In today’s world of technology, the rate of disruption is fast and constant. To keep up with customer needs, the PeopleSoft team is constantly updating the applications strategy and roadmap that addresses changing user expectations, new business models, shifting landscapes of competitors, rapidly evolving technology, and constant cost reductions.

Rebekah Jackson, Vice President of Product Strategy for PeopleSoft, walked through the main investment areas within PeopleSoft. She also shared the latest updates to PeopleSoft Recruiting, Workforce Administration, Talent Development, Credit to Cash, Financial Management and Operations, Procure to Pay, and IT.

PeopleSoft’s Investment Strategy

The investment strategy for PeopleSoft has been, is, and continues to be consistent. The PeopleSoft team is constantly looking at how they invest in the software across a few key dimensions. The graphic below shows the six buckets that PeopleSoft is continuously investing in:

One bucket of the investment strategy is an intuitive user experience. PeopleSoft will continue to invest in both Fluid and Classic Plus. However, when new features are being built, they will be built in Fluid. If there is something on Classic Plus, and it doesn’t have a demand for mobile usage or has a narrow user base and continues to work in Classic Plus, it will be continually enhanced in Classic Plus. In both cases, the PeopleSoft team is looking at ways to make the user experience as seamless and effective as possible.

Another piece of the investment strategy is configurability. It would be unrealistic to expect all customers to use features in the way that they are delivered. It’s important for customers to be able to tailor features to meet their needs. The PeopleSoft team keeps this need in mind when designing new features and functionality.

Continuously driving analytics and insight is another core part of the PeopleSoft investment strategy. Serving up information that can help drive an individual’s decisions, complete transactions, monitor the business, etc. is important to the PeopleSoft team. They are continuously looking at how to merge analytics into the user experience and develop analytic capabilities to open up more opportunity for customers.

Reusable frameworks are another key investment area in PeopleSoft. The PeopleSoft team is looking at how to get more customers to continuously leverage and adopt these frameworks. They are also looking to push the boundaries and continuously develop them moving forward to meet customer needs.

Being highly consumable is also important to the PeopleSoft team. Making the development process quicker makes it easier for customers to quickly and continuously adopt new features. This quick implementation process follows the PeopleSoft model of continuous innovation. It provides quick feedback to PeopleSoft about newly released features. If new features aren’t adopted by customers within a few months, it’s a sign to the PeopleSoft team that they’ve built the wrong thing.

The sixth piece of the investment strategy is delivering compelling value. This ties hand-in-hand with the goal of being highly consumable because PeopleSoft is always trying to provide valuable features and functionality for customers. When customers can rapidly adopt and leverage new features, there is a real impact.

Recruiting

PeopleSoft’s latest updates to Recruiting empower customers to attract great candidates and hire the right people.

The Fluid Candidate Gateway Experience is available in HCM Image 18 and has transformed the way many organizations are finding potential talent within their industry. There are currently more than 89 customers live on the Fluid Candidate Gateway Experience, and there are new go-lives every quarter.

The Fluid Candidate Gateway Experience allows organizations to reach job candidates on any mobile device, so candidates can have a quick, simple, personalized experience anytime, anywhere. It provides a modern first impression to attract talent, and it provides potential candidates with functionality like easy-to-use search, marking jobs as favorites, sharing jobs with friends, etc. that gives candidates the typical consumer experience that is expected in today’s workforce. It’s easy to apply for jobs from any device, and users can quickly and easily add attachments, like resumes, to their application from their device. It is truly tailored to your desired hiring experience.

In addition to Fluid Candidate Gateway Experience, the Fluid Recruiting homepages are a great feature available in HCM Image 26. While it’s important to make the candidate experience powerful and meaningful, these personalized dashboards can do the same for recruiters and hiring managers as well. Recruiters and hiring managers can personalize their dashboards and tiles in a way that allows them to engage in the work in a way that is the best fit for them.

These dashboards make employees more efficient through:

• Having all critical activities only a click away
• Proactive alerts
• Approvals anytime, anywhere
• Powerful analytics
• Setting and meeting goals and ensuring compliance
• A system that monitors and notifies you (new in PeopleTools 8.57)

Workforce Administration

After organizations attract the right talent, they have to onboard new hires. PeopleSoft Onboarding is available in HCM Image 23 and provides new hires with an easy, guided onboarding experience. Since it is a Fluid application, new hires can complete onboarding on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device. In addition to providing a friendly, mobile user experience, the application is highly configurable. Organizations can configure templates to jobs, departments, regions, etc.

Onboarding also leverages the Activity Guide Composer to provide guided steps that are easy for the user to follow. It can also easily incorporate acknowledgments and attachments in the onboarding process.

Tracking time and attendance is made easy through the Fluid Time and Labor pages, available in HCM Image 27. These pages help quickly and easily capture time for all types of time reporters, and it can be done on any device. There is a one-button time reporting option for punch time reporters and quick fill drop down options for time details. They help drive latency and errors out of the process for both users and managers.

The Time and Labor pages also house Fluid Approvals for managers. The approvals are routed in the Fluid Approvals framework, so managers easily get approvals pushed to them—making them more efficient.

Part of an employees work schedule is entering time, but another big part of the cycle is getting paid. Organizations can leverage the Fluid Payroll WorkCenter, available in HCM Image 9, which enables payroll administrators to have a personalized, configurable one-stop shop for managing all of the complexities, work, and processes associated with running payroll. It also makes it easier to identify and fix errors within payroll.

The WorkCenter also incorporates analytics, which can be used by either the administrator or the employee. It provides quick, anytime access to paycheck summaries, paycheck analytics, direct deposit setup and management, and more.

Talent Management

Over time, organizations need to start investing in their employees. Mobile Learning, available in ELM Image 16, provides employees with skill development that is available at their convenience. Continuous learning keeps employees engaged and ultimately makes them more productive, skilled employees. Courses are easy to find and enroll in, and it is easy to monitor an employee’s learning objectives and history.

Employees can also be easily managed and promoted through Employee Snapshot, available in HCM Image 9. Employee Snapshot gives managers quick, at-a-glance, access to information that can drive the decision about whether or not to promote an employee. In addition to quickly being able to analyze the information, managers can also quickly take action and promote the employee directly within Employee Snapshot. This is a great way to grow, reward, and retain employees.

It gives managers a guided experience for taking action and provides reduced demand for support staff and error correction during the process. It also makes approvals of promotions even easier—whether the manager is on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.

Credit to Cash

Enhancements and features in PeopleSoft aren’t only about the employees and managers—they’re also about the business that organizations are running. All businesses have revenue that they need to collect from customers. Fluid eBill Payment, available in FSCM Image 24, helps increase collections from customers and provides the business and customers with easy access to bills, statements, and history and makes it easy to quickly make a payment. This “one-click” payment option aligns with what is expected by consumers in today’s reality. The application improves collaboration with payers and reduces days sales outstanding. Not only does it improve the user experience, but it also helps streamline processes and get the right information into the system quickly.

Organizations also need to manage their Credit to Cash operations. As they collect revenue from customers, they need to see how it ties back to their revenue objectives and operational metrics. Administrators in the finance department also have the benefit of the Fluid homepages, tiles, dashboards, Navigation Collections, etc. to tailor the work and organize it in a way that is meaningful to them.

The personalizable dashboard for Credit to Cash, available in FSCM Image 24, provides critical insights and transactions just a click away. It leverages powerful analytics to help set, meet, and improve on collection goals. The system also monitors and notifies you if you are on PeopleTools 8.57 or higher.

Financial Management and Operations

It’s also important for organizations to be able to track inventory. Mobile Inventory, available in FSCM Image 14, provides customers with:

• Barcode scanning
• Real-time data validation
• Par counts and cycle counts
• PO receipts, putaway, delivery, and transfers
• Stock and fulfillment inquiries
• Reduced latency and data entry errors

Submitting expenses when employees travel is another piece of financial management. Expense Report, available in FSCM Image 19, allows employees to take a photo of their receipt and text the image into MyWallet to easily create and submit expense reports on any device. The system can automatically identify the user, date, and time of the expense report, which makes both submitting and approving expense reports easier. There are visual indicators given for risks, and there are drill-down details available for approvers who need more information. They are then able to approve, reject, or send the expense report back to the user.

Procure to Pay

Businesses also often need to make purchases. Fluid eProcurement, available in FSCM Image 10, provides users with an intuitive experience on any device, powerful search, and the ability to browse catalogs and set favorites. It has a familiar cart and checkout process. It provides order history and easy approvals, and it is easy to configure in order to meet your business needs.

Many organizations are also leveraging Supplier Scorecard, available in FSCM Image 25 through the Fluid Supplier Portal, to strategically manage their suppliers. With Supplier Scorecard, organizations can monitor KPIs, collect input via scorecards, and provide insights into supplier performance. It helps ensure that organizations have a modern, strategic way of managing and interacting with suppliers.

In addition to Supplier Scorecard, Fluid eSettlements empowers suppliers through self-service, which reduces that number of vendor calls and overhead that organizations have to handle. It allows vendors to upload invoices, track payments, collaborate on disputes, and more.

Organizations can also optimize the way they pay their suppliers by using the Fluid Manage Payables Operations dashboard, available in FSCM Image 24. The personalizable dashboard provides all critical insights, just a click away, and leverages powerful analytics. It allows organizations to manage timely payments in order to maximize cash flow and discounts. With PeopleTools 8.57, the system also monitors and notifies users.

IT

Organizations are constantly personalizing and configuring the system to make it their own by leveraging:

• Unique homepages and dashboards
• Tiles and Navigation Collections
• New analytics
• Analytic thresholds and notifications
• Hidden fields and change labels
• Custom processing logic
• Bolt-on capabilities

Additionally, organizations are adopting new capabilities that rapidly deploy new features, integrate with the CFO tool, identify customization impacts and test dependencies, and use test automation to speed up go-live while maintaining lower costs.

Adopters are also eliminating environment constraints through:

• Provision environments in minutes, not days or weeks
• Lift and shift environments that preserve data and configuration
• Utilities to support all environment needs
• New, one-click “automagic” tools upgrades
• Automated download of all apps maintenance

Successfully running enterprise software in today’s reality requires a modern personalized experience, agile and rapid adoption, lower costs through automation, cross LOB and IT alignment, and ongoing innovation. Organizations will likely have to change the way they approach systems and processes in order to succeed in today’s workforce. It’s important to rapidly evolve and respond to the shifting expectations within the user community about how users interact with systems. This transitional in terms of thinking and approach is critical for every PeopleSoft customer to go through.

Whether you plan to stay on PeopleSoft forever, change enterprise systems, or move to the Cloud, you must think about the way you approach systems and processes and how you plan to evolve as you move forward in today’s climate.

4 Areas of Focus Moving Forward

PeopleSoft is currently and continuously focusing on the development of four key areas moving forward:

1. New features
2. Configuration and customization
3. Deployment and Cloud Infrastructure
4. Emerging technology

New features are the bread and butter of PeopleSoft. There are constantly new features on the PeopleSoft roadmap, and this list is always changing. The PeopleSoft Planned Features and Enhancements list on My Oracle Support is a great way to stay up to date with what’s coming next in PeopleSoft.

Configuration and customization are a big conversation point right now, and PeopleSoft recently started heavily investing in this concept. While it’s important for customers to be able to tailor their system to meet their needs, there are ways to do so without loading the system with customizations. Configuring PeopleSoft is a much less costly and invasive alternative. There are tools within PeopleSoft that can help customers avoid and isolate customizations to their ERP system, which is absolutely critical. Some of these tools include:

• Page and Field Configurator
• Event Mapping
• Drop Zones
• Activity Guides
• WorkCenters
• Navigation Collections
• So many more!

Deployment to Cloud Infrastructure is another focus area for PeopleSoft moving forward. The expectations around enterprise software as Cloud began shifting the market. It changed customers’ mindset about what is possible. Customers shouldn’t be running their PeopleSoft systems that same way today as they did 10 years ago. Many customers are looking at making the move to the Oracle Cloud, and the PeopleSoft Cloud Manager can help them do it.

Emerging technology is another key area of PeopleSoft’s focus moving forward. It’s time to ask, “How can technology improve the human experience?” It can help simplify interactions, submit transactions, anticipate questions, offer suggestions, provide guidance, and more. One emerging technology that will soon be playing a big part in today’s PeopleSoft is a conversational interface—a chatbot. Chatbots are made possible through the Oracle Digital Assistant, which is already available. The PeopleSoft team is looking to deliver chatbots for Absence Management, Expenses, Procurement, eSettlements, Supplier Portal, Financials, eBill Payment, and Recruiting.