PeopleSoft FSCM v9.1 Feature Pack 2 – For You!
Just a month ago (February 16 to be exact), Oracle provided the latest version of Financials and Supply Chain Management (FSCM) in its Feature Pack 2 (FP2) release. At MIPRO, we’re pretty excited about the new capabilities within this FP, and believe that this one is for you.
From Oracle’s press release, FP2 delivers
“…new applications and capabilities for financial governance and control, healthcare materials management, and enterprise service automation.”
Why are we excited about this particular release? Well, as you know, we’re particularly interested in all things PeopleSoft and, especially, all things Maintenance Management. FSCM v9.1 FP2 provides some nifty enhancements in areas that are specifically congruent with our interest and expertise in enterprise maintenance management systems. These enhancements especially aid organizations that are geographically dispersed, but can definitely affect consolidated environments as well. I’ll take a look at a few of these areas in this post – only a few, because this release has considerable meat – while hopefully whetting your appetite to dive more deeply into these and other capabilities in this release. Some of the new features include:
- Enhanced GIS within Maintenance Management – FP2 brings you a fuller integration with ESRI’s ArcGIS Online enabling users to see the asset’s description and locate it on a map. And, the capabilities of ArcGIS continue to expand. ESRI states it “is expanding ArcGIS Online to give organizations the ability to manage their geospatial content and publish their maps, apps, data, and hosted services in ESRI’s cloud infrastructure.” This can dramatically lower the cost of performing maintenance by knowing exactly where the asset physically is and being able to schedule other maintenance tasks on other assets nearby. By the way, MIPRO has GIS working in a demo environment with FP1, but we recommend users upgrade to FP2 before using GIS in a large database.
- Creating Work Orders – FP2 includes streamlined data entry options (and user-set requirements, such as blackout days or mandatory item entry) to allow work orders to be created more easily and accurately. And, fortuitously, the enhancements include more functionality such as allowing the printing of work orders in the format you need with whatever attachments you select.
- Scheduling Work Orders – FP2 includes the ability for maintenance schedulers and technicians to reserve inventory items from the work order. This allows the dispatching of multiple maintenance teams or individuals without creating “deadlocks” where one team has some of the required parts while other teams have other required parts but no team has all the required parts. An improvement in Inventory’s Allocation Workbench makes this pre-allocation of specific parts (or lots or serial IDs, etc.) much easier than in previous versions.
- Approving Work Orders – FP2 has enhanced the approval workflow and made it much easier to set up and administer the approval steps your organization requires for work order dispatch. While workflow is native to all recent releases of FSCM, FP2 provides simplified and more powerful capabilities. Unnecessary paper can be kept to a minimum while the time-to-fix is significantly shortened.
- Reporting from Work Orders – FP2 has improved and simplified the reporting capabilities of the system. Data entry has been streamlined, accelerating the capture of work order information, so that management reports can provide better information of active and completed service requests.
The above enhancement areas in Maintenance Management are only the tip of the iceberg. Within FP2, there are even more Maintenance Management improvements among the several hundred to FSCM. These improved capabilities span the gamut from Asset Management to Supplier Contract Management. Because the FSCM system is highly integrated, changes and enhancements in one area – as we discussed, above, in these five areas within Asset Lifecycle Management – affect many other areas in the complete system. MIPRO lives in the FSCM area and we are really excited about sharing our knowledge and expertise with you. Paraphrasing a famous commercial, we believe “this one’s for you!”
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More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
