MIPRO Unfiltered » business processes

PeopleSoft Clients: What Can Web Services Do For You?

Larry Zagata — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:11:43 +0000

In the PeopleSoft context, a web service provides external applications a web-based means of accessing PeopleSoft data. Web services are implemented through the PeopleTools Integration Broker (IB) framework. PeopleSoft Enterprise delivers web services that facilitate integration, including integrations with external partners, making processes more streamlined and efficient. Integrations can be costly to develop, maintain and upgrade. Any service which can streamline an integration and make it more efficient can have a positive effect on total cost of ownership.

Web services running through the PeopleSoft IB aren’t getting the limelight they should.

Web services should be explored when external integrations are a requirement. Organizations can certainly build their own web services integration, but there are out-of-box web integrations that can be taken advantage of to improve the PeopleSoft experience. We have summarized some of the new web service functionality below as described in the 9.0 and 9.1 release notes.

Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager. BPEL, or Business Process Execution Language, is a standard language introduced by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP to define composite applications or process-centric applications. It is an umbrella for standards and technology that can be used to reduce the cost and complexity of developing, deploying, and managing web services across diverse applications. These services can be created by an application and used by other applications. These services can be consumed in a logical sequence or in parallel. BPEL Process Manager also provides portals/interfaces for each of the applications to receive or send the services. These portals/interfaces also work with web user interfaces to facilitate an action using a service and external website. Using this solution, you can develop business processes that are portable across products from different vendors. This portability eliminates the lock-in that customers faced when they used EAI or Business Process Management solutions from pure-play solution providers.

Web Services for Chartfield Validation

Web services facilitate integration requirements for building connected applications for deployment on the Web and are especially useful for exposing services and service operations for applications that do not share the PeopleSoft Enterprise financials database, such as legacy applications.

A typical web service is a self-contained, stateless function that accepts one or more requests and returns one or more responses through a well-defined interface. Web services can perform discrete units of work such as editing and processing a transaction.

Enterprise General Ledger 9 uses open standard Web Services for Combination Editing that enables you to validate transactions from legacy systems up front. This means that you can use this enhancement to validate transactional data prior to saving it to the tables and that minimizes the time-consuming activity of reconciling errors after the fact.

Integration with Travel Authorizations

By importing pending and confirmed reservations from online booking solutions, you can use these services to create a travel authorization or an expense report and thereby maintain greater controls on spending. For those organizations that do not require the use of travel authorizations, the travel reservation can be linked and referenced in an expense report. PeopleSoft Expenses uses Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and web services to facilitate the communication between PeopleSoft Expenses and your travel partners.

Integration with Project Costing

In PeopleSoft Enterprise Project Costing 9, web services are available to integrate projects, activities, and transactions from third-party applications directly into PeopleSoft Enterprise Project Costing. These web services, based on industry standards, allow seamless integration and loading of projects, activities, and transactions from third-party applications. With a single, standardized interface, data integrations are delivered that streamline processing and reduce costs of maintaining multiple integration points in terms of time and IT resources.

PeopleSoft Enterprise Project Costing 9 provides third-party loader web services to which any third-party application can subscribe and send projects, activities, and transactions data to Project Costing interface staging tables.

Physical Inventory Functionality for Non-Capitalized Assets

Physical inventory functionality is extended to include non-capitalized assets. It is also enhanced to allow integration with third-party physical inventory tools by means of web services.

Web Service Integration with Mobile Devices and PeopleSoft Maintenance Management 9.1

Availability of web services integration with mobile devices grants maintenance organizations the flexibility of entering and retrieving work order data from a handheld device. Real-time mobile device integration fosters accuracy and efficiency in managing work order data and reporting from the field.

We’ll talk more about web services and mobile devices in an upcoming blog post.

Microsoft Outlook plug-in for PeopleSoft Desktop Integration

Desktop Integration uses web services via the PeopleSoft Integration Broker, and in the case of PeopleSoft Services Procurement, queues and synchronizes work order tasks with Microsoft Outlook tasks.

What I’ve given you here is a summary of some popular high-level web service functions that you can use for PeopleSoft technologies and business functions. This information runs far deeper than what I’m able to present here. If you have any questions about any of this, please email me. I’m more than happy to chat about this stuff.

###

More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

MIPRO Consulting at Oracle OpenWorld

Jeff Ventura — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:18:00 +0000

We’ve been getting a lot of inquiries as to our speaking schedule at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld, and we now have some details that we can share.

First, we will have our PeopleSoft Practice Director and ALM/EAM guru David Brunet making the rounds at this year’s OpenWorld. If you’ve worked with David, you know he’s one of the most knowledgeable consultants you will find anywhere, especially as it relates to asset maintenance and reliability. He’s consistently sought after by clients and even Oracle’s product teams themselves.

This year, he will be speaking in two ‘official’ sessions and have a steady presence in Oracle’s demo grounds area. David has also been asked to be a guest speaker at other Oracle-hosted sessions, but we can’t share them here. But don’t be surprised if David crops up more than the schedule below indicates.

The two official sessions are:

Session 1

When: Monday, September 20, 2:00 –3:00 PM (AutoView Enterprise Visualization Session)
What: Capitalize on Information for Business Process Innovation with AutoVue Apps
Session ID: S317893
Location: Marriott Marquis Room – Golden Gate C3

Session 2

When: Monday, September 20, 3:30 PM
What: Crafting an Effective Capital Program Infrastructure Applications Strategy
Session ID: S318164
Location: Westin Market, Street Hotel, Metropolitan II

In addition to these sessions, David Brunet will be available in the demo grounds area in-between his commitments. If you’d like to chat with him, the best way is via Twitter. Follow @mipro_dave now, and when he’s in the demo grounds at OpenWorld, he’ll tweet where he is. If you want to talk to him, reply to him (via a mention) and he’ll track you down so you can meet. It’s that simple.

(Plus, following him now gets you in on the live tweeting he’ll try to do during the show’s keynotes.)

Have any questions? Let us know in the comments.

###

MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Oracle posts.

PeopleSoft 9.1 Recruiting Management: An Overview

Pamela Brown — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:06:12 +0000

As any HR pro has learned from the past 18 months, sweeping changes in the economy create changes in recruiting concerns. Chief among these is the misperception that talent is easier to find now because of a saturated, supply-side market. That is correct, but it’s also largely irrelevant when it comes to smart recruiting.

Getting talent is not the issue; the raw applicant pool isn’t the clear answer. Finding the right talent, for the right position, at the right time is still the key. The challenge to HR is now to get to the right person instead of sorting through a hundreds of resumes in brute-force fashion. Having an solid, systematic way of putting the best candidates on top of the pile is even more important than ever; in other words, smart filtering and screening processes matter.

If an organization is looking within its own walls, sourcing right internal candidate is equally important. Why? These days, the candidate’s old job may not be available if placed in the wrong new position. Productivity is not lost just by a new (and wrong) person in a job but also as a result of lost productivity in the old job.

If you’re a PeopleSoft shop, how nice would it be to be able to tie these requirements directly into your PeopleSoft applications and business processes? Well, that’s what PeopleSoft Recruiting Management is all about.

General Description of PeopleSoft Recruiting Solutions

Applicant’s online experience

PeopleSoft’s Candidate Gateway allows applicants to set up personal profiles, upload resumes and attachments, search job postings, save searches and apply to positions, all within a secure environment. With version 9.1 your applicants will also be able to receive offer letters and related documents and accept or decline their job offer online.

Recruiter’s online experience

Talent Acquisition Manager (TAM) accommodates standard requisitions as well as continuous openings. In 9.1, there are integrated workflows to make the job opening process seamless, reducing the amount of time that the recruiter spends on the administrative aspects of recruiting.

Additionally, recruiters can review applicant or job opening information in a single view. To dig deeper in a particular area, the navigation is designed such that most detailed information can be accessed in one click. Actions are easy to see and track so that decision making is an efficient process.

The interviewing process can also be managed within PeopleSoft. Interview schedules can be set and guides and notes maintained online for the applicant. With version 9.1 these schedules can be directly integrated with Outlook 2007. The recruiter can check the availability of internal applicants, interviewers and locations and update their statuses as appropriate. There is also the ability to send one way messages to those without Outlook 2007.

It’s fairly well known that PeopleSoft’s TAM gives recruiters the tools to be able to quickly and efficiently screen and rank applicant information. How? Examples: applications that do not meet the minimum required standards can be quickly and easily isolated and responded to with a system-generated response. Those that do meet the minimum qualifications can be ranked according to the criteria that your organization deems important. This allows you to quickly focus on the top tier candidates first using an objective screening method.

With 9.1 these processes are made even more efficient. Prescreens can now be put into place to review and prevent an applicant from completing a formal application. The candidate will be notified immediately of their status. If the recruiter links an applicant to a job that they have not applied for, the applicant will be notified that they must complete an online questionnaire. In addition, candidate responses can be accessed directly through the candidates’ record.

Very cool stuff.

Other PeopleSoft 9.1-centric HR/Reporting Goodies

In no particular order:

All of the information you need to comply with OFCCP regulations is contained in the system. All applicant information (including self disclosures) is maintained, as are all generated system searches. PeopleSoft provides delivered reports that make it easy to comply with these requirements.
Successful applicants can be quickly and easily transferred to HR for hiring. The applicants’ data and information about the job opening will follow the applicant through the entire hire process.
PeopleSoft Recruiting Solutions can be integrated with external recruiting vendors. Using Oracle’s Open Integration Framework you can integrate this solution with any vendor you choose.
PeopleSoft delivers tighter integration with Profile Manager in version 9.1. Recruiters can do searches on more types of information. Profile searches can be run that will compare job vs. applicant/employee profiles and show the recruiter where there are gaps. People and job profiles data can be used to update requisitions making them more targeted and specific without increasing the time it takes a recruiter to complete this activity.
PeopleSoft delivers other, more generalized enhancements in version 9.1. Recruiting team members can now directly print job opening information and applications. Your organization can decide if the offer letter will be prepared in recruiting or HR. There is also rich text formatting allowing you to customize the look and feel of your posted job openings. Fairly minor stuff, but their value, UX-wise, is more than the sum of their parts.

I realize this is a high-level overview of a topic many HR professionals are asking us about. This is not meant to be a definitive guide. PeopleSoft 9.1 Recruiting Management is efficient and user-friendly, offering modern amenities such as powerful search capability and other workflow refinements. In the end – especially in today’s job market – it goes a long way towards making a tough job considerably easier.

If you’re looking at PeopleSoft Recruiting Management or just want to know a bit more than this blog post offers, please email me (seriously!) and I’ll be happy to chat with you. This is a hot topic among the PeopleSoft 9.1 chatter, and nearly every conversation I have with clients leads to other areas of consideration. The rabbit hole is deeper than you might originally expect – in a good way.

###

Related whitepapers (PDF):

PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: An Introduction and Overview of Benefits

Related web content:

MiPro Consulting: PeopleSoft Services
MiPro Consulting: Resources