Kansas City Power & Light created a pivot grid to provide management-level insights

Kansas City Power & Light (KCPL) takes full advantage of PeopleTools, Enterprise Components, and Query tools to provide necessary information to their internal and external users.

• Using Related Content and Drilling URL’s within the query tool, KCPL provides necessary information for vouchers pending approval. The information includes the purchase order associated to the voucher and the total dollar value of all linked vouchers. The related content results contain the purchase order number which is a link to PO Activity Summary.
• Pagelets can be found on each internal and external user’s home page and WorkCenter Dashboards. In eSupplier Connection, supplier’s are provided details about invoice status and details about items where the supplier logged in is priority 1. The item information can be downloaded into excel where the supplier can provide updated pricing, lead time and manufacturer information. Within each WorkCenter Dashboard, internal users have pagelets related to their job duties. The Inventory Dashboard shows users pending and open cycle counts, Return Merchandise Authorizations (RMA’s), Return to Vendors (RTV’s) and pick plans. Even the System Administration and IT teams have pagelets related to Integration Broker Failures.
• Related Content can be found throughout KCPL’s PeopleSoft System. Under Purchasing Attributes linking the Procurement Agent to details found under Define Item, such as the manufacturer. Related content shows the user purchase history, supplier information, contract pricing, and links that take users to internal SharePoint program sites. The supplier record has related content so users can easily locate payment and freight terms, payment and dispatch methods as well as the email address the PO will be sent to. Purchase Order, PO Inquiry, Contracts, and Voucher pages all have related content or as KCPL folks call them, ‘the magic button”, providing users with information they need. Related Content can even be found in eSupplier Connection showing Supplier’s information about our on hand balances for their items.
• Using Navigation Collections on the PeopleSoft home page, KCPL provides Casual users with quick links to tasks such as creating, managing and approving requisitions, voucher approvals, supplier information, approval levels, and delegation of authority. KCPL has also provided a navigation collection that links users to their internal KCPL PeopleSoft Blog where Systems Administrators post and store information about training, videos, reminders, outages, etc. They have also provided navigation collections containing various WorkCenters (AP, Procurement, GL, Supply/Demand and Receivables)

KCPL has nearly two dozen email alerts configured for their internal and external users. Alerts notifying requesters when their PO has been sent to the supplier, if their purchase order is over invoiced, when material has been received in the system, and when vouchers nearing payment haven’t been approved. KCPL also provides suppliers with email alerts when PO lines are past due and when acknowledgments haven’t been completed.

Why it's great

What KCPL has been able to accomplish with these tools is tremendous. KCPL is able to provide information to the end user in ways that keep them on the page and task at hand, rather than navigating away to find the needed piece of information. Best of all, it’s not a customization and it doesn’t require IT time and effort. For instance, the related content on the voucher approval page is forced to always appear and provides the approver with the whole picture- Purchase Order, Total PO line amount, total amount invoiced, what’s remaining, payment terms, due date and even if there’s a discount and when it’s due. It even provides a way to dig into the details. Select the PO link in the query results and the user is taken to PO Activity Summary where they can see everything from receipts, RTV’s, and all invoices associated to the purchase order. To find all of this information without the related content would take users all over the system, it was frustrating and often times, vouchers were approved and paid that perhaps should not have been.

The ability to schedule a system generated email alert to requesters when their purchase orders are 80% and over invoiced provides quick visibility into invoicing issues, before the supplier is expecting payment. These type of configurable options help KCPL save time, money and keep the business flowing- managing by exception and enhancing the user experience.

Kansas City Power & Light (KCPL) has created an analytic Pivot Grid report pulling together pending workflow approvals across different approval processes with different transaction and workflow tables. The pivot grid displays the total number of journal, requisition, purchase order and vouchers pending approval. The pagelet that displays the pivot grid also has a filter so the results can be filtered by department, status (past due, coming due, current), user or user's supervisor. An application engine job writes the pending approvals to a table. A query is created from the table which feeds the pivot grid.

It is great because the analytic pivot grid report is created in PeopleSoft where it can be displayed. You don't need to leave PeopleSoft and log into a data warehouse. The pivot grid displayed in a pagelet pulls together data from across different workflow approval processes and displays them in one report. The various approval processes all use different transaction and workflow tables which complicates creating one report. Four different SQL statements are needed to pull the pending workflow data for journal, requisitions, purchase orders and vouchers. The use of an Application Engine process to populate the table used for reporting allows the AE job to be executed as often as needed for close to real time reporting. The Application Engine job can be scheduled to run in batch as often as you like to refresh the results. The pivot grid chart gives an easy to understand presentation of the data with the capability to drill into detailed values and also download the data. The solution pulls together data using various tools in PeopleSoft for a very usable Pivot Grid report.