Within PeopleSoft 9.2, there are a number of new features that users will find useful, including PeopleSoft Activity Guides, WorkCenters, and Dashboards. Here, we’ll give an overview of these new tools and provide tips for utilizing them effectively.
Activity guides are a PeopleTools feature that allow you to define guided procedures for a user or group of users to complete. Whether that involves filling out forms while onboarding new talent, employees self-enrolling in your companies’ benefits programs, or updating personal information after a life change event such as marriage or the birth of a child, activity guides allow companies and users alike to efficiently accomplish these tasks. Users are presented with a step-by-step list of tasks they will need to complete in order to be finished with the task or activity.
Within Activity Guides, tasks are referred to as action items. These action items are linked to specific local or remote transactions or external URLs. The action items can be assigned to a specific user by User ID or to a group of users by security role and provide a hierarchical organization of sequential or non-sequential tasks.
Typically, activity guides are generated from reusable definitions known as activity guide templates. These activity guide templates and action items are defined and managed through pages available under the PeopleTools menu.
For example, an activity guide created at prior clients was used to set up payroll processing. It allowed step by step processing, including running payroll processes and queries. Each step was assigned specific security and notifications. This took a process normally stored in spreadsheets and automated it in PeopleSoft.
The PeopleSoft WorkCenter Framework provides a central area within PeopleSoft for you to access key components within the Finance, HCM, and Supply Chain applications. It focuses your efforts on your daily tasks, and your work is brought to you as specific and prioritized tasks arranged into groups and pagelets which reduces navigation time. The WorkCenter includes two different areas: the Pagelet area and the Transaction area. The PeopleSoft WorkCenter is designed with access and reduced navigation time as a priority. Users are able to access a component without needing to change pages or the query results.
One of the key benefits of PeopleSoft WorkCenters is that it can be cross-functional as well as very configurable, which provides users with personalized content based on their roles and user permissions. Creating WorkCenters is a straightforward process that doesn’t require coding or using Application Designer. WorkCenters are delivered for applications with four common framework pagelets defined, but not yet populated, which enables you to customize them to fit your specific needs.
Configuring a WorkCenter can be done in two ways: If you want to start with PeopleSoft’s sample configuration, use the Data Migration WorkBench to copy the configuration from the demo system to your database, or, you can configure each pagelet using the Common Applications framework Configure Pagelets component. More information and specific instructions for using the Configure Pagelets component can be found here.
PeopleSoft Dashboards are powerful features of the PS user experience that make using PeopleSoft more efficient and engaging for users. Within PeopleTools, customers have the ability to modify delivered instances or create their own dashboards to support the unique requirements of your enterprise. Dashboards work well on mobile devices and many of the activities users perform are suitable for mobile devices.
Dashboards are designed for specific roles and day-to-day work. As a highly customizable tool, subject matter experts should be able to create a new dashboard in just a few minutes. For example, PeopleSoft pivot grids enable you to visually display data in a dashboard. You can display data in different views by performing operations such a pivoting and filtering, which enables business analysts to interpret data in a variety of ways. Pivot grids display pivot tables and chart representations of data using PS query as the data source. You can use pivot girds to see different views of your data in a table, and you can also see the same data in a chart view.
Internally at Elire, we have used dashboards to implement our custom Scope Object Tracker Tool. As functional users as well as technical implementation experts, our knowledgeable team is ready to assist with all your PeopleSoft needs. Check out the PeopleSoft Services Page of our website here.