Oracle Delivers Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Feature Pack Amidst Wide Customer Adoption of Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1

Snappy title eh? They know how to get to the point.

I'd have missed this but for a tweet from @PeopleSoft_Info - and that was tweeted again recently after initially appearing at the end of January.

In short, Oracle/PeopleSoft has a "new strategy" for releasing extra functionality between releases. It would appear that, possibly spurred by stuff like this from a prolific industry commentator, and an apparently growing acceptance (at least among the cognoscenti) that the future of HR Software lies in SaaS; Oracle has decided to release new functionality between formal releases.

For some reason, they have used the same announcement to trumpet the success of the latest version, 9.1, of PeopleSoft. According to Oracle:

Adoption of PeopleSoft 9.1 is over four times faster than previous PeopleSoft releases across all products. Over 1,000 customers are live on or deploying PeopleSoft 9.1. In addition, the customer base is expanding with over 350 new customers selecting PeopleSoft applications over the last 12 months.

I'm off to review these new features (and the Global Payroll Core ones recently announced) to see what they are offering.

ERP App Store

This is an excellent post from Jiju Vengal. It is a great idea, but (there's always a but)-

At the back of my mind I seem to recall that there is something in the licence agreement for PeopleSoft that precludes this kind of thing if the widget/app is written using PeopleSoft - but I may well be wrong about that.

I wonder if the march of SaaS (of which Salesforce.com is a leader) may overtake all of the ERP systems we currently know and (occasionally) love, thereby rendering it obsolete.

I don't pretend to be able to see the future but I suspect the arguments for SaaS HR systems may soon become so compelling that there will be a major shift of customers in this direction.

Absence Before Payroll

This came up again recently - and my experience at a client has been useful. In general organisations who are implementing Global Payroll and Absence Management do so at the same time, or do Absence after Payroll.

Occasionally it may be appropriate to do Absence first - however, there are quite a few areas where setup done in one module overlaps with the other. Briefly, things to watch out for are:

Retro config including triggers
Calendar and accumulator config

In our case, part of the Absence implementation had invloved removing all the delivered GP rules (for reasons best known to whoever did it) so we spent quite some time "repairing" those, too.

PeopleSoft GP Year End

This is as good a time as any to mention one factor in PSGP which as far as I can tell, is unique in UK payroll processing. Most other UK payrolls require some kind of cleardown and reset process to be run at this time of year (tax year end). PSGP doesn't, and it really takes some explaining, even though it means there is a whole lot less to do and to worry about.

Yes - that's it - there is nothing to do. Tax year to date balances roll over automatically and the system holds all the previous year's too. Automatically, no intervention needed. Keep calm and carry on.