PeopleSoft

I try to keep internal events at MiPro (mostly) away from the blog unless they’re newsworthy on a broader level, because most internal gyrations have no context to our readership and therefore are a bit ho-hum.

As an exception, I’d like to take a moment to announce a new addition to MiPro that we’re very excited about.

For the past several months, we’ve been rigorously interviewing high-end candidates for a new VP of Business Development position, and we’re thrilled to say that search has come to an end.  We’re happy to announce that we’ve just brought aboard Tom Asby to the MiPro management ranks, and if you’re familiar with Oracle, PeopleSoft or Workday, you probably have heard of or worked with Tom.

Prior to joining us, Tom was at SAP America as a Regional Sales VP, where he bagged the highest total of net new wins in the Midwest region and 2007 and dramatically increased channel revenue via an impressive program of coaching and mentoring channel partners.

Tom has already started with us to prove that he could beat the press release to the wires.  He’s still being indoctrinated learning, but he’s already running with multiple things and we can’t wait to see what he brings to our sales and business development operations.

Welcome, Tom!  If you have any questions whatsoever, remember that whoever writes the blog is almost always right.

If you’re going to HRTech 2008 in Chicago this week, come by and see us.  Mainly, we just want to hear how your business is doing.  There’s a lot going on in our country right now, and we’re interested in how you’re dealing with your HRIT projects and the demands you’re hearing from your management.  Even if you’re at HRTech just to collect foam squeezeballs, come by and talk to us.

(And we’ll have foam footballs, by the way.)

While you’re visiting, cast your mock vote in our booth and enter to win our biggest raffle prize ever — a $1600 trip for two to the 2009 Inaugural ceremony.  You can even get your picture taken with one of the (cardboard!) candidates, which, as customers demonstrated at this Spring’s Collaborate 08, allows imaginations to run a little wild.

Of course, we’d love to talk to you about our nationally-recognized expertise and experience within the Workday, PeopleSoft and Authoria markets, and we’d be thrilled to show you how a consulting company can be different from what you might expect.  It’s what we pride ourselves on, and we hear it from our clients every day.

We’ll be in booth 1105.

And we look forward to talking to you.  See you there!

For anyone still wondering if Oracle has let Fusion go into a black hole and innovation has stalled in the mothership, Joshua Greenbaum emphatically says no:

Perhaps the most impressive, due only in part to the huge hype riding behind it, is Fusion Applications. Oracle gave industry analysts a two-hour mind-melting core dump earlier in September on Fusion Apps and is planning on showcasing some of the new functionality during Open World on Day Three. And here’s what I can say without blowing the terms of an NDA agreement I signed two weeks ago: Oracle has made good on its promise to deliver Fusion Apps, and has greatly exceeded my expectations in doing so. A very impressive debut.

Greenbaum’s post is filled with great detail, so check it out if you’re wondering about the application and innovation details Oracle brain-dumped at this year’s OpenWorld.

From a more macro level, just yesterday our PeopleSoft Practice Lead and one of our Senior Client Execs gave a report from the field regarding their observations at OpenWorld, and the takeaway is this: there’s lots of good things happening with Oracle.  Lots of good energy.  While Fusion has taken its sweet time and shapeshifted, sometimes strangely, over the past 24 months or so, it’s come out looking better than anyone was expecting.  People notice that, and what we have here is grassroots buzz from a company that is making products that take a message to the marketplace.

The next year will be a very exciting time in the Oracle/PeopleSoft spaces.  Watch.

So I’m wrapping up at Oracle OpenWorld with Jim Borne, one of our Client Executives, where I’ve been asked to be the subject matter expert for PeopleSoft Maintenance Management.  I’ve been at the Utilities Industry kiosk, and while the name might not get you fired up, there’s been a ton of attention around the Maintenance Management offering.

(Gratuitous horn-honking: MiPro has been the only consultant involved with every Maintenance Management deployment in North America.  It’s been a fun journey and I’ve learned a lot, and I’m pretty thrilled that we’re in the position that we are.)

Anyway, in no particular order because I’m exhausted and getting ready to hop a red-eye, here are some recap thoughts of the conference:

• The Oracle Fusion applications are really coming along.  If you’re planning on being an early adopter of this stuff in 2009, you’ve gotta check this out.
• Lots of buzz about Oracle Beehive, a brand new, built-from-scratch collaboration tool.  It gives users a very slick way to communicate and work together, and does an excellent job of tying together email client, IM programs, calendars, VM and conferencing.  It does all this behind the scenes so users can easily share (and collaboratively edit) documents, emails, etc.  Pretty cool stuff.
• The show is downright huge, which, no matter how often I come to it, always sort of startles me.  All the products seem mixed-up, the grounds are confusing, and in general it’s hard to find what you’re looking for.
• The general mood is very positive: there are lots of comments and good juju about the continual improvement of the Oracle products and the future of Oracle apps.  Pretty exciting stuff.  Nice break from the dour headlines.
• PeopleSoft customers:  you’ve got to be on the lookout for PeopleTools 8.5.  There are some major usability improvements in the app itself and the web 2.0 applications.
• Mobility is one of the huge themes here, and many companies are grabbing hold of this sucker and seeing where it takes them.  Most notable supporters in this area are companies like RIM (BlackBerry), Bluedot Solutions, HighJump, DSI and tons more.  It’s going to be huge.

That’s all for now.  Off to the airport.  Will post more from BlackBerry if I get a chance.

BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm’s insightful piece about Workday absolutely nails what we are hearing ourselves from our customers and prospects:

Ever since veteran software entrepreneur Dave Duffield launched his new startup, Workday, a year and a half ago, people have wondered if it could become the next Salesforce.com (CRM). Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s chief executive, had shaken up the customer-relationship management software world and created a company with a market cap of $8 billion with an online service that replaces expensive and complex traditional software packages. Could Duffield and Workday do the same? Just now, there’s growing evidence they can.

Workday has landed three large companies as customers—important votes of confidence that it can be trusted to handle some of a corporation’s most crucial computing tasks. Flextronics (FLEX), the biggest of the three, plans on rolling out the Workday human resources management system worldwide for more than 200,000 employees in the next two years. “Workday could definitely be the next Salesforce.com,” says David Smoley, Flextronics’ chief information officer. “Their model is in line with companies like us. We want to keep things as simple as possible and keep costs as low as possible.”

The other major customers are Chiquita (CQB), with 25,000 employees, and Life Time Fitness (LTM), which plans to adopt all three of Workday’s services, adding accounting and payroll to human resources management.

If Workday does a good job of serving these clients it will gain credibility with large corporations that are looking for alternatives to traditional software packages. “They’re in the phase where they’re getting big customers. If they do well with the rollouts they’ll get the attention of a lot of mainstream corporations,” says analyst Jim Holincheck of market researcher Gartner (IT). David Dobrin of B2B Analysts is even more effusive: “Workday is like the iPod for enterprise HR software. It’s a better and simpler way of doing things, and people can see it.”

Right now, ERP and SaaS have a (relatively) symbiotic relationship, even within the same enterprise.  But SaaS is clearly the emergent, progressive concept (intelligently discussed here in what is must-read reading for anyone interested in the space) and will likely attract an increasing number of devotees — eventually at the expense of in-house software.  ERP certainly has its strengths, but the SaaS model is becoming more validated every day, which accelerates the maturity/acceptance curve.

(thx Jeff)

In our recent newsletter, two of our senior principal consultants wrote a quick bit about the differences in PeopleSoft invoice matching functionality from 8.9 to 9.0.  We get asked about this a lot, and for most users, the differences can be somewhat arcane.  Because of this, I’d like to share the article.

Differences in PeopleSoft Invoice Matching from 8.9 to 9.0: A High-level View

by April Black and Jack Kochie, Sr. Principal Consultants

From PeopleSoft 8.9 to 9.0, some of the invoice matching and processing rules changed significantly, and we find many of our clients don’t know about the changes in any sort of detail.  At a high-level, here are the biggest-hitting changes:

• 9.0 includes all features of prior releases
• Expanded document association included (e.g. receipt selection)
• Expanded rules engine (contexts: summary, tolerance, global), which provide:
  • More flexibility
  • Flow control (allows matching – i.e. check all or check first)
  • Summary rules
  • Rule tolerances
• Auto-matching with debit memos
• Configurable matching workbench
• Expanded workflow

As for what we get asked about steadily, it’s the intricacies of the rules engine.

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