As part of PeopleSoft Industry Day 2019, Robbin Velayedam, Director of Product Management for PeopleSoft HCM, presented the PeopleSoft HCM roadmap and an update on helpful features that users can leverage in their PeopleSoft system.

As you look to the future for PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM), there are several exciting features and enhancements in the development stage. Although these features are not guaranteed to come to market, there are self-assigned guidelines that Oracle follows to shape the products into customer-generated and PeopleSoft-developed updates. Any feature that has not been released yet may be found on the roadmap, a list of changes that are expected to occur in the next 12 to 18 months. The PeopleSoft team avoids looking further into the future because customer feedback, internal goals, industry changes and more can make longer-term ideas moot. However, it is a priority of the PeopleSoft team to stay ahead of the curve and to fuel development by looking forward to the next 12 to 18 months.

Features on the PeopleSoft HCM Roadmap

Features that get put on the PeopleSoft HCM roadmap come from several channels. The PeopleSoft team consults several focus groups, the Ideas Space on My Oracle Support, what is happening in the market and with competitors, internal initiatives within Oracle, and the Customer Advisory Board.

Robbin covered a few key items on the PeopleSoft HCM roadmap:

While the image does not show an exhaustive list of road mapped features and enhancements, you can go to www.peoplesoftinfo.com and view the Planned Features and Enhancements tools within the HCM page to view a comprehensive PeopleSoft HCM roadmap.

As part of his PeopleSoft Industry Day presentation, Robbin focused on four key initiatives within PeopleSoft HCM:

Drop Zones

To better explain PeopleSoft HCM Drop Zones, Robbin compared them to golf. On several golf courses, there are designated Drop Zones for players who hit their ball into the water. Since the player cannot wade into the pond, the golf course stipulates where he or she is allowed to drop their ball to continue play. In most cases, this is a large chalked-off area, and the player determines where exactly to set their ball within its coordinates.

PeopleSoft Drop Zones are delivered, pre-defined areas on Fluid pages in which you can embed custom content— but only in that area. The Drop Zones are at the top and bottom of most delivered Fluid pages. This feature is not treated as a customization, but a configuration, which helps you to minimize ongoing maintenance costs. Additionally, the content that is delivered by Drop Zones is indistinguishable from that which was delivered by PeopleSoft. Some expected use cases of Drop Zones include:

• Adding text to a Fluid page (special instructions, text, reminders)
• Adding related information (institutional policies, additional links)
• Adding data entry (additional fields)

The image below shows an example of adding special instructions to a Fluid page.

It should be noted that Drop Zones are not available on Fluid grids or Classic pages at this time. They also must be added by Oracle in order to be considered configuration. If you add your own Drop Zones, it will be considered a customization. A minimum of PeopleTools 8.57 is required to run Drop Zones, but Oracle recommends PeopleTools 8.57.04 for the best outcome.

For a demonstration of Drop Zones, check out the video below.

Delegations

Created with high-level employees in mind, the Delegation Framework allows a manager, director, or other individuals to delegate his or her tasks to another employee, or proxy, during an extended absence from the office. The PeopleSoft team understands that certain transactions cannot wait until personnel arrives back at work. Therefore, PeopleSoft Delegation has been recently redesigned for more effective use.

The Delegations feature works in Fluid for an enhanced self-service experience. Specifically, the Delegation Framework allows managers to delegate authority to proxies for initiating existing transactions and approving, denying, or pushing back transactions on the manager’s behalf. The manager will be able to select multiple proxies and multiple transactions at once with compatibility across pillars and quick search capabilities. The delegator will also have visibility into the actions performed by a proxy during his stead.

Finally, cascading delegation authority allows two steps of delegation in case proxy No. 1 has to be out of the office, as well. For ease of use, PeopleSoft delivered the ability to look up and re-use previous delegation requests. The new Delegation Framework is fairly early in the development stage, but it is already seen several important improvements.

For a demonstration of Delegations, check out the video below.

Position Management

The Position Management feature allows you to define your Human Resources organization by position, rather than by job or by employee, for better insight into organization planning, administration, recruiting, talent management, and budgeting. A position has its own identity and can be vacant or refilled later. You can also assign titles, headcounts, job codes, organizational details, compensation and other options to your positions. One job code can be tied to many positions. The enhancements to your PeopleSoft HCM application can be driven by full or partial Position Management.

Some of the enhancements on the Position Management roadmap include abilities to:

• Configure position data
• Select the primary incumbent
• Improve the update incumbent functionality
• Apply a vacant position to reporting and analytics
• Save as draft requests and changes
• Increase position title field length
• Enable Drop Zones
• Request customer feedback

For a demonstration of Position Management, check out the video below.

Absence Management Chatbot

Chatbots are an emerging technology that utilizes conversational interaction through a chat window. PeopleSoft is developing a chatbot for Absence Management at this time and is expecting to create chatbots for several other applications – including Company Directory, paychecks, job openings and more.

With the Absence Management Chatbot, users will be able to request or cancel time off, view the current or forecasted absence balance, check the status of absence requests, and view support for all absence types. The chatbot data and actions are powered by PeopleSoft, but the technology or translation of text is powered by Oracle Digital Assistant. ODA is a Cloud-based application that Oracle offers to customers. You must license it to use it in PeopleSoft.

For a demonstration of the Absence Management Chatbot, check out the video below.

Conclusion

The enhancements on the PeopleSoft HCM roadmap are intended to make the future of PeopleSoft more efficient and less costly for PeopleSoft customers. Features like Drop Zones, Delegations, Position Management, and Chatbots will make users more effective and efficient in their work and will improve organizations overall. There are so many exciting updates and new features on the PeopleSoft HCM roadmap, so make sure you stay updated and leverage them as they come along.

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.

Additional Resources

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!