I recently spoke with Michelle Erkenswick, PeopleSoft Technical Lead for Jack Henry & Associates, who primarily supports the Human Capital Management (HCM) system, but also serves in an advisory capacity to other PeopleSoft areas. We discussed how Jack Henry & Associates is using Fluid within their PeopleSoft systems.

Founded in 1976, Jack Henry & Associates provides more than 300 products and services that enable their customers to process financial transactions, automate their businesses and succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Their three brands – Jack Henry Banking®, Symitar® and ProfitStars® – support financial institutions of all sizes, diverse businesses outside the financial industry and other technology providers.

The PeopleSoft technology team consists of 18 developers (four on HCM, seven on FSCM, and seven on CRM), and five PeopleSoft Administrators. Their first implementation of PeopleSoft was their CRM system in 2005, followed by HCM and FSCM in 2006. These were all version 8.8. They then upgraded HCM to 8.9 in 2007 and then to 9.1 in 2011. They upgraded HCM to 9.2 in 2015 as well as FSCM upgraded to 9.0 in 2009, and to 9.2 in 2015. CRM was upgraded to 8.9 in 2007. In 2014, they upgraded to 9.1. and are currently in the process of upgrading CRM to 9.2.

They have not always stayed completely current on patches and rolling out new functionality, but they try not to fall too far behind. Their current strategy will be to try to get up to date with patches at least every other year, if not more often.

The conversation with Michelle Erkenswick highlighted a few key points that other organizations should consider as they deploy Fluid User Interface:

• Consider rolling out Fluid navigation first, and then deploying Fluid content and pages
• Involve the power users as early as possible to manage change

Fluid is a great way for companies to be modern, mobile and highly intuitive. From what I can tell, customers who are taking on Fluid capabilities are wondering why they didn’t take them sooner.