Modernize Peoplesoft On Oracle Cloud

How and Why to Implement PeopleSoft Modernization

Today, most businesses don’t have the option of doing a complete overhaul and restructure overnight to make room for innovation. Some of them have IT systems that have been in place (usually on premises) for longer than even their top veteran employees have been there. These systems hold everything together and if they were to stop functioning, business would screech to a halt as well.

On the other side of the token, spending the majority of your IT budget on just keeping the business up and running leaves too little room for innovation. In order to conjure up the resources to innovate, you need to trim costs somewhere. Additionally, to generate the flexibility and agility to innovate, you will need to modernize your existing systems.

PeopleSoft Modernization Service helps organizations discover new opportunities to find business value. Modernizing your PeopleSoft infrastructure builds more agile and efficient organizations that are better able to serve the public by optimizing your existing application usage, expanding your business abilities and reducing the complexity of your technology.

Several organizations that already have invested in Oracle applications and technology have experienced the advantages of modernizing PeopleSoft on Oracle Cloud firsthand. When they are in need for evolution as they migrate, expand and improve their IT systems on the cloud, they can do so without jeopardizing their priority to maintain continuity in supporting their company’s needs with the least amount of disruption.

IT is often considered a function within an institution that is not necessarily in direct correlation with achieving business objectives. For this reason, it often loses its significance as an essential contributing factor to the success of those strategies.

Modernizing PeopleSoft can help your IT organization address a number of challenges across the board that have a great impact on your company’s ability to consistently generate value.

PeopleSoft Modernization allows your organization to create value in the following areas:

• Adopting the latest advances in technology
• Upgrading or migrating your application and technology platform
• Transitioning capabilities to the cloud
• Integrating an acquisition
• Establishing new business capability
• Standardizing processes
• Consolidating operations
• Aligning with Oracle product direction
• Reducing the complexity of IT applications and technology

The basis of establishing a foundation and priorities that PeopleSoft Modernization services can offer starts with a comprehensive evaluation of the missing link between your business’s strategic objectives, current processes, and IT capabilities to connect the dots. PeopleSoft modernization and benchmarking provide a range of tools to help customers develop a modernization roadmap.

The proven approach that PeopleSoft has refined over the years allows you to build your roadmap in a way that bridges the gap between your business’s objectives and your business’s IT strategy and lays the foundation for planning and prioritizing the effect of future business developments on your IT proficiencies.

In this article, we’ll discuss the following:

• How to effectively implement PeopleSoft Modernization
• Transitioning to Fluid UI
• Feature analysis and customization for PeopleSoft Modernization
• 15 benefits of implementing PeopleSoft Modernization

PeopleSoft Modernization Planning

The PeopleSoft Modernization Service is designed to align your teams and overcome traditional organizational setbacks in order to generate buy-in to your modernization roadmap results. In order to adopt an effective modernization framework, there are key factors to consider.

Understanding Your Business Objectives

The first of the key factors in developing the foundation of your PeopleSoft modernization roadmap is to understand your organization’s business strategy, objectives, and goals for performance improvement. This can be achieved through interviews and executive meetings in order to identify and gain alignment across these fundamental elements of your business moving forward.

Analysis of Current State

This next activity reveals the source of the barrier that is in the way of achieving your business goals and strategic objectives. A series of structured, process-focused workshops can allow you to analyze your current state of operations and IT implementation. As a result, you will be able to pinpoint the areas that are in need of complete transformation to clear the path to achieve your business objectives. These key areas of improvement are displayed as a ‘heat map’.

Solution Scope and Charters

To further establish your PeopleSoft modernization strategies, you can take advantage of Oracle’s enterprise reference architecture and process framework. This will allow you to translate the “heat map” information to distinguish the specific processes and applications that are required to facilitate your business objectives.

Furthermore, you can compare the fit of potential solutions and modernization best practices with the unique needs of your business. Roadmap initiatives can then be built off of the identified essential factors of business benefit. These can include initiative objectives, scope, solution elements, and expected benefits.

Prioritization and Value Analysis

The foundation for prioritization is deeply rooted in examining your business’s strategic alignment, potential costs, and initiative benefits. Oracle provides the top in class tools for developing your PeopleSoft modernization best practices and determining the relative value of choosing to move forward with certain initiatives.

Risk Considerations

Modernizing your IT and infrastructure can come with certain risks. In order to effectively adopt a modernization roadmap, it is imperative that you have a plan in place to manage those risks, especially those that are unique to your organization. PeopleSoft Modernization planning provides the capabilities to discover those risks and develop proven strategies for addressing them before they compromise your progress.

Roadmap Development

With a thorough understanding of your business objectives, initiative direction, the current state of operations and IT controls, you can then turn your focus to your business and technology interdependencies, readiness, and risk to move forward with the development of your actionable and relevant modernization roadmap.

Transition to Fluid UI

Fluid User Interface (UI) has developed into PeopleSoft’s strategic approach for offering its customers an innovative and intuitive experience while maintaining a familiar interface at the same time. PeopleSoft has spent several years working on application usability and has quickly become a major component in Oracle partner’s PeopleSoft modernization strategies.

As we’ve seen with the last few releases of PeopleTools, each new installment includes enhancements to the user interface. PeopleSoft has also been working diligently at developing ways to improve the overall experience of using applications with the goal of making their systems more intuitive and efficient.

PeopleSoft Fluid UI is recreating the approach of the user application experience. It focuses more in-depth on the way the interface looks, where the user begins, where they go next, and their common behaviors and activities with the applications.

Fluid UI has quickly become an essential investment for customers and their PeopleSoft modernization goals. PeopleSoft has developed this new interface in order to assist its customers with building a solid roadmap to get the most out of their investments and maximize ROI.

While the existing applications on the Classic UI are more menu-driven, set up for backend power users, and focus on discovering instances and submitting data, Fluid UI is a modernized way of utilizing the system. It’s a mobile initiative that not only looks better but provides PeopleSoft customers with more robust and intuitive solutions.

Getting Started with Fluid UI

PeopleSoft Fluid UI has everything a new interface needs to be ready to launch for new users, including the following:

• New navigation paradigm
• Simplified UI
• Real-time analytics
• Ability to run on any device

First off, Fluid UI has a new navigation paradigm that offers a modernized way to present information to the user. It also provides a way for them to navigate directly from the data they are seeing, instead of always having to start over by returning to the menu. This is made possible by its new Secure Enterprise Search feature and how it offers related actions from each search result.

The second upgraded feature that Fluid UI offers is a simplified UI by providing application developers the tools they require to create simpler, data-driven user interfaces. It breaks down large components with several different tabs and complicated entries into pages that are much easier to understand and fill out.

Next, with real-time analytics Fluid UI provides relevant and important information to its users so that they can do their jobs more efficiently. These real-time analytics can be reviewed, evaluated, and ingested by the end-user.

Finally, the fourth and last requirement that a new UI needs to achieve modernization is that it should have the ability to run on any device, anywhere, and at any time. Users that are more casual tend to switch from device to device. They might work primarily from the desktop, but spend meetings using their tablets. Other times they might use their smartphones. Fluid UI has developed a way for its users to access PeopleSoft applications while ensuring that applications are responsive and adapt to the screen size of the device the customer is using.

One of the most strategic approaches to PeopleSoft modernization strategies, Fluid UI has transformed PeopleSoft applications to have a more information-driven, self-service oriented, and novice-friendly interface that is optimized for any device.

Fluid UI and PeopleSoft Modernization Strategies

Once you’ve adopted and fine-tuned the technical aspects of Fluid UI as a part of your PeopleSoft Modernization, it’s important to build out a strategic plan to discover areas in your organization that will benefit most from what the interface provides. Employees, managers, and executives can use the application to their advantage.

The features we discussed above make it easy for even the most amateur users to get on board and see success with Fluid UI. That being said, Fluid UI is designed to assist employees and managers with the following applications and processes:

• Expense Management
• Time Entry
• Approvals
• Real-time analytics
• Project Management
• Employee Self-Service
• Manager Self-Service

These processes are only a few of the areas that Fluid UI delivers. However, there are several other examples of application content that have the ability to benefit from the new features in Fluid.

If your business has other demands or custom components, Fluid technology has been built to move the application into the hands of the users that need it most. This type of analysis should be conducted before attempting to use Fluid UI for any project. It’s crucial that you fully comprehend the benefits of Fluid and ensure that its new features are something your business will benefit from.

Business analysts can pull from a plethora of information and resources to keep up with PeopleSoft Fluid UI product direction. In order to understand the capacity of what PeopleSoft has delivered with Fluid UI, business analysts can turn to the Cumulative Feature Overview tool. This tool shows all of the new features in each update image and displays useful information such as the minimum PeopleTools release required for you to be able to use a new feature and any links to helpful resources to learn more about that specific feature.

The Planned Enhancements and Features homepage on My Oracle Support can keep you updated with what PeopleSoft is working on for upcoming releases. You can also find more details and resources through the PeopleSoft Information Portal, including video feature overviews, PeopleSoft Talk episodes, and links to additional information. These resources will help your business analyst discover and understand which types of Fluid applications PeopleSoft offers that would work for your unique business needs and how to take advantage of them.

Feature Analysis and Customization with PeopleSoft Modernization

With an experienced PeopleSoft consulting team, you can access a full-service upgrade portfolio option that offers customization and can be set up to meet all of your upgrade needs. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s best practices, automation tools, templates, and delivery mechanisms can be applied to reinforce full project lifecycles. They have the ability to be used separately or together - whichever is a more effective option.

The following tools and services can be optimized for your unique business needs and objectives as part of your PeopleSoft Modernization planning.

PeopleSoft Page and Field Configurator

This PeopleSoft modernization tool is a configurable framework established upon PeopleTools Event Mapping. It offers the ability to do the following:

• Modify labels
• Hide fields or disable fields for data entry
• Specify a default value for a field
• Select a field for enforcing required edits
• Hide an entire page without Application Designer

The PeopleSoft page and field configuration allows you to define multiple configurations to the same component depending on the user role or criteria that is specified within the transaction data. It also enables you to tailor your page modifications to your customer’s needs across all applications, eliminates the use of Application Designer with minimal effort, and lowers the cost and impact of customizations and upgrades.

Kibana Analytics for PeopleSoft

Kibana is an excellent PeopleSoft modernization tool that allows you to create a dashboard containing a collection of visualizations and searches. In PeopleTools 8.58, the Search Framework enables you to create your own visualizations for PeopleSoft application data. Kibana offers intuitive charts and reports that you can use to interactively navigate through large amounts of data. Dashboards in Kibana are extremely dynamic and versatile — data can be filtered on the fly, and dashboards can easily be edited and opened in full-page format. Kibana for PeopleSoft provides rich analytics and visualization with performance enhancements, enabling better decision making and improved understanding of your data. Kibana Analytics doesn’t affect transaction processing, as the analytics are run against Elastic indexes, not against the transactional PeopleSoft database. In Kibana, a dashboard is a collection of visualizations and searches. The visualization is based on Elasticsearch queries on the Elasticsearch data. These visualizations are in the forms of charts, maps, tables and other diagrams.

Customization Benchmarking and Analysis Service

Astute’s PeopleSoft Modernization Service gives you the ability to take a deeper more comprehensive look into your business’s application customization and help you arrive at a complexity score. This presents you with the opportunity to get a better grasp on your organization’s customizations, while displaying how your business ranks against your peer groups and target areas for de-customization.

Upgrade Assessment and Roadmap

Astute’s Upgrade Assessment and Roadmap, provides you with an interactive, solution-based session so you can compare and contrast all of the upgrade options available to you and gauge readiness. Whether you are looking to get current with Version 9.2 PUM and Tools, or on an older version looking to upgrade to 9.2, we conduct an in-depth review of your existing application footprints, customizations, infrastructure and business processes, and lay out a roadmap and plan for your upgrade.

Functional and Technical Upgrade Services

Modernizing PeopleSoft may involve upgrading, modifying, streamlining and automating functional and technical aspects of your PeopleSoft implementation. Astute helps you review all of your existing interfaces and configurations and see how they compare with newly released applications and software and we work with you to extend functionality, allow for reduction of customizations, lowering TCO and boosting standardization.

Astute’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Upgrade labs are ideal for technical upgrades. The Cloud Upgrade Lab can perform a full technical upgrade of your existing Oracle applications environment to ensure that it is up to date with the latest release, while also providing your team with an initial trial upgrade. Additionally, it offers assistance for multiple test upgrade iterations which includes the final transition to production.

Isolating Customization in PeopleSoft

One of the many advantages that you can gain through PeopleSoft modernization is the ability to isolate customization in order to simplify the process of updating images and minimize the impact of change. By removing and isolating customizations, you can avoid disrupting the data and logic of applications, and continue to keep up with specific and essential requirements.

While the default offering may not be appropriate or realistic for all instances, isolating customization in PeopleSoft is ideal for several situations. Customization isolation can be done through the use of two different approaches:

• Big Bang
• Incremental

The Big Bang method requires a one-time effort only to isolate as many customizations possible. It utilizes tools such as event mapping, drop zones, and the page and field configurator, to their fullest capacity. It also allows users to plan for 80 percent or more of their customization isolation.

On the other hand, the incremental approach works overtime and addresses conflicts within customization as they arise. The user migrates customization when it displays an issue in a Change Assistant Compare Report. Over a period of time, product areas that are modified frequently will return to generic. This approach is performed in each PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM) application cycle.

The following PeopleSoft features help with minimizing the impact of changes made and isolating customizations:

• Event Mapping
• Drop Zones
• Page and Field Configurator
• Page Composer
• Forms Builder

15 Benefits of PeopleSoft Modernization

The trend of modernizing your IT and business objectives and transitioning your business onto cloud services will continue to rise as this new decade treks on. Oracle with PeopleSoft has transformed the core of how companies operate with its incredibly innovative engineered systems and integrated solutions that can be implemented on the Cloud infrastructure, on-premises, or both.

There are several benefits of PeopleSoft modernization with Oracle Cloud services, including the following:

• Simplifying IT
• Minimizing operational costs
• Speeding up time to market
• Improving collaboration
• Increasing operational efficiency

Cloud adoption and PeopleSoft modernization allows you to powerfully host your business systems, custom applications, and infrastructure on remote servers while remaining protected from data loss and without disruption of your operations.

Furthermore, PeopleSoft modernization strategies help you achieve the following goals and objectives.

1. Discover New Areas to Generate Value and Enhance Existing Value

The PaaS platform will help you guarantee your applications and software is performing optimally. Comprehensive Cloud solutions ensure lower capital investment in things like Datacenter or in-house and simplify the integration processes with your existing systems.

PeopleSoft modernization strategies can also help you by optimizing your existing application usage, expanding your business abilities and reducing the complexity of your technology. These capabilities allow you to focus on innovating and accelerating the growth of your organization.

2. Reduce Dependency on Certain Applications and Versions of Applications

PeopleSoft modernization can save you time and money when operating within a point-to-point architecture and upgrading to packaged applications, interacting with a newly added destination system, or completely swapping an application with another one. By utilizing PeopleSoft modernization offerings such as customization and de-customization, you can analyze the current state of your applications and determine which to keep and which to eliminate.

Furthermore, a proper integration design that keeps applications from being “hard-coded” to each other can allow for changes to be reduced to routing and mapping within the integration platform, which means that little to nothing on the applications need to be changed. This concept is referred to as application virtualization.

3. Optimize the Platform as a Service (PaaS)

PaaS is a Cloud computing model that provides the necessary hardware and software for application development as a service. This service can be utilized for your PeopleSoft modernization approach with development tools, libraries, and database management systems to promote complete innovation of your IT functionality and objectives.

4. Gain Services and APIs that are consumable, discoverable and application agnostic.

Along the same lines as application virtualization, OCI for PeopleSoft modernization explores how an integration platform can assist in making the fundamental applications irrelevant to those who need to use them. These services and APIs also provide a repository that presents the opportunity to discover existing services more easily and encourages reuse.

5. Streamline Management, Monitoring and Auditing

Managing and viewing the status of integrations is made easy by setting up all of your integration transactions to run through a centralized hub, which can be achieved with the right PeopleSoft modernization strategies. The more integrations you accumulate the more valuable this option becomes.

With the ability to scale, deploy, and monitor your services in one central location, you can reduce overhead and require fewer skill sets. Another key aspect is consolidating and managing your audit logging features with management tools such as Splunk or ELK. These elements are incredibly beneficial for audits, troubleshooting, and health management of your integrations.

6. Drive Granular Cost Control

Utilizing the “pay-as-you-use” subscription model allows you to achieve autonomy through self-service sign-up, management, and monitoring services, which is ideal for short-term ad-hoc projects without compromising your existing infrastructure.

7. Improve Data Integrity and Reliability

If you have multiple outside systems that are simultaneously developing their own point-to-point integrations into an application rather than reusing a common service, you risk developing inconsistencies in the way that data is queried or updated. This can cause difficulties in maintaining several point-to-point integrations. With PeopleSoft modernization planning, you can establish centrally managed integrations to prevent these inconsistencies and increase reliability.

8. State of the Art Architecture

Implementing PeopleSoft modernization with Oracle’s Solutions gives you access to the best of the best security and maintenance that offers a high level of flexibility and availability. Furthermore, you can improve lifecycle management, reduce the life cycle of integration and cut down on testing to allow for expansion across multiple business spaces.

9. Faster Time to Market on New Initiatives from Reuse

PeopleSoft modernization offers reusable services and APIs that work as a set of existing tools for central IT to take advantage of when building out new solutions or communicating with different lines of business. Additionally, a central platform allows for more powerful governance and streamlined processes for development and testing life cycles.

10. Accelerated Implementation

You can maintain more focus on revenue-generating engagement by eliminating workflows and customizations that aren’t working. PeopleSoft modernization encourages efficient and agile workflows, grows your business’s abilities and simplifies your technology usage so that you can see success faster.

11. Remove IT as a ‘Bottleneck’

By identifying the gaps between your business objectives and IT capabilities, you can modernize your IT to focus on building components that can be reused. Then the lines of business can leverage those components without having to wait on newer components to be completed. Furthermore, teams that require specific access to data for newly developed initiatives can obtain what they need with services that are already available in the library.

12. Promote Innovation

When you make services available for others within your organization, you’ll build an environment of innovation. Environments like this are what gave way to the major companies that have stepped into an industry and ‘disrupted’ it with their innovative approach based on existing services and APIs.

The same idea can promote innovation internally. When APIs are made available, people become creative with how they can improve their business tactics and strategies.

13. Enhance Application Agility

When considering the availability of engineering resources, PeopleSoft modernization guidelines can greatly improve and enhance application agility. The most agile organizations generate more powerful and longer lasting influence on their overall business efficiency using Cloud services because of their continued resource availability and internal IT optimization.

14. Ensure Business Continuity

PeopleSoft modernization provides top-notch Cloud-based disaster recovery and back up services to ensure business continuity and protection from risks.

15. Seamless Workflows

By ensuring that your IT and cloud services are modernized, you can optimize your business workflows across all applications that are intact with the Cloud platform. Oracle offers industry-leading modernization solutions. For example, Oracle Integration Cloud enables centralized alignment for process flows and uninterrupted business transactions.

Wrapping Up

It is imperative that organizations in this day and age keep up with the advancements in technology. The right Cloud service and software can help your employees work more efficiently, effectively, and securely.

With Oracle Solutions Modernization Services for PeopleSoft, you can modernize your IT and internal systems without compromising your daily operations. By implementing strategic PeopleSoft modernization services, you can give your company and your team the room they need for innovation and accelerated growth.

The benefits of going with PeopleSoft modernization are as follows:

• Discover new areas to find business value and enhance existing value
• Reduce dependency on applications or versions that are no longer of use to you
• Optimize as a PaaS
• Streamline management, monitoring, auditing, and gain new services
• Drive granular cost control
• Improve data integrity and reliability
• Enhance your application architecture and workflows
• Accelerate the implementation processes
• Improve application agility
• Achieve seamless IT capabilities
• Promote innovation

Oracle Solution Modernization Service for PeopleSoft allows organizations to explore new opportunities to create business value, builds more agile and efficient organizations that are better able to serve the public and optimizes your existing application systems. Expand your business abilities by modernizing your technology and simplifying the processes so even the most novice users can succeed.

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