During Quest Forum Digital Event: Innovation Week, Robbin Velayedam, Senior Director of HCM Product Strategy at Oracle, presented the PeopleSoft HCM roadmap and update.

Updates and Extensions Resulting from COVID-19

Before diving into the latest HCM innovations, Velayedam shared COVID-specific updates and extended deadlines to support customers through the current business climate.

• COVID-19 Response page published on peoplesoftinfo.com
• Extended PeopleTools 8.56 Patch support through April 2021
• Extended Microfocus Cobol migration through April 2021
• Moved December 2020 desupport date for Classic pages to December 2021
• Apps Unlimited Support extended to at least through December 2031

PeopleSoft continues to monitor and adapt changes on payroll as a result of:

• Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA)
• Annual dollar limits on designated leave earnings
• Daily hours limits on designated leave earnings
• COVID-19 related leave earnings exempt from Employer FICA
• CARES Act – Federal Student Loan Garnishments

If you have a COVID-19 related issue that has not been addressed on peoplesoftinfo.com, you can submit a service request through the standard channels.

Benefits Tips for COVID-19

As employees experience pay cuts and furloughs, the customer service team is fielding many questions about changing benefits and creating leave plans.

Here are a few simple steps to handle these situations:

• Create Special Fluid Benefits Enrollment
  • Build a miscellaneous life event where the employee would initiate the process
  • Build a unique “open” enrollment that can be pushed out directly to employees
  • Resources: Spotlight on Life Events and Open Enrollment Knowledge Document
• Create a New Benefit Leave Plan
  • Absence management is the go-to solution
  • Create a leave plan in Base Benefits to track Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA)
  • Resource: PeopleBooks Leave Plan Setup

HR Tips for COVID-19

As part of their HR license, customers have access to many tools that may come in handy during the COVID crisis. These capabilities have been available for a long time, but they may not have been called to action until now.

• Health & Safety
  • Tracking Safety Incidents, Illnesses, Exposures, Preventative and Corrective Actions
  • Focus Group starting soon
• Mass Updates
  • Enter a mass update in Job Data (i.e. furlough a group of employees)
  • Enter a mass change (i.e. reduce salary for a group of employees)
• Delegations
  • Allow someone else to approve/deny HR transactions on your behalf
  • Also covers initiating transactions
• Teleworker
  • Tracking telework status
  • Tracking location and effective dates
• Onboarding/offboarding
  • Onboard and offboard in mass
  • Webinar on Quest this Wednesday
• Tracking Company Assets
  • Track PPE assigned to depts, EEs

The Current State of PeopleSoft

To help customers fully understand system capabilities, Velayedam provided a rundown on what PeopleSoft currently delivers:

• Rich, deep functionality
• Intuitive, mobile user experience
• Flexible and personalizable user experience
• Selective adoption of new features
• Actionable configurable analytics with Kibana
• Deployment on OCI
• Integrated Chatbot (ODA)

Oracle is committed to long-term investment in PeopleSoft. Customers will always have at least a 10-year warning if Oracle decides to quit offering premier support for PeopleSoft. There are currently no plans to end investment and premier support is guaranteed through at least 2031.

Looking ahead, PeopleSoft is focused on four major strategic investments:

• Simplification and modernization
• Analytics
• Cloud and emerging technologies
• Frameworks to eliminate customizations

PeopleSoft’s continuous innovation is proven through 280+ new application features delivered in the last 12 months, some of which you can see in the image below.

PeopleSoft HCM Roadmap

Features planned for HCM Image 34 include:

• Uptake of PeopleTools 8.58
• Integration with Twilio
• Visual Refresh to 8.58 Stylesheet (colors, tile spacings, icons)
• Support for Kibana Visualizations Using Elastic Search
• HR Notifications (administrator access, log summary, recipient setup & preview, sender details)
• Improved Accessibility for Fluid Timesheet and Time Reporting
• Enhancements to Person Global Search for Administrators (facets, filters, and related actions)
• Data Privacy Enhancements (data masking for PS/Query)
• Fluid Timesheet – Details Display
• Benefits WorkCenter
• Kibana Visualizations for Salary Analysis and Recruiting
• Text Message for Approval Notifications
• Support for Drop Zones in Classic Foundation Pages
• Enhanced Self-Service Navigation with Dashboards and Tiles

PeopleSoft recently released a subtle interface refresh and chatbot frameworks. Now, you can use a bot to answer questions about requesting time off, searching for orders, and reviewing the status of reports. To deploy a PeopleSoft chatbot, use Oracle Digital Assistant. The image below shows the planned PeopleSoft chatbots.

Additionally, PeopleSoft offers central notification preferences and channel selection to put more power in the hands of users. Notification channel options include text, notification windows, and emails. Notifications keep work moving. People need to be notified about what they need to do, wherever they are, and they need to be able to delegate when they are away.

Another new tool comes through the PeopleSoft Kibana Visualizer. This tool brings easy-to-use, interactive visualizations to your applications with no load on the transactional database. This large palette of visualization is available from both tiles and related content and is highly optimized for speed.

Check out Velayedam’s demonstration of Kibana below:

Some of the PeopleSoft HCM roadmap highlights are shown below along with highlights from the roadmaps for PeopleSoft FSCM, PeopleTools and Technology, and Cloud Manager.

For more information on PeopleSoft updates, check out the PeopleSoft Information Portal, Video Channel, Cumulative Feature Overview Tool, and Planned Features and Enhancements.

To learn more, check out Velayedam’s Innovation Week presentation and other sessions from the Quest Forum Digital Event attached below.