field (such as user login or system date)
- Extend to modal window for both Classic and Fluid
- Inactivate sequences
- Expand group logical operators
- Extend to multiple roles
- Add activation date
For a demonstration of Page and Field Configurator, check out the video below.
Page Composer
Page Composer is another tool that helps eliminate customizations within PeopleSoft. It enables users to design their own Fluid application pages to make them more in line with business needs. Users can design pages for different form factors and can include fields and tabs using the registered components delivered with the feature. It is metadata-driven, so users can modify the styling and layout of select areas on component pages without having to code or customize delivered PeopleSoft application pages.
For a demonstration of Page Composer, check out the video below.
For more information about the PeopleSoft Financials investment strategy and tools that can help empower Financial users, check out the PeopleSoft Industry Day 2019 presentation 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!