Why HCM Image 36 is so important to every PeopleSoft HCM customer?

The PeopleSoft team is excited to announce that Image 36 has finally arrived! In terms of new functionality and potential benefit to PeopleSoft customers, Image 36 is one of the most impactful images delivered by our PeopleSoft development team across multiple HCM applications.

Some of the key enhancements include:

Modernization of Job Data
Fluid Health & Safety for Employee Self Service
Fluid Profile Search, Match, Side-by-Side Compare
Chatbots for Benefits, Payroll for North America, Global Payroll Core, Global Payroll United Kingdom
Direct Deposit for Off-cycle Payments in Payroll for North America
Support for Regional Minimum Wages in Payroll for North America

Modernization of Job Data

Job Data Modernization is the single most important feature you can add to your production environment that will make your HR administrators more productive, eliminate data entry errors, and help new administrators get up to speed quicker, using your PeopleSoft system.

The Job Data component has been in PeopleSoft for many years and is the primary component for HR Administrators to enter job-related transactions for their employee population. With Image 36, the component has been redesigned in Fluid to make it simpler and faster to enter data.

The component is now ‘activity guide’ based with like-fields grouped together for easy navigation
Actions are now configurable with Page & Field Configurator to allow you to configure which steps and fields are shown, masked, hidden, greyed out, etc. to the user for each type of action and reason
You have the ability to attach files to a job action
You have the option of routing transactions for approvals
Multiple drop zones are available to better handle your Job Data customizations
A new, configurable search page is included for Administrators to find employees with saved searches, commonly used search fields, and personalized searches

I suggest you do the following to prepare for deploying Job Data modernization in your environment:

Review an earlier blog post that highlights what key functional decisions that should be made upfront
Review this Job Data Modernization FAQ which addresses commonly asked questions from customers and partners
Review this Job Data Modernization Technical Red Paper, particularly if you have Job Data customizations
Let me know when you are planning to deploy Job Data modernization
You’re also encouraged to read the feature announcement blog post to know more

Fluid Health & Safety for Employee Self Service

This year Health & Safety incident tracking has become a high priority for many of our customers across all industries. Historically, Health & Safety has been an Administrator-only function for entering incidents in PeopleSoft.

Available with Image 36 is a new Fluid-based Employee Self Service Health & Safety module that allows employees to use their mobile device (or any device) to log incidents, illnesses, accidents, exposures, or potentially dangerous situations as they occur or are spotted in your offices, work locations, stores, facilities, campuses, etc. These incidents then flow through approvals or directly to your Health & Safety administrator for review and action.

Report Incident

The easier it is for your employees to report an incident, the more likely they will report them and the safer your work environment will be overall.

Check out this video for a demo of Fluid Health & Safety.

Fluid Profile Search, Match, Side-by-Side Compare

Profile Management is one of the most powerful modules within PeopleSoft HR because it allows organizations to track key attributes of their employees such as competencies, skills, certifications, training, languages, diplomas, among many others. It’s like having a structured LinkedIn database for just your employees. Tracking this profile data helps organizations gain better insights into the internal talent available within their employee base.

In Image 36, you will have access to a new Fluid-based Profile Search, Match, Compare feature that is unlike any other Fluid feature in PeopleSoft.

Find team members

You may now perform powerful searches of profile management items based on a requirement you have, for example:

You have a job opening for which you want to find the best internal candidate
You have to identify a planned successor for a key position within your organization
You are opening up a new location and need to identify who is best equipped to transfer
You are starting a new project and want to staff it with employees with the right skillset

PeopleSoft will match as many profiles of people or jobs in profile management that meet your search criteria.

Results of all matches are presented in a nicely formatted side-by-side comparison to support your decision making.

Chatbots for Benefits, Payroll for North America, Global Payroll Core, Global Payroll United Kingdom

We are a firm believer in chatbots becoming more and more of a preferred way for employees to interact with enterprise systems like PeopleSoft. It’s fast, it’s conversational, it doesn’t require waiting for a live agent, the answers are consistent, and it is available all day, every day. Since Chatbots excel at addressing common employee requests, they allow administrators to focus on more valuable HR responsibilities like talent management, strategy & planning, processing complex actions, hands-on counseling, and handling high-touch requests.

Image 36 provides four new chatbots for customers: Benefits, Payroll for North America, Global Payroll Core, Global Payroll United Kingdom. The delivered chatbots allow for employees to use the chatbot powered conversational user interface to look up their benefits enrollment, beneficiaries, paycheck data, among others. They complement the chatbots already available in previous PeopleSoft releases for Absence Management and Employee (Company) Directory.

To deploy chatbots in your environment, you have to be on PeopleTools 8.57.07 or higher, on HCM Image 31 or higher, and have Oracle Digital Assistant licensed.

Direct Deposit for Off-cycle Payments in Payroll for North America

Payroll for North America customers submitted and voted for the feature idea of enhancing direct deposit to allow for off-cycle payments to be included in our roadmap — and in Image 36, PeopleSoft delivered. Payroll administrators may now initiate off-cycle direct deposit payments to employees as needed, without having to wait for the confirmation of an associated on-cycle calendar. This will save customers time and money by eliminating the expense of paper checks deliveries while getting payments to employees quicker and more conveniently.

Support for Regional Minimum Wages in Payroll for North America

Image 36 provides an enhancement to the Minimum Wage functionality in PeopleSoft to include rates from local jurisdictions for situations where localities enforce their own minimum wages that are higher than that of the state. Administrators can now set up minimum wage rates for jurisdictions that are used in the payroll calculations and tips processing for employees who work in these areas.

There are more features included in this Image for which you can see in the Image 36 Highlights Video below.