At the heart of every successful organization is the ability to adapt and maximize the tools at its disposal. In the 5th episode of The PeopleSoft Connection – a Quest On Air podcast, hosts and PeopleSoft users Stephen Valentine, senior director of quality assurance at the Milton Hershey school and Brooke Repine, a PeopleSoft business systems analyst with Samaritan’s Purse, sit down with Joe Willever, Oracle PeopleSoft Director of Product Strategy, to explore how organizations are leveraging the Page and Field Configurator (PFC) to streamline operations, increase productivity, and enhance user experiences.
The PeopleSoft Connection – A Quest On Air podcast – explores and showcases how PeopleSoft customers are harnessing specific functionality and capabilities to drive business success.
In this episode, the trio discuss:
- The fact that organizations using PeopleSoft have historically customized the application to tailor interfaces, labels, field visibility, and data entry, resulting in higher maintenance and upgrade challenges.
- These customizations are labor-intensive, require IT involvement and impede staying current with releases.
- Page and Field Configurator reduces dependency on IT and custom development by allowing business analysts to change page displays and behavior, mask sensitive information, track a history of changes made by users and notify managers when transactions are added or changed,
- Adoption of PFC has led to the elimination of thousands of customizations, empowered configuration, improved auditability, and streamlined business processes.
Listen to the full episode here
A few key points from the discussion:
What is the Page and Field Configurator?
The Page and Field Configurator empowers organizations by minimizing the need for custom development. Initially designed to help customers avoid common customizations, PFC allows business analysts (not just IT or developers) to:
- Change field labels
- Hide fields
- Require entry for a field
- Make a field display only
- Apply default values
Key Functionality by Configuration Type
- Standard: Configure field visibility and labels.
- Masking: Protect sensitive data, such as SSNs, bank accounts and pricing data
- Change Tracking: Track and log who changed what and when, view before and after values and apply criteria-based notifications to managers when changes occur
Advanced Features include:
- Targeted Criteria: Show different information to users based on role, field values, or system variables like dates or mode of entry.
- Notifications: Integrate with Notification Composer to send alerts via email, SMS, or in-app messages when users add or update information.
- Insights Dashboards: Visualize change history across the environment, supporting compliance and audit teams with detailed, filterable logs.
Best Practices and Collaboration
Joe emphasized the value of collaboration between business analysts and technical teams, especially when setting up complex configurations. The “Advanced Options” filtering functionality enables IT to identify which fields to use in PFC to meet the desired outcome, while providing streamlining selection of fields to the business analyst responsible for creating and maintaining the configuration over time.
Common Pitfalls and Advice
Joe shared two key tips:
- When using multiple sequences within a component, ensure the “Apply Additively” checkbox is selected to ensure the criteria for all sequences are evaluated at run time.
- Apply configuration changes through the map to portal registry tab to trigger the right event mapping.
Advice for first-timers:
- Start simple—replace a customization like a field label change. Once you’re comfortable, add criteria and more sequences to differentiate display behavior using role or fields as criteria.
Brooke and Stephen sum up the impact: “Leveraging PeopleSoft’s built-in functionality amplifies our organizations’ missions. The PeopleSoft community—and tools like PFC—are central to our ability to better serve.”
The PeopleSoft Connection is available on 🎧 Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music. Subscribe to The PeopleSoft Connection via your preferred channel to get notified when the next episode of the podcast is released. The podcast hosts will continue to bring to you real stories and strategies to help you get the most out of your PeopleSoft products.