ORACLE SSHR: GET YOUR INFORMATION WHEN YOU NEED IT WITHOUT WAITING

A White Paper prepared by IT Convergence presented at Collaborate 10

Author

The IT Convergence Oracle HRMS Team

Copyright

IT Convergence 2010

ORACLE SSHR: GET YOUR INFORMATION WHEN YOU NEED IT WITHOUT WAITING

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Self Service for Human Resources Can Help You Help Yourself ............................................................................................. 3 Managers Managing Their Workforce with a Net ...................................................................................................................... 3 Employee Self Service: More than Just a Catch Phrase........................................................................................................... 4 SSHR Can Also Serve HR ........................................................................................................................................................ 6 Self Service = Direct Access ..................................................................................................................................................... 7 Give Yourself a Helping Hand................................................................................................................................................... 7

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Self Service for Human Resources Can Help You Help Yourself
Companies invest in an Enterprise Resource Planning solution like the Oracle E-Business Suite to help its operations and back-office transactions execute more efficiently. A key component to this goal is having timely and accurate access to workforce data to support tactical and strategic decisions. Depending on conditions in your enterprise, the demands the HR department must manage might make your request for information the last thing on the priority list of who gets what and when. For example, on boarding employees during an acquisition might take precedence over a request for a departmental roster. Oracle Self Service for Human Resources (SSHR) provides secure and user-friendly, browser-based access to workforce data that managers and employees need for transactional and decision support. Oracle SSHR is secure: You can configure it to provide data in a view-only mode or you can combine it with workflow and approval rules. This allows for the initiation of data changes that do not get committed to the database until the requisite reviews and approvals are processed. The SSHR forms access the same data on the same tables as the standard Oracle HRMS forms but without the need for the Jinitiator.

Managers Managing Their Workforce with a Net

To effectively manage their departments, many line managers and supervisors require knowledge of their workers data. The Manager Self Service (MSS) can provide users with access to basic information (names of all direct and indirect reports), as well as advanced information, (assignment data, competencies). The default security model for MSS is to provide access based upon the value in the Supervisor field on the Assignment form to limit data access to only those workers in their realm. A typical request for information fielded by the HR department is to provide rosters to managers who desire a current list of all direct and indirect reports, or to view the span of control. There is a default MSS view that can be granted to managers that provides a list of direct reports with the ability to drill down to all indirect reports by expanding the list. The data in MSS is the same data as in the base Oracle HRMS tables and application. Viewing the data in MSS provides real time accuracy that cannot be provided via a roster report that is generated and printed or emailed.

In this default view, managers can view the assignment related data such as organization, location, job, and hire date. A tab displaying Salary data and history can also be displayed depending on the access rights. Based upon Oracle HRMS usage, other tabs displaying Performance, Training, Absence, and Job Application data can be made available for managers to view.

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Line managers and supervisors may find it necessary to obtain the contact data, including employees emergency contact data. This, too, can be provided on a view-only basis via standard MSS functionality. Depending on the enterprise, it may be desirable to enable direct supervisors the access to update the basic contact data for employees who cannot readily access Employee Self Service (ESS). Several HR industry benchmark studies have suggested that the real return on investment in SSHR comes in the deployment of workflow and approval rule enabled functionality with line management initiating workforce management transactions. MSS has several default transactions that can be deployed to control for which data attributes managers can initiate changes. These changes are then sent to HR for reviewing and approval. The MSS forms use the same list of values as the standard Oracle E-Business Suite forms that the HR Professionals use. Thus, the same level of edit controls can be applied to the significant fields. The personalizations available using the OA Framework simplify changes to the look and feel of the forms, and to the fields presented to the line managers. Fields can be reordered, relabeled, hidden or flagged as required through configuration of the personalization attributes. Personalizations can be applied at the site level for all users. Alternatively, they can be applied at the responsibility, organization, function, or user level to meet specific requirements based on department, role, or geography. The Oracle Approvals Management (AME) module provides a robust and flexible means for creating approval rules that can be applied to different transactions. For instance, a transaction that includes a salary change may need to include a review/approval from the Compensation department to ensure policy compliance, but a supervisor change may only need to route through the supervisory hierarchy and to the HRIS department. This functionality allows companies to change the focus of the HR staff from administrative, paper-related tasks to more business-centric, partnership tasks that add more value. It is more desirable to have HR focus on tasks related to talent management, trying to ensure that the right people, with the right skills, are in the right place in the organization, at the right time. Many companies have an operating model that includes an HR Generalist or Business Partner who deals with employees and managers in a face-to-face manner, and an HRIS department that is primarily responsible for the data entry into, and report retrieval from the various HRMS technology applications. An advantage of utilizing MSS with workflow review/approval steps including the supervisory staff, HR Generalist/Business Partner, and HRIS department, is increased communications among these groups. Often in the traditional paper-based environments, managers send completed data change forms to the HRIS group for entry. But the changes are not communicated to the HR Generalist/Business Partner until several weeks later. As stated previously, MSS provides the flexibility to control line managements access to transactions. A company may decide to allow access to create and end placements for contingent workers, but not the hiring and termination of employees. Alternatively, access to change departments and supervisors may be granted while not granting access to salary changes. During the design phase, it is suggested that time be spent on reviewing the functions available, deciding on which ones will provide value to your company, with appropriate workflow approval rules to support them.

Employee Self Service: More than Just a Catch Phrase

HR professionals can spend a great deal of time providing employees with information that is stored in Oracle EBusiness Suite. Employee Self Service (ESS) has several default views that can be granted to employees to give them visibility to this data. Employees can use the standard views to review personal data (address, phone number, emergency contact data), as well as assignment-related data (job, salary history).

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Some of the most frequent communications between HR and Employees are changes in their personal data that are important in regards to payroll, taxes, and benefits. ESS can enable employees to communicate changes in phone numbers and addresses in a timely manner. The HRMS tables are updated with this information, which flows directly to Oracle Payroll and Benefits, and processed downstream. Using ESS to initiate an address change transaction can certainly be more efficient online than using a paper form that must be completed, submitted, verified and then manually entered. There a several more Payroll and Benefits related ESS functions that can be used. Among the most popular functions for those enterprises using Oracle Payroll, are the View Online Payslip and Manage Payroll Payments functions, allowing employees to maintain the bank account information used by Payroll to distribute their funds. There are two taxrelated functions; one for providing W-4 information at the Federal and State levels, and the other to view W-2 information online. Oracle provides companies with the ability to solicit and control access to these ESS functions in accordance with state regulations. The most common usage of the Benefits ESS offerings is the Open Enrollment functionality that enables employees to enroll in and make changes to their various benefit elections on an annual basis. If Oracle Advanced Benefits (OAB) is installed, the function to allow employees to make changes based on qualifying life events is provided. Another function can enable employees to view their benefit elections throughout the year, whether they have OAB or Oracle Standard Benefits (OSB). This can reduce a number of inquiries that are made to an HR department regarding options, dependents, and benefit rates and deductions. For enterprises that track education, certifications, qualifications and competencies, updates to these areas can be enabled in ESS. These submitted requests can be made subject to review/approval by supervisory and/or HR staff to meet stated requirements. If Oracles Absence Management functionality is used, employees can request a paid or unpaid absence, which is then routed for review and approval through supervisory and/or HR staff as configured in AME. Employees can query the balances for various plan entitlements, eliminating the need to make this frequent request for information from HR.

One of the most popular functions available in ESS is the Employee Directory. It provides a simple hierarchical representation of the enterprise following the supervisor relationships, using the Supervisor field from the Assignment form. The directory is populated via a concurrent process to synchronize the logistical data it shares with HR. Included are the name, supervisor name, job name, email address, department, location, time zone, and work phone number. If pictures, such as those from security badges, are stored in HRMS they can be made available. The directory functionality is turned on by submitting a concurrent request that does a full load on the first submission, and via incremental refresh loads. These can be run several times per day in larger, more dynamic enterprises. There is no

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functionality associated with the generation of graphical organization charts. Companies that want that will need to consider third party applications.

Another common employee request to the HR department involves obtaining employment and salary verification to support financial institution related requests, such as loans or mortgages. ESS provides a functionality that enables employees to provide banks and other financial institutions with secure access to validate employment and/or salary history. The employee enters the email address of the interested third party and indicates whether it is just the period of service information and/or the salary information that is being requested. The submit button generates an email with a secure link to access the specified data. The access has a three to five day expiration period, depending on the length selected by the employee upon request. One of the impediments to deploying ESS for many enterprises is the nature of the workforce. Not all employees have computer access to the Oracle E-Business Suite at their work stations. Some enterprises solve this problem by creating ESS kiosks in common areas (break room, cafeteria). Another possible solution is to work with the database administration/infrastructure groups to provide access to ESS that is outside of the firewall. Employees may access the site from a home computer given that adequate authentication standards can be met.

SSHR Can Also Serve HR

HR Professionals can benefit from the implementation of Oracle SSHR putting workforce information in the hands of managers and employees, reducing the requests for information and amount of administrative tasks they have to perform. There is another way that SSHR can directly help them. Publicly held companies are subject to stringent reviews by their auditors. Much time and effort has been spent establishing roles and responsibilities in HR complying with several policies and regulations, like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). One of the areas of concern in some audit reviews is that information entered directly into the standard forms in Oracle HRMS is committed immediately, and is only subject to post-entry review. The same workflow approval rules functionality used by line management in MSS can be tweaked and used by HR professionals as well, to alleviate some of these audit concerns. The standard HR Security Profile functionality, which creates the appropriate logical view of workforce data, can be combined with the robust, flexible functionality of AME to create a solution to appease both the HR and the Audit departments. The approval rules can interpret the data of the

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individual involved in the data change, creating the approval routing based on his/her supervisor hierarchy. This allows HR to initiate a data change that follows the same routing as if the line manager had initiated the transaction. Once the ESS and MSS responsibilities are in place for an organization, HR can take advantage of these menu structures to provide access to other resources that are not resident in Oracle HRMS. Policy and procedure manuals, as well as other desktop reference materials can readily be made available by adding an HTML link referring to the server location of the document to an existing menu. This deployment strategy can be used by organizations that have a desire to create an HR portal, but lack the resources to do so in another manner.

Self Service = Direct Access

The Self Service product offerings used to be called Direct Access in earlier releases of Oracle E-Business Suite. In many ways this name still applies. Through the functions in ESS and MSS, the employees and managers have direct access to the workforce data when needed. The main advantages to be realized by enabling SSHR are:

Decrease the number of requests for information fielded by the HR/HRIS staff by providing real time data and
lists via standard SSHR functions

Decrease the amount of time to complete data changes including posting the results to the database by
allowing Managers to use MSS to initiate workforce administration changes

Increase the number of employees administered and decrease the time to fulfill requests for information by
increasing the access to HR technology solutions

Improve compliance with administrative and regulatory controls by introducing AME governed approval rules
supporting workflow-enabled processes SSHR and AME can be configured in a manner to provide your enterprise with a secure, effective means of viewing and updating workforce data to meet your operational needs. This may free your HR resources from administrative requests, allowing them to partner more with the business they support and derive more value for all.

Give Yourself a Helping Hand

The IT Convergence Oracle HRMS team has helped dozens of enterprises rollout, support, or tailor the Oracle HRMS suite. Weve partnered with companies in almost every conceivable industry, helping everything from mid-sized regional organizations to large multinational corporations to streamline their human resources business processes, in addition to using Oracle HRMS in house. If you need to deploy or support Oracle SSRS or any of the modules in the Oracle HRMS suite, youre more than welcome to speak with one of our Oracle HRMS Specialists. Simply contact us at 1-800-6750032 or 1-415-675-7935 and we will be happy to set up a meeting.

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LEGAL DISCLAIMER:

The information contained herein should be deemed reliable but not guaranteed. The author has made every attempt to provide current and accurate information. If you have any comments or suggestions, please contact us: info@itconvergence.com.

IT Convergence White Paper: Oracle SSHR: Get Your Information When You Need It Without Waiting May, 2010

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