The Port of Portland is a 24/7 operation responsible for overseeing Portland International Airport (PDX), general aviation, marine activities, and several industrial parks in the Portland, OR metropolitan area. The company implemented JDE HCM Employee Self-Service (ESS) in 2008, with 700+ Administrative and Represented employees using JDE ESS. They are currently running JDE EnterpriseOne 9.2.3 64-bit, Tools Release Update 23 (9.2.7.2).  At BLUEPRINT 4D 2023, Evelyn Bian, Senior Business Analyst for Port of Portland, shared how they used JD Edwards Orchestrator to improve employee access to online W2s.

The Challenge: Providing Employee Access to Prior Year W2s

Each year, Oracle releases a new W2 BIP template, but it has the same file name as the previous year. When the Port of Portland team would try to update the W2 in the system, prior records disappeared from ESS, which meant payroll was constantly fielding employee requests for older W2s. The Port desired a way to keep prior W2s in ESS, so employees could access and print their own W2s for current and past years. Since most employees were rarely in the JDE system, this solution needed to be easy for anyone to use.

 Overcoming the Challenge with Orchestrator

To overcome the challenge of employee access to online W2s, the team built a custom solution using Orchestrator. To create this solution, they had to do a lot of groundwork.  One piece of it was the data generation and the other was the template setup.

For the data generation, the Port of Portland created a custom program that allowed the payroll team to specify the year and generate the W2 data for ESS, which populated a custom table.  Then, they created a Business View that merged the custom table with the state/local control table data and that is what is presented in the W2.

For the template setup, after each new template is release from Oracle each year, the Port of Portland downloads it and creates a copy of it.  Then, they create a custom name for it.  Then, they link the template to a custom BIP object. This BIP object has a custom object name for each year.  Then, there is a report definition for every single year.  Then, they have a version of R07885 for each year so that the program knows which combo of the BIP object, report definition, and template to pull based on the year the employee wants to pull the W2 for.

This solution allows employees to access online W2s by going to the Employee Self-Service page, where they can select W2 history.

Then, they can select the year of the W2 that they wish to view.  Then, they select the Print W2 button, which can be seen in the image below.

After an employee clicks the Print W2 button, a screen pops up, which instructs the user how to retrieve their W2 in Submitted Jobs.  In addition to giving instructions to employees who are otherwise not familiar with JD Edwards, this popup also works as a delay tactic while the BI publisher generates the PDF of the W2 so that by the time the user arrives at Submitted Jobs, their PDFs should be fully loaded.

For more details about how the Port of Portland used Orchestrator to improve employee access to online W2s with JD Edwards, watch part three (starts at 22:32) of this BLUEPRINT 4D 2023 session recording: JD Edwards Ignite Sessions.