At RECONNECT 19, Amira Morcos, Senior Director of Product Strategy, and Madhavi Makkapati, Product Strategy Director, spoke about how Fluid WorkCenters that are delivered in PeopleSoft Financials can help change the work paradigm and support efficiency when identifying, delegating, and executing critical work functions.

Current State of Financial Operations

For many, the current state of financial operations includes mundane or inefficient processes like:

• Managing task lists on paper, email, or notepads
• Keeping many windows open to get a simple job done
• Receiving ad hoc inquiries that create work interruptions
• Constantly needing to multitask
• Navigating multiple systems to do tasks

If you can relate to any of these situations, you are a prime candidate for leveraging PeopleSoft Fluid WorkCenters in your organization.

How PeopleSoft Fluid WorkCenters Can Help

When you add Fluid WorkCenters to your system, you can increase productivity and improve end user adoption through three major improvements:

• Personalized workload and work assignments
• Centralized access to relevant data
• Reduced need to navigate

PeopleSoft Fluid WorkCenters offer extreme productivity in a one-stop-shop. You can create and modify WorkCenters, define page layouts, configure pagelets, and consider My Counts. In the My Work pagelet, there are four link types:

1. System-defined
2. User-defined
3. Worklist
4. Alert

For system-defined links alone, PeopleSoft offers 241 definitions listed by product in the Appendix and in PeopleBooks.

In My Work filters, you can personalize and delegate links with filters, assign links during configurations, and change filter criteria. For WorkCenter filtering considerations, keep these notes in mind:

• Decide whether users can set filter values (per filter)
• Filter fields leverage security views (you pick prompt table)
• Able to limit filter value operands to “=” or “IN list”
• Able to make a filter value required which prevents returning “ALL” values
  • Make required and restricted if using security views
  • Warning – if no filter defined, will return ALL values

Moving on to My Work Scope, you can increase efficiency by reducing the effort required for viewing and managing work. You have the ability to toggle between work for different operations with one push button and see all results for selected groupings.

If you choose to configure a WorkCenter, there are three things to consider:

• Assess functional areas
  • Cross-functional or product-specific WorkCenters
• Assess how work is allocated in the organization
  • Work delegation drives filtering/filter values definition
• Leverage My Work system delivered links
  • Evaluate links and decide on filter fields

The out-of-the-box configuration delivers empty shells and an applications common framework, and you can use data migration workbench to copy configurations between databases.

Benefits of PeopleSoft Fluid WorkCenters

PeopleSoft Fluid WorkCenters can make a huge impact on your day-to-day work as you manage and delegate your operational work queue and take immediate action on critical work. WorkCenters exist for Billing, Receivables, Payables, and General Ledger.

Other helpful tools include simplified analytics and devices and roles that empower managers to support business objectives on the go. Furthermore, you can improve departmental productivity through administrator and user control grouplets.

With WorkCenter expansion, you are able to:

• Increase staff productivity
• Reduce operational cost
• Improve efficiency

Frequently Asked Questions About PeopleSoft Fluid WorkCenters

As you begin to work with PeopleSoft Fluid WorkCenters, questions may come up. Here are some answers to some frequently asked questions:

1. How many WorkCenters do I need?
   • Look at your logical functional areas
   • May not need a WorkCenter per product
   • Single WorkCenter can cover the needs of many roles
2. Are WorkCenters and Workspaces the same thing?
   • No, they are different things.
3. Can I modify application grids (add/drop fields)?
   • You can personalize each application grid in the WorkCenter Transaction page (hide fields, freeze fields, change order)
   • Adding fields requires modifying appclass
   • You create your own appclasses (customization)
4. Can I add My Work links from different areas into a WorkCenter?
   • Yes, you can add any system defined link to a WorkCenter
   • You can only add Fluid to Fluid or Classic to Classic My Work links
5. Can a WorkCenter be my homepage?
   • This is possible with the branding theme assignment support in PeopleTools 8.54 or later. Here are the steps:
     • Create a Nav Collection and add the WorkCenter CRef to the collection
     • Go to PeopleTools > Portal > Branding > Assign Themes
     • Edit (or create if access for the first time) the portal registry theme assignment, select the Nav Coll created in step 1 as the Custom Tabs collection, and then select the WorkCenter page as the default tab. You can also do this based on user role or permission list.