In May 2023, PeopleSoft customers gathered in Dallas, TX, for RECONNECT Live! at BLUEPRINT 4D, an annual conference where attendees learn from real-life successes and failures, receive candid advice for avoiding mistakes, and understand the best approaches for transforming their people, processes, technology, and strategy.

At the 2023 BLUEPRINT 4D conference, leaders from AdventHealth and the State of Kansas agreed to share their recent experiences to help others in the Oracle community. Below, you’ll find their tips and tricks for inventory management and high-volume payment processing.

PeopleSoft Customer: AdventHealth

Ellen Dadlani, a PeopleSoft customer, from AdventHealth, and non-profit healthcare system made up of 51 hospital campus across nine states, shared how the organization used to struggle with accurate data and early issue identification. To solve this issue, the team sought help in the form of the PeopleSoft Cost Balancing WorkCenter, which allows them to improve productivity by saving time and reducing clicks in navigation.  It also gives AdventHealth a personalized view and a one-stop place to identify and process issues as well as increases communication between supply chain and finance.

The Cost Balancing WorkCenter is used to help identify and resolve inventory/accounting issues earlier in the reconciliation process. For AdventHealth, this tool improves productivity by saving time and reducing clicks in navigation. It also offers a personalized view and a one-stop identification and processing of issues. Lastly, the Cost Balancing Workcenter increases healthy communication between supply chain and finance.

The Cost Balancing WorkCenter, allows AdventHealth to monitor potential issues by setting up alerts.  For example, the WorkCenter monitors when inventory items have not been successfully put away, when inventory items with costs that exceed a cost threshold, and when inventory items have a negative balance.  These alerts can be easily used to identify issues.  For a full list of the alerts, AdventHealth has set up, read PeopleSoft Inventory Tips & Tricks from AdventHealth.

Additionally, AdventHealth set out to improve accuracy of inventory and PWAC.  One way they do this is by cycle counts frequently – at least once per quarter.

Teams were also challenged to reduce express issues with par optimizations, adjusting storage for individual departments or bumping up supplies for weekends (when supply chain members may not be present).

AdventHealth also revised a daily/weekly checklist for supply chain team members:

• Review Cost Balancing Workcenter
• Correct Staged Putaway Errors
• Review Negative on-hand quantity
• Review Negative PWAC

Next, they enhanced performance with a match exception dashboard. The reporting team created a custom OBIEE dashboard to 1) combine data from multiple databases, 2) include available payment discounts, and 3) roll up at the corporate level, regional level, city level, and supplier. This enabled them to determine the root cause for match exceptions. Between the combined dashboard and monthly meetings, they reduced match exceptions immensely.

Lastly, AdventHealth recommends adding Glyphs to your system so you can review extra information with a simple right-click. Glyphs help you navigate to related pages, reduce keystrokes, and equip you to make strategic decisions.

PeopleSoft Customer: State of Kansas

Another PeopleSoft customer, the State of Kansas, recently faced an overwhelming problem on the finance side of their PeopleSoft system.  Sarah Tongier shared how they solved this issue.

Each month, the state of Kansas pays out 80,000 retiree payments. These payments get sent to the central PeopleSoft system by the Kansas Public Employee Retirement System (KPERS).

On the nights that these payments hit the PeopleSoft system, the team would experience extremely poor performance during the voucher and payment processing. Payments were bogged down at every step through accounts payable, from budget check, to voucher post, to pay cycle, and payment post.  This caused users to be unable to access the systems for sometimes more than 13 hours.

After hiring a consultant to fine-tune processes within their system as much as possible, the team still encountered issues on the high-volume payment night and realized they needed to define requirements for their next solution.

In the end, the team adapted a solution they were already using in the HCM process for payroll for public university staff that they coined The Balancing Routine.

To use The Balancing Routine on the finance side, KPERS sends the central account office the ACH payment file, General Ledger file with accounting entries for each ACH payment, and an email with the expected totals for each month.

Then, they use a custom process that their developers created to compare two files using temp tables to ensure that the payment count and payment amount total “balances.”  If the files do not match, then these files are automatically re-named to prevent further processing and KPERS is notified that new files must be submitted.  If the files match, then the system generates an email confirming a successful match and a General Ledger file release for posting on the specified release date on the run control page, therefore capturing accounting entries related to the payments.  Then, the ACH Payment file is transmitted directly to the bank and aren’t recording in Accounts Payable, which bypasses the performance issue.

The Balancing Routine was so successful that the State of Kansas has now implemented it for two other high-volume scenarios: tax returns in the Department of Revenue and unemployment payments in the Department of Labor.

To read about The Balancing Routine in more detail, check out the full story in this blog: Speed Up Payment Processing Time in PeopleSoft.

By learning from the experiences of PeopleSoft customers like Ellen Dadlani and Sarah Tongier, you can quickly solve issues, avoid failures, and achieve success in your PeopleSoft system.  You can view the full BLUEPRINT 4D session, featuring these two speakers, here: ERP PeopleSoft Ignite Session.

To hear more PeopleSoft customers’ stories like theirs, don’t forget the save the date for BLUEPRINT 4D 2024, which will be back in Dallas, May 7-10, 2024.