A Look Inside: PeopleSoft 9.1 Enhancements
With all of the talk focused on the new Oracle Fusion HCM applications with their on-premise, on-demand and SaaS options, it seems that the old PeopleSoft workhorse of 9.1 HCM applications may have been forgotten. But wait! Here comes the latest feature pack (v2.0) which shines some new light on the PeopleSoft HCM suite.
PeopleSoft 9.1 HCM Feature Pack 2.0 has a Fusion flavor to it: usability enhancements through the expanded use of related content, highly configurable/flexible dashboards and embedded reporting and analytics. While Fusion takes all this to a different level, taking some of the Fusion concepts and including them in PeopleSoft 9.1 better positions Oracle to stave off the Workday strategy of poaching their existing HCM client base.
Workday has been, in the past, been able to position itself with HR as the more user- friendly alternative to the many-clicks, menu-driven navigation and pages that PeopleSoft customers have endured over the years. With Feature Pack 2.0, Oracle has shown that it has authoritatively produced a user-friendly, efficient and modern user experience.
The embedded reporting now available with PeopleTools 8.52 can be used to counter Workday’s embedded analytics story. It still requires PSQuery to extract the data, but the flexibility and presentation of the data lends itself to providing the user the data they want to see in the way they want to see it.
With the Feature Pack releases, Oracle is also combating Workday’s strategy of saying that it will take Oracle years to provide new functionality and it’s a major upgrade to do. While Feature Packs aren’t released as often as a SaaS product releases (and many organizations can argue this is a good thing), it certainly provides customers with significant new features and functionality in consumable doses.
So while it is the same old workhorse of the integrated HCM suite, it is starting to have a whole new look and focus. Take a look at the latest Feature Pack and let us know what you think. In the meantime, here’s an overview of PeopleSoft Pivot Grids and how they represent your data based on PSQuery.
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