Over the past decade, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has transformed its PeopleSoft platform. To help other organizations find success with HCM and FSCM, Daniel Rech, Director of Information Systems for BIDMC, shared his company’s journey with Fluid UI.
About Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)
Recognized as a world-class teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, BIDMC is the home of 673 hospital beds, 5000 annual births, 40,656 inpatient discharges, 57,224 emergency visits, and 643, 975 outpatient visits. The hospital consistently ranks as a national leader among independent hospitals in the National Institute of Health funding, with $250 million in their research portfolio, 2,000 private investigators, technicians, and staff, and 2,500 active clinical research studies.
BIDMC’s PeopleSoft Environment
BIDMC initially implemented HCM in 1996. In 2003, they added FSCM to their portfolio. Since that time, the company has received recognition as a PeopleSoft Innovator in the areas of configuration, Selective Adoption, and user experience.
BIDMC’s HCM environment includes 11,000 casual users and 150 power users working with PUM image 26 and PT 8.56. The FSCM environment is comprised of 1,200 casual users and 150 power users with updates up to PUM image 21 and PT 8.56.
BIDMC’s approach to adopting Fluid user interface (UI) evolved over time after first rolling out Fluid with HCM 9.2 in 2016. The initial homepages had very few tiles – a few that were delivered plus several navigation collections that were built using Tile Wizard and that BIDMC prevents users from personalizing. Little by little, BIDMC introduced new tiles and capabilities, including pivot charts/grids (actionable analytics), and then started allowing users to personalize their own landing page. BIDMC also took advantage of the easy and powerful branding framework to enhance the look and feel of applications while further improving the user experience.
Key Objectives for Users
When company leaders decided to adopt Fluid, they identified key objectives for both casual users and power users.
Casual users:
- Deliver a modern and visually appealing user interface
- Help users complete tasks without assistance
- Make it easy to roll out new functionality (ESS/MSS)
- Provide a uniform/standardized experience (no personalization)
Power users:
- Provide simplified navigation
- Enable higher productivity
- Make data actionable
- Allow them to personalize their own homepage (not initially)
BIDMC’s Fluid Strategy
The company’s approach to Fluid evolved over time, as described in the advancing steps below.
- Few homepages, limited and fixed set of tiles geared towards the self-service user, and no personalization
- Additional homepages and additional navigation collections and direct link tiles
- Personalization for power users and branding
- Pivot charts and grids for actionable results and custom Fluid pages (MSS widgets)
User Feedback on Fluid UI
Once the Fluid UI was complete, BIDMC received positive feedback from casual users, but power users gave mixed reviews:
- They did not like the NavBar Navigator
- Favorites worked well for individuals but not teams
- Navigation collections became team favorites
- Grouping links into folders was a big advantage over long lists of personal favorites
At implementation time, Global Search hadn’t been enabled in HCM, so BIDMC leveraged the portal navigation tool to create its own custom search utility. Users would search by menu item names, and the search utility was pinned to the NavBar for access from anywhere.
Once employees felt comfortable with Fluid pages, the implementation team branded the site and allowed power users to personalize their homepages. Additionally, leaders developed their own Fluid pages for employee engagement and introduced analytic tiles to help users visualize data.
Challenges Faced
Along the way, the BIDMC team ran into a few “gotchas:”
- Oracle Support Doc ID 2140992.1
- Related content is not usable in the Fluid Navigation Collection page. As per PeopleTools development feedback, the reported issue is not a bug.
- PeopleTools 8.56 PeopleBooks
- The related content frame configured for a classic page will not be displayed when that page is rendered inside any fluid wrapper, such as in a fluid activity guide or in the fluid master/detail container.
- Workarounds
- Configure navigation collection links to open a new window or use page level related actions instead of component level related content.
Tips & Tricks
To guard against browser issues with your system, Rech shared the following steps:
- Identify which browsers are commonly used in your organizations
- Test with each of those browsers to ensure that pages and functionality works properly
- When users run into odd errors that you can’t replicate, try having them delete browsing history (cache)
- Each browser has unique settings and options for clearing cache; make sure you know them
- Test in private/incognito browsing mode to confirm whether an issue is due to corrupt or stale cache
Additionally, the BIDMC team experienced various quirks when trying to publish new tiles, especially when users had personalized their homepages. They recommend help in the form of a blog post by Kim Marion titled “Where is My New Optional Default Tile?”
Another issue was the long time to load real-time analytics. They had multiple pivot grids and KPI tiles with complex underlying queries. To fix this, the team decided to avoid adding too many analytic tiles to homepages. Instead, they chose dashboards and began trying materialized views (snapshots) for the most complex queries.
Lastly, BIDMC was frustrated by no query expressions allowed on pivot grid axis, which they couldn’t fix, but Rech submitted an idea for a fix in Ideas Space.
Helpful Resources
These resources showed BIDMC how to add fun icons to the tiles, add style with the Tile Wizard, and place YouTube videos on tiles:
- Quest Oracle Community (That’s Us!)
- Sasank Verma’s Blog (Sasank’s PeopleSoft Log)
- Simon Chiu’s Blog (PeopleSoft UX Blog)
- Logesh Balasubramaniam’s Blog (Lean IT Designs)
- Jim Marion’s Blog (Jim’s PeopleSoft Journal)
- PeopleSoft Fluid UX Standards Guidance for Designers and Developers
To learn more about BIDMC’s Fluid journey and what’s possible for your own Fluid system, check out Rech’s COLLABORATE 19 presentation.