How to Enhance HR Help Desk with Groovy Scripting
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Posted by Harry E Fowler
- Last updated 12/03/20
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During Quest Forum Digital Event: Cloud Week, Angela Beckman, HR Applications Team and IT Shared Services at Yum! Brands, presented on how to enhance HR Help Desk with Groovy scripting.
About Yum! Brands
Yum! Brands, Inc. includes KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell with the recent incorporation of The Habit Burger Grill. Yum! Brands’ journey to the cloud has been quite extensive. In 2015, Yum! Brands started evaluating options about where to go. Yum! was originally running PeopleSoft, and it was a highly customized platform. They made the decision in early 2016 to go with Oracle Cloud, and the project kicked off in April. Yum! went live with its first wave on Oracle Cloud in July 2017. The HR Help Desk was originally in PeopleSoft as well, and they kicked off that project in October 2018 by going live with Wave 2 and HR Help Desk by January 2019.
HR Help Desk Business Cases at Yum!
In addition to creating tickets within the Oracle system, the Yum! teams also had additional requirements. The first one was for the payroll team, who needed a quick view of specific employee attributes. In the PeopleSoft system, this was considered the 360-view. It gave analysts that were taking calls a quick view of their current position, their current location, management, and those kinds of details that they would need off the bat to execute or direct the ticket where it needs to go.
The pension team, on the other hand, needed a way to create tickets for users that were not in the system (prior employees not converted, spouse, etc.). During the move from PeopleSoft to Cloud, Yum! didn’t convert all the employees from the entire time Yum! has been in existence. Instead, they went back to a date, set that date, and then converted everyone from that date forward. So, because of retirement, Yum! had some users that never got converted, and for that reason, they needed a way to pull those users into the system and create tickets accordingly.
One of the issues that Yum! also had was finding a way to lock down the title to force users to enter details into the problem description. What they noticed right off the bat was that the title was getting used as the problem description field, so users were continuously putting an enormous title in with the full details of their issue. Then, in the problem description field, they would put something simple like “See above.” Therefore, it was difficult for the Yum! teams to really understand what the issue truly was because there is a character limit. They also needed to automatically remove the primary contact name from those tickets when they are created by an agent but keep the contact name when created in self-service. Yum! also needed to update other attributes of the self-service request when an agent creates a ticket.
Enhancing HR Help Desk with Groovy Scripting
Groovy Language is a Java platform based on Dynamic Scripting Language. The Oracle Application is rather robust, and it helps support you in creating the scripting. It provides a language library within the composition, and it also helps you validate and understand if you have something in there that doesn’t really make sense or if you are missing certain components. The scripts are written to sell for Yum! Brands’ requirements and they can be used for much more. As with any language, the big caveat is to be sure to add comments to your scripts.
Above are a few Groovy examples of solutions for Yum! Brands’ payroll requirement. First, they needed a quick view—the 360-view that PeopleSoft offered—of specific employee attributes brought over from the primary contact’s HCM profile. While it is not an extensive list, it did provide the information for which the team was looking. Yum! was looking for the person number, the business unit name, the department name, the job name, and the location name. Using the Groovy scripting shown here, they were able to pull that information in from the HCM side into the CRM application for them to view on the HR Help Desk.
To fix the issue of the pension team needing a generic employee, Yum! needed to create a checkbox for them to say whether or not it was a generic employee. They had to create an Employee ID field and an Employee Name field (both that defaulted to blank). They also had to put in additional verification in order to let the system know whether or not these fields were populated. If they were populated, it would remove the Primary Point of Contact field.
All-team issues included:
- How to lock down the title
- How to force users into the problem description
- Automatically removing the primary contact name and update other attributes of Service Request when a ticket is created by an agent
Below, several examples are shown that were used for re-scripting.
One of the quick fixes was the Problem Description field. Oracle allows you to manipulate the delivered fields somewhat so you can make them required or not required. As far as setting attributes, this is done through the server script. You can create a server script that says, “Set my title to a specific title.” Then, you can hide that title value so nobody can write into it, and that will populate that title for every service request. The security context in User Role just identifies which users (if they have that role) are able to see the specific fields or what the system should do in the event that the user has those roles.
Let’s talk about YUM! Brands’ Groovy impact. The requirement was that the payroll team needed a quick 360-view of specific employee attributes as they are working the tickets. The solution to this was to create custom fields that would populate the information from the HCM side to the CRM side via Groovy scripting.
The second requirement was that the pension team needed a way to create tickets for users that are not in the system (prior employees not converted, spouse, etc.). The solution was to create custom fields with verification via Groovy scripting.
Finally, Yum! Brands’ all-teams requirement was a way to lock down the title to force users to enter the details in the problem description, automatically remove the primary contact name, and update other attributes of a service request when an agent creates a ticket. Yum! solved this by utilizing Groovy scripting to add a static title to every service request. They also removed the primary contact and updated service request fields during service request creation.
Helpful Resources
Beckman cited a few helpful resources that others may want to reference:
To learn more, check out the Quest Forum Digital Event presentation and additional resources below.
Additional Resources
Join us next month for Quest Experience Week (QXW) as Quest celebrates its 25th anniversary with a FREE week of digital learning! QXW offers four jam-packed days of practical Oracle product learning for users of JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Oracle Cloud apps, and Oracle Database solutions. There’s something for everyone: strategic insights, practical product how-to sessions, customer case studies, and best practices.
