Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) is the Managing and Operating Contractor for the Department of Energy Savannah River Site. SRNS employs roughly 5,000 people. The Savannah River site is located in the central Savannah River region near Aiken, South Carolina. This site has over 15,000 acres devoted to industrial facilities, research labs, and supporting infrastructure.

SRNS is responsible for:

• The site’s nuclear facility operations, with the exception of the liquid waste facilities
• The Savannah River National Laboratory
• Environmental stewardship and cleanup
• Disposition of nuclear material
• All administrative functions

SRNS processes and stores nuclear materials in support of national defense and US nuclear proliferation efforts. Additionally, it develops and deploys technologies to improve the environment and treat nuclear and hazardous wastes left from the Cold War.

SRNS’ PeopleSoft Environment

The company, made up of 51 percent baby boomers and 27 percent millennials, uses PeopleSoft FSCM and HR for finance tracking and management. SRNS’s Finance Supply Chain Management department includes 8,500 users and the Human Resources department has 7,000 users.

SRNS has been on FSCM since October of 2011 and HR since 2002. They are currently on Image 26 for FSCM and Image 25 for HR. In the most recent FSCM update, SRNS moved from Image 19 to Image 26—completing a full Image upgrade. They also updated from PeopleTools 8.54 to 8.56 and underwent a database upgrade from 11.2.04 to 12.1.02. They manage their entire system on-premise.

As the SRNS team utilized their PeopleSoft platform, they recognized a need for Page and Field Configurator in two use cases.

Use Case #1: Defaulting Values

Return to Vendor/Supplier is a problematic area for SRNS. The RTC needs to be entered correctly, and there are many handoffs during the process. SRNS only wants to use an RTV for Credit and Replace, not Exchange. If it is not entered correctly, downstream processing is not smooth—causing more work on the back end.

Before implementing Page and Field Configurator, SRNS invested more time and money in training. Even then, they faced frequent turnover and continued errors. They ultimately decided they needed a structural change. They could have requested a customization that would remove Exchange from the dropdown option, but the organization had a priority on low customizations.

With Page and Field Configurator, the team changed the default return action to Replace instead of Exchange. Users could still select Credit as needed. Exchange was still an option, but it wouldn’t be the default.

After go-live, the number of Return to Vendor use of Exchange moved from 21 to zero. This number may seem small, but it was quite impactful at SRNS.

Use Case #2: Page Labels

In the define item page, there are delivered custom fields reserved for an organization’s use. SRNS has a purpose for several fields and wanted the page/field label to reflect those purposes.

Without Page and Field Configurator, SRNS could have customized to the desired label. Although the customization would be low complexity, it was not the desired action because the company tries to stay away from customizations. With Page and Field Configurator, they were able to change the page/field label to reflect the desired label.

Life Cycle Management Approach

Life Cycle Management was one of the concerns that SRNS had. Just like with any new functionality, SRNS wanted to ensure that as they do maintenance components like system updates, PUM Images, selective adoption, PeopleTools, etc., they didn’t lose any of the configurable functionality that they set up with Page and Field Configurator.

The approach that they came up with meant that verification of Page and Field Configurator use would need to be included as part of a PUM Image update project to assess the impacts. There is a tool that provides a mechanism to validate the component, but it provides very limited information.

Moving Forward

SRNS made these changes with Page and Field Configurator near July 2018. A few months later, in November, they still had zero occurrences of Exchange since the time of their implementation.

Another potential use case that they found after their July implementation was to use Page and Field Configurator to hide tabs on a page (Report Manager). However, they determined that the best approach was to utilize security permission lists instead.

They found one issue during the refresh of environments where the configuration was brought down but did not seems to be applied to the portal registry. However, the IT team was able to update the refresh script and fix the problem.

To hear more about SRNS’ use cases and see what Page and Field Configurator can do for your organization, check out the full presentation from Savannah River Nuclear Solutions attached below.

Additional Resources

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