Char Jorgenson, Director of PeopleSoft Product Strategy, recently presented an overview of the digital assistant, PICASO, with a quick video demonstration for employee and supplier digital assistants.

PICASO can provide your employees and suppliers with an anytime, anywhere, concierge-like experience via simple conversation interaction. Utilizing the Supplier Digital Assistant with PeopleSoft Intelligent Chatbot Assistant from Oracle (PICASO), the Collaboration Skills provide suppliers with secure access to transaction information and answers to their questions regarding Procurement and Financial activity.

Using the Expenses Digital Assistant, an employee can quickly determine the payment status of their Expense reports and add entries to their Wallet while on the go. The Requisition Inquiry Skill will provide an Employee with data on their Requisitions and those entered on behalf of someone else.

By leveraging emerging technologies like the Digital Assistant, you can improve and enhance the self-service collaboration experience by the internal and external users of your applications.

As is standard for roadmapped features, all of Oracle’s future plans are covered by the safe harbor statement.

Read on to discover how PICASO can enhance your Employee and Supplier user experiences.

Why a Digital Assistant for Employees?

This is a popular question. If employees are inside the system and can navigate to find answers to their questions or call a phone number, why do they need a conversational interface? The answer lies in our modern-day culture. People are using chatbots in their everyday life for all kinds of tasks. They should be able to use the same familiar interfaces at work and get quicker answers.

With PICASO, Employees don’t have to log in and click on a menu item with additional steps. Instead, they can make a direct inquiry. The digital assistant is very helpful for remembering important details such as expense reimbursements. Employees can log their expenses immediately, saving the headache of lost or forgotten reports. They can also find the status of expense reports, monitor orders, and so much more.

For the purposes of Char’s presentation, she mainly referenced the digital assistants in Financials and Supply Chain. However, HCM has a corresponding list of employee-related digital assistants that can be found in a separate post.

Why a Digital Assistant for Suppliers?

Many customers with external-facing portals have to deal with supplier questions all day:

• When will my invoices be paid?
• Is there training for my new Suppliers?
• Anything overdue I should be worried about?

This digital assistant helps your Suppliers find the information they need without requiring them to learn how to navigate the portal.

FSCM PICASO for Employees and Suppliers

Common terminology for the digital assistant is outlined below:

• PICASO – PeopleSoft Intelligent Chatbot Assistant from Oracle
• Digital Assistant – Formerly known as “Chatbot”
• Skills – A collection of conversations on a particular topic or functionality
• Utterances – The conversations contained within the Skill
• ODA – Oracle Digital Assistant (Cloud Application Supporting the PeopleSoft Digital Assistants)

Below is a list of delivered digital assistants and skills:

PICASO Digital Assistant Overview

The PICASO Digital Assistant for Employees gives employees quick access to information via mobile device and voice commands. Soon, PICASO will be enabled for access via Slack and MS Teams channel (Roadmap Item).

You can access multiple functional areas from a single entry point and easily customize conversations/utterances to suit the organization culture. Build your own skills as part of the DA structure and enjoy a reduced number of internal calls and emails as employees gain 24/7 access to immediate answers.

The Employee Digital Assistant gives employees the following capabilities:

Expenses

• Create Wallet Entry
• Show recent Expense Reports
• Show Expense Reports for last week
• Show pending Expense Reports

Requisitions

• Show my recent items
• Show my overdue items
• Show my pending items

For the Employee Experience, PICASO greets the employee and gives them options of questions for them to ask.

PICASO Digital Assistant for Portal Guests and Credentialed Users

About three years ago, the supplier portal was not very intuitive. Below is a screenshot of the old portal:

After a big redesign, the team added tiles with a credentialed homepage and updated styled sheets.

Today, the public homepage offers skinny tiles with a fresh look:

If you have the digital assistant implemented, the blue icon pops up on the bottom right of the page for quick access to conversations.

The following slide displays supplier interactions for both the Guest user and the Credentialed user.

An additional layer was recently released that takes all of the above into consideration and applies it with intelligent conversation.

If Strategic Sourcing is installed, the Sourcing Assistant (Roadmap Item) enables Suppliers to:

• View Bidding Events where the Supplier was invited to participate
• See Public Bidding Events
• See Bids they were awarded
• Won the Bid, but not yet received the official award