Fusion HCM R8 - New Features - Text Replacement

Having worked for a long time on Fusion Applications, I find that customers really like the ability to use the page composer to change the look and feel of the system.  That's fine until the customer asks "Can I change all the occurrences of the word "Assignment" to "Job" please?".  Up to now, the answer to that question has always been, "Well, we could, but it will take forever, and do you know how many places that text might occur in the system?  It could be thousands".

But now, there is a brilliant new feature which allows you to search for text strings and find all the occurrences of it.  Then you can replace the text with your own.  But, it gets better.  More later.

So, let's step through this process.

First, as long as you have the correct roles, you will find a new entry on the navigator menu.  It's under a group called Customization and the workarea is called User Interface Text.

You must do this work in a sandbox.  If you try to do it outside a sandbox you'll get a warning message.

So, open a sandbox and then begin by searching for the text you want to change.  My examples in the following screenshots show the replacement of the text "Visa" with "Permit".  But, just imagine the number of hits you'll get on the word "Assignment"!

Press the Search and Replace button...

Then, select the text you want to replace and the replacement text.  You can choose to look for plural versions of the text too, or whether the text case should be used as part of the search criteria...

You can also look for the text in messages.  Now this is really powerful, because you would never be able to find every occurrence hidden away in the myriad messages in the system.

Next, you preview the potential changes.  This is where you see just how many places your text occurs!

Text....

and messages....

At this point, you can review the places the text was found, including the messages it is embedded into.  If you want to, you can select specific occurrences to change and leave the rest untouched, or you can manually change the results if you think they don't read correctly.

When you're happy with the potential changes you can save them.  As you did this in a sandbox, you then have the ability to control their deployment into the mainline system or export them to a sandbox in another environment.

This is a really powerful feature and one I can see we will be using a lot!

Working in the SaaS World

One of the reasons I haven't had much time to blog this year, is that I've spent a lot of the first 6 months travelling around the EMEA region delivering training to Oracle partners on Fusion HCM and Taleo.

Over that period, I've encountered delegates at our sessions from a wide variety of consultancy companies. 

Two interesting observations have emerged from this, and they are my 'observations' and therefore subjective.

One - a lot of people are having to rethink their view of implementing these types of systems.  SaaS changes the game and should also change the approach to implementation.  Not everyone seems to realise that the approach must change.  In SaaS, you really must understand the full potential of the functional tools the application gives you because these are the only way you can 'tailor' the application.  It is no longer satisfactory just to say "The application doesn't do that, but we can do you a customization (at extra cost)". 

Two - it seems to me that the smaller niche consultancies are the ones who 'get it'.  So, why is it that the larger consultancies still seem to dominate the market?  Answers on a postcard please!

Fusion HCM R8 - New Features - Workforce Modelling

We are working an 4 concurrent Fusion HCM implementations, 3 of them using R8.  So, I thought it was time to write a few thoughts on some of the new features that have come out with R8.

In fact, there's such a lot that's new in this release, I've decided to do one post per feature.

This one's about Workforce Modelling.

Workforce Modelling allows users to create scenarios related to organizational changes, such as hiring new people, moving people around the organization, etc.  The functionality is delivered via some new Duty Roles which are mapped to the Human Resources Specialist and Human Resources Manager job roles and also to the Line Manager abstract role.

Using this tool, you can show what the effect will be of making the changes.  The dashboard used contains a hierarchical display of the proposed reorganization and a running total of the changes and potential costs of those changes.



 Once the changes have been finalised, ALL the changes are sent for one set of approvals.  So, if a change involved a change in salary, position and department, that would be just one approval.

A very powerful and useful piece of functionality and a sensible approach to approvals.

As this product develops, we are beginning to see some very coherent integration of functionality.