Birlasoft deployed the Fluid user interface in conjunction with a hybrid mobile app to provide a single access point to separate PeopleSoft instances, along with deploying a custom-built chatbot for PeopleSoft transactions including leave, travel bookings, and approvals, as well as deploying PeopleSoft HTML e-mail approvals driving dramatic improvements in accountability and compliance levels (from 70% to 98%) and reducing approval time (from 9 days to 1 day).
We have implemented PeopleSoft Fluid and as part of PeopleSoft Fluid, Oracle provides the HTML5 responsive pages to be accessed through Mobile browser which deliver better multimedia and graphical content as well as support offline operations through local storage capabilities, without requiring special plug-ins but the challenge with that is that users need to remember the URL of the PeopleSoft system or need to make a bookmark in mobile browser to access these pages all the time which is not very user friendly and often due to this users don’t used this features in the way they should be using it.
To handle this problem and to increase user experience and compliance levels, we have created the Hybrid Mobile App on top of PeopleSoft Fluid responsive pages and with that users are now able to access these pages like a native mobile app without the need of remembering different URL for different PeopleSoft instances and functionality.
We have also created and deployed a PeopleSoft chatbot with both the text and voice options. So, now our employees are doing the PeopleSoft self-service transactions like leave and travel booking and approvals using both PeopleSoft Hybrid Mobile App and PeopleSoft chatbot and both of these are now also available on Android play store for download.
We are using PeopleSoft in Birlasoft for close to 15 years now and all our business processes are automated using PeopleSoft which includes PeopleSoft HRMS, PeopleSoft ESA and Financials. In all major feedback sessions, town halls and otherwise, users always complain of scenarios in which they were not able to approve a transaction in PeopleSoft system, specially sales teams and people who are always on go as they need to login to PeopleSoft to do the approvals but they were always travelling and hence were not able to do on time. Due to this, the compliance levels of our various processes were going down and in certain cases we had to put auto approval mechanism in place so that system auto approves the transactions which was not the right process.
To solve this problem and to give users an enhanced experience, we have Implemented PeopleSoft HTML email approval functionality in various processes including Travel Management, Leave Management, Procurement etc. which allows users to provide the approvals over the mail without login in to the system and system is getting auto updated. Within 2-3 months of implementation, we have seen drastic changes in our compliance levels and user experience and have received more than 100 congratulatory/feedback mails from our users telling us how happy they are with this functionality and how much time and cost this is saving for them.
This feature has increased the user experience and their satisfaction to a new height in using the PeopleSoft applications. Where in past users were not ready to use these responsive pages, they are now happily using these due to ease which has been provided by this hybrid app and due to this, the overall compliance of PeopleSoft applications has been increased tremendously and specially those users who are always on the go and didn't have time to login to PeopleSoft in their laptops, this has become very popular. This has direct impact on the productivity of employees and in turn on revenue generation.
Also from the technical point of view, this is a great achievement as with this approach, the maintenance of applications has not increased, so for any new change, we just have to change the main PeopleSoft application and no need to change anything on Mobile App front but at the same time we are getting the native Mobile App features and ease of use.
With this approach, we let our developers reuse code and create apps whose core remains platform agnostic, which reduces development time and costs while taking advantage of the flexibility of PeopleSoft Fluid.
It’s great achievement for us because this is what business users wants, a speedy approval mechanism without logging on to system every time so that day to day operations are not hampered, travel happens on time, leaves get approved on time and all other transactions should go fast. This has given them the confidence that PeopleSoft is and will be able to cater there business needs which earlier they were not sure.
As part of this exercise, we have collected some statistics to check the success of this enablement and results were fantastic.
For example, the compliance level of our leave approvals has increased from 70% to more than 98% per month which means that before this implementation, managers were reluctant to go to system for approvals and was relied on Auto approvals processes to process the transactions but with these changes, almost every manager is approving the transactions themselves which means a greater accountability and compliance, we are almost on a deciding point where we are thinking of stopping the auto approval processes due to increased compliance levels.
In another example the approval time (Time taken by a manager to approve the leaves of his/her subordinate) has come down to an average of 1 day from 9 days due to this implementation.
Apart from effort reduction and user experience enhancement, this is saving us cost as well due to increased and timely compliance levels.