The Feature

New Features in Oracle HRMS Release 12

December 15, 2006 on 9:11 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press | 7 Comments |  Print |  Email

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remain at the sole discretion of Oracle. For more information, refer to the Metalink Note: 400061.1.

R12 will deliver a new user interface, which translates to a standard process flow, standard fonts, colors, and user-modifiable skins, and consistent navigation across all product families. R12 will also use Oracle’s 10g technology.

New User Experience

• iRecruitment – Completely re-designed Candidate Registration
• Absence Management – Updated business flows and entire look-and-feel
• Salary Administration – Vastly improved UX for Salary Information, including high-interactivity embedded analytics
• Competency Profile – Completely re-designed user experience

Oracle’s Top 5 Reasons to Upgrade to Release 12

• Supports HR Best Practices
• Reduces Administrative Costs
• Improves Productivity
• Key New Features/Functions
• Extended Maintenance & Support

The following are few selected new features that are planned for HCM in R12.

Checklists

Some HR actions, such as employee hiring, transfer, or termination, require the completion of standard tasks, such as printing contracts, reassigning resources, and creating users. The checklist functionality in Oracle HRMS enables you to link the HR action to a life event and generate ‘to do’ lists or checklists when the life event is initiated.

Global Deployment

This has been a long-awaited feature. Oracle HRMS Global Deployments function controls the temporary or permanent transfer of an employee to a different business group by means of a deployment proposal. In the case of secondments, which is a temporary transfer from the home business group to the host business group, at the end of which the employee will return to the Home business group, the employee in the home BG is not terminated and he/she will continue to be an employee.

Workforce Performance Management

Combines objective setting and appraisal processes into a manageable plan to track. Allowing consistency enforcement via corporate objectives and eligibility criteria, tracking objectives with copying and duplicating objectives for multiple appraisals during a period.

Salary Administration

New UI with the ability to delete, allows for gaps, end dating, retroactive and future changes in salary proposals.Display current grade and step on assignment with FTE on salary proposal. Viewing salary history of terminated employees.

Compensation Workbench

Manage budget awards across multiple currencies, business groups and compensation types in a single worksheet with a new task oriented interface with worksheet that can be personalized. Integration points between Oracle Incentive Compensation and Compensation Workbench are established so that target amounts, actual amounts, and commissions can be displayed on the worksheet. You now have the ability to change a manager’s location, organization, and supervisor within Compensation Workbench.

Sub-Ledger Accounting (SLA)

Sub-ledger accounting is an intermediate step between the sub-ledger product (e.g., Payroll) and the Oracle General Ledger. It allows multiple accounting representations for a single business event, resolving conflicts between corporate and local fiscal accounting requirements. It retains the most granular level of details in the Subledger accounting model, with different summarization options in the General Ledger, allowing full audit ability and reconciliation.

Applications Unlimited For Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle’s plan to continue providing ongoing enhancements to current Oracle applications beyond the delivery of Oracle Fusion Applications

Sample DataLoad Templates for Oracle HRMS

July 19, 2006 on 9:58 pm | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | 2 Comments |  Print |  Email

DataLoad is a good option to upload data from Excel to Oracle Applications when other options, like Web ADI, are not available. DataLoad is practical when the volume of data to upload is too small to justify creating a custom script with the use of Oracle APIs, or too big to do it manually (let’s say between 10 and 1,000 records).

Below are several sample DataLoad templates for Oracle Human Resources (HRMS) I used before, with their descriptions and navigation instructions. Note that these are only samples. You may need to modify the spreadsheets based on your application configurations. The blue columns represent DataLoad commands, the yellow columns is where you paste your data. Hope you will find the templates useful.

Create HR Organizations

Create HR organization names and their classifications.

Navigation: US HRMS Manager: Work Structures > Organization > Description

Start Field: Name

DataLoad: Create HR Organizations

Create HR Organization Hierarchy

Create organization hierarchy, define parent organizations and their subordinates.

Navigation: US HRMS Manager: Work Structures > Organization > Description

Start Field: Name

DataLoad: Create HR Organization Hierarchy

Update Employee Email Addresses

Update employee email addresses in HR. This email address is used to route Workflow notifications via email and must be the same as employees primary address in your mail server (e.g. MS Outlook) if your Oracle WF Mailer configuration does not allow forwarding of email responses (see the Do Not Forward Oracle Notifications from Outlook! story).

Navigation: US HRMS Manager: People > Enter and Maintain

Start Field: Full Name in the Find Person window

DataLoad: Update Employee Email Addresses

Transfer Employees

Oracle Human Resources provides several flexible options to mass update employees and employee assignments. However, when transferring employees between organizations, you can only update their HR organizations and not their Default Purchasing Information when using Mass Updates. The Purchasing Information is critical for accurate approvals and accounting of employee requisitions and expense reports. This is where DataLoad came in handy.

Navigation: US HRMS Manager: People > Enter and Maintain

Start Field: Full Name in the Find Person window

DataLoad: Transfer Employees

How to Find Active Employees, Users and Responsibilities

May 17, 2006 on 11:01 am | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Here is a query you may find useful when maintainig users, doing SOX 404 controls audit, creating new users for existing employees in Oracle eBusiness Applications . Use it to find active employees, contingent workers and their user accounts and responsibilities. You will need to know the person_type_id for employees and contingent workers.

Employees, Users and Responsibilities Query

Find Active Employees, Contingent Workers and Users Query

March 6, 2006 on 9:07 am | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Here is a query you may find useful when maintaing users in Oracle. Use it to find active employees, contingent workers and their user accounts in Oracle Applications. You will need to know person_type_id for employees and contingent workers.

Employees and Users Query.zip

Welcome Aboard, Contingent Workers!

February 26, 2006 on 9:00 am | by Marian Crkon | In Reviews | 1 Comment |  Print |  Email

Open the gates! Roll out the red carpet! Start the music! Contingent workers have arrived in Oracle Applications (Release 10.5.10)! Who are those contingent workers anyway? I define them as individuals working for your business, but not on your payroll.

You are probably thinking what the big deal is, right? Well, it’s big because contractors can now enter time and expenses in Oracle, and we are done with all the ugly workarounds and customizations we had to do in the past! Somehow, it took Oracle several years to provide this functionality, but it’s better late than never. Contingent workers are here, and they look fabulous!

How It Works…

• In Human Resources (must be a fully installed HR), you can define contingent workers as persons with a separate person type ‘Contingent Worker’. You can define their assignments, assignment rates, and attach them to their suppliers – either their agencies or their respective 1099 suppliers.
• In Oracle Time and Labor (OTL), contingent workers can now enter time the same way employees do.
• In Oracle Internet Expenses (iExpenses), contingent workers can now enter expense reports the same way employees can. When expense reports are imported into Payables, they become invoices under suppliers that are assigned to contingent workers in HR.
• Contingent worker time and expenses can now be imported into Projects to be costed and/or billed according to your company’s needs.
• Contingent worker labor costs can be calculated either based on their Purchase Order, or Hourly Rates defined in Projects. Using the Labor Costing Extension, you can calculate their costs based on their assignment rate maintained in HR.
• You can define separate accounting rules for contingent worker costs and revenue, thanks to Person Type being a separate parameter in the AutoAccounting rules.
• You have an option to send, or not to send, contingent worker labor costs to General Ledger.

People keep asking me about the gotchas, hidden bugs and surprises. I can’t believe your expectations are so low! There are none. We found everything described above working as designed. Well, for most part…

.. What Could Work Better

• WebADI Transaction Import does not distinguish between person types, and hence does not recognize contingent workers. If you are planning on uploading a larger volume of contingent worker expenses into Projects (e.g. data conversions) using the Web ADI upload, it won’t work.
• The Streamline Interface Process (XL option), which interfaces labor costs from Projects to General Ledger, does not work for contingent worker costs, if they are being interfaced alone. It workrs fine if you interface them with employee costs. I understand this is an existing bug fixed in the next release.
• Contingent Worker and Supplier Start Dates Be careful about the start dates! If contingent worker record in HR has an earlier start date than his supplier record in Payables, and if contingent worker incurred expenses during that timeframe, his expense reports will fail, because “Supplier is Not Active”. In addition, there is no supplier start date, so fixing it is a lot of fun. See Contingent Worker and His Supplier Start Dates feature of the week.
• Contingent Worker Assignment Rate Start Date. Here is a little gotcha for you. Make sure you set this date far enough in the past so that you can cost any legacy timecards. Once you define the first assignment rate, you cannot define another before it.

Share your experience with contingent workers with others. Let the rest of us know what worked and what didn’t.

Contingent Worker and Her Supplier Start Date

January 31, 2006 on 3:50 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Feature of the Week | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

You can encounter this feature if you are using Oracle iExpenses and Oracle Payables with contingent workers.

The Feature

A contingent worker starts working on a specific date. Her AP supplier record is not created until few days later. So the effective date of her HR assignment starts before her supplier record was created. When a contingent worker then tries to enter her expenses for the dates prior to the existence her AP supplier record, Oracle rejects the expense report.

The Workaround

Ugly, but there is one … The user has to create and submit an expense report with an item date AFTER the date her supplier record was created. Once she created and submitted the expense report (it can be withdrawn and deleted if needed), she will then be able to submit her expenses for the dates prior to the creation date the supplier record, but after her start date as a contingent worker. There isn’t a way to change supplier start date.