PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Management 9.1 PeopleBook

Preparing to Implement PeopleSoft Resource Management

To implement a PeopleSoft application, first design the system's business structure based on your organization's business structure, practices, rules, and procedures. Then implement the PeopleSoft application features required to put that structure in place.

This chapter discusses:

Employee source data options.
PeopleSoft business structure.
Organizational units.
Resource pools.
The Resource Optimization feature.
Storage of resource resume attachments.

Understanding Employee Source Data Options

PeopleSoft Resource Management requires access to current personal and professional employee information. If you use PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Resources 8 (PeopleSoft HRMS) or higher, this information is accessible from the HRMS database. If you do not use PeopleSoft HRMS, you can enter employee data into PeopleSoft Resource Management. If you use a third-party HRMS system, or an earlier version of PeopleSoft HRMS, PeopleSoft PeopleTools provides the functionality to create an interface between PeopleSoft Resource Management and other HRMS databases.

During implementation planning you must determine the source of your employee data. Three possible sources of employee data are:

PeopleSoft Enterprise HRMS application database.
An earlier version of PeopleSoft HRMS or a third-party HRMS application.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials application database, which includes Financial Management Solutions, Enterprise Service Automation, and Supply Chain Management.

This section discusses:

PeopleSoft HRMS.
PeopleSoft Resource Management without PeopleSoft HRMS integration.
Employee and non-employee source data.

PeopleSoft HRMS

PeopleSoft Resource Management is tightly integrated with PeopleSoft Human Resources business processes. You should use PeopleSoft Human Resources business processes because of their complete functional capabilities and ease of integration with PeopleSoft Resource Management.

When you use PeopleSoft HRMS as your employee source database, selected data that is used to populate PeopleSoft Resource Management employee records and resource profiles is imported from PeopleSoft HRMS using PeopleSoft application messages.

PeopleSoft Resource Management Without PeopleSoft HRMS Integration

If you do not use an HRMS database as the source for employee or non-employee data, you must update the source data tables in PeopleSoft Resource Management to maintain employee and competency information.

Employee and Non-Employee Source Data

In the Financials database you have the option to manage non-employee resources as easily as you manage employee resources. Non-employees may be contractors or consultants that your organization hired to do work for the organization. They may also be contract service providers that your organization hired to provide services to an end customer.

During implementation, you determine whether your organization's business processes allow non-employees to be established as resources. The effect of each option on establishing resources is:

If your organization allows non-employees to be established as resources, the resources' personnel status is visible throughout the system so that you can distinguish between employees and non-employees.

You can control non-employee resources' eligibility, maintain their competencies, accomplishments, and schedules, search for non-employee resources, and assign non-employee resources to projects and service orders. In addition, the Person Type field (PER_TYPE) appears on the Employee Data page so that you can further classify the non-employee. Examples of non-employee person types are temporary worker or independent contractor.
If your organization allows only employees to be established as resources, the non-employee's personnel status appears on the Employee Data page for information, but you cannot establish a non-employee as a resource.

Resources that appear elsewhere in the system all have the personnel status Employee.

During implementation, you also select the employee and non-employee source database. The effect of each option on establishing resources is:

If PeopleSoft HRMS is the only source for employee and non-employee data, you can review—but not create or update—employee records in PeopleSoft Resource Management.
If PeopleSoft HRMS is the source for employee data, and the Financials database is the source for some or all non-employee data, you can create employee records with the personnel status of Non-Employee in either database, and you can review any employee records in the Financials database.
If the Financials database is the only source for employee and non-employee data, you can create and update employee records in the Financials database.

Understanding the PeopleSoft Business Structure

As with all PeopleSoft applications, you recreate your business environment within the PeopleSoft business structure when implementing PeopleSoft Resource Management. Business units, setIDs, and tablesets are the foundation that enables the flexible grouping of your people assets while minimizing the administrative burden of maintaining organization attributes. This feature enables you to organize your businesses by dividing them into logical units other than companies and departments—a particularly useful feature for companies that are operating in the global market. This feature also enables you to control how you share your organizational data among those organizational units.

This section discusses:

Business units, setIDs, tablesets, and record groups.
Projects and general ledger business units.

Setting Up PeopleSoft Resource Management Without an Integrated HRMS

PeopleSoft Enterprise HRMS Application Fundamentals PeopleBook

Enterprise PeopleTools PeopleBook: PeopleSoft Application Designer

Business Units, SetIDs, Tablesets, and Record Groups

During implementation planning, familiarize yourself with these concepts:

Name	Description
Business units	A business unit enables you to track specific business information for reporting and other data consolidation. A business unit may be, but is not required to be, a legal entity. You define and implement business units to suit the organizational needs of the company. The data from one business unit is segregated from the data of other business units in the organization, although it exists in the same physical database table. The entire organization may have only one business unit if every department uses the same processing rules. Multinational or otherwise diversified companies, such as those that contain multiple cost centers, divisions, or subsidiaries, may have multiple business units.
SetIDs and TableSets	The accounting structure and processing rules for each PeopleSoft Enterprise application are defined in a series of control tables, or tablesets. A tableset is a group of rows across control tables, identified by the same setID, that allows sharing of control data among business units. Many business units may share the same set of data on the physical tables in the PeopleSoft HRMS or PeopleSoft Financials system. In order for a business unit to process transactions, it must have an associated tableset. In simple terms: The business unit contains the actual transaction data. The tableset contains the rules by which the data is processed. A setID identifies each tableset. You must create at least one setID even if you are not taking advantage of tableset sharing. You can have as many setIDs as necessary, but tableset sharing becomes more complex with multiple setIDs. Define tablesets when you implement PeopleSoft HRMS or any other PeopleSoft application.
Record groups	A record group is a set of logically and functionally related control tables and views. Record groups save time by enabling tableset sharing to be accomplished quickly without the burden of redundant data entry. Record groups also ensure that tableset sharing is applied consistently across all related tables and views in the system. The PeopleSoft TableSet Record Group control table associates a business unit or setID value with a setID value for each record group. One business unit or setID can be associated with different setIDs by record group. Group the record definitions for the tables that you want to share, as well as any dependent record definitions. If a new table is added to a PeopleSoft application, the appropriate record group may already be defined. However, if tables are added for a new business function, a new record group may also be required.

"Planning Records, Control Tables, and TableSets" in the Enterprise PeopleTools PeopleBook: PeopleSoft Application Designer

Project and General Ledger Business Units

PeopleSoft Resource Management uses the same business unit structure as PeopleSoft Program Management and Project Costing. As financial applications that define project resources—labor, assets, and material—and track and report the costs of those resources, PeopleSoft Program Management and Project Costing provide the link from Resource Management to the general ledger.

PeopleSoft Resource Management requires that you establish at least one project business unit, even if you don't use PeopleSoft Program Management or Project Costing. You may want to establish more than one project business unit depending on the reporting requirements per project.

Understanding Organizational Units

During implementation you must define your organizational units and insert them into a hierarchical structure known as a tree by using the PeopleSoft Tree Manager. For example, an organization can consist of 12 different companies grouped into three lines of business or subsidiaries, each represented by a business unit, along with a separate corporate business unit. All of these units—12 companies in three business units and a corporate business unit—roll up into the organization at the top of the hierarchy. Between the tree manager and your business unit structure, PeopleSoft Resource Management provides a powerful and flexible mechanism for defining reporting parameters.

Many organizations are composed of departments that fit hierarchically into a treelike structure. However, with PeopleSoft Resource Management you are not required to base your organizational structure on departments. For example, your structure can be based on geographical locations or job codes.

This table contains the primary areas in the application that depend on the organizational unit. Based on this information, and knowledge of your organization's business practices, choose the most appropriate organizational unit such as department, job code, location, or another unit.

Application Feature	Description
Owning organizations	The owning organization owns a service order, which is most likely the organization that sold the business to the customer and is responsible for ensuring that the requested services are delivered. The combination of owning business unit and owning organization are specified on each service order. Resources are tracked by organizational units. Resource Matching uses owning organizations to match resources with service orders. Users can search for resources in specific owning organizations to fulfill orders.
Resource groups	Resource groups are collections of resources grouped by organizational unit or supervisor ID. Resource groups can be defined and saved by a user, and serve two main purposes. They can be used to selectively limit, broaden, or redirect the search for resources to different parts of the organization. They also enable a resource manager to define the group of resources who appear on the Staffing Workbench - Manage Utilization page.
Reports	The Chart Resource Schedules, Scheduled Utilization, Unassigned Resources, Assignments Ending, Assignment Listing, and Average Staffing Time reports enable a user to indicate which organizational unit to analyze. For example, the Scheduled Utilization interactive report calculates resource utilization for the specified organizational unit, and has the capability to drill down to the utilization of each individual in the unit.

After you identify the organizational unit, identify the field and record associated with that unit. This field is the organizational unit field. For example, if the organizational unit is Department, the organizational unit field is the Department ID field (DEPTID). The organizational unit record is the table that contains the valid values of the organizational unit field. For example, if the organizational unit field is DEPTID, the organizational unit record is the Departments table (DEPT_TBL).

Note. Every resource that PeopleSoft Resource Management tracks must belong to an organizational unit that is included on the organizational tree.

See Also

Enterprise PeopleTools PeopleBook: PeopleSoft Tree Manager

Understanding Resource Pools

Resource pools provide an effective mechanism to organize human resources. They enable organizations to group resources into meaningful and logical groupings. These pools can then be defined in a hierarchy to establish relationships between different pools, enabling analytics, reporting, and capacity information.

In information technology and development organizations, individual resources are often grouped together in resource pools for planning purposes. A resource belongs to an organizational unit and a pool. Although resource pools can be identical to HR departments, you can configure them to best suit your organization's needs.

See Also

Conducting Capacity Planning

Understanding the Resource Optimization Feature

The Resource Optimization feature proposes the optimal staffing solution that eliminates inefficiencies and matches the right resource to the right project at the right time—based on your business objectives. The Resource Optimization feature evaluates all open resource requests against available employee resources for one or more business units and proposes an optimal staffing solution set. You can create an optimal staffing solution for each individual business unit, or group business units into logical sets to run the Resource Optimization feature.

The Resource Optimization feature performs a complex set of algorithms to generate the optimal staffing solution sets, and stores each current solution set in memory for access by the application. To take advantage of this feature, you must first verify that the Process Scheduler server has adequate system specifications to perform Resource Optimization processes. Your system must have the memory, storage, and processing speed that are appropriate for your business practices. The amount of memory required to calculate a solution set effectively is a function of the number of open resource requests and active resources in the business units that belong to the set, and the average number of days between resource request days of work and latest start date.

For example, if a large number of the resource requests in the system have a wide request time frame window (the number of work days between the start date and the end date) and fewer work days required, the start date has some scheduling flexibility. This flexibility provides the Resource Optimization feature with more possible solutions to consider.

Important! You should install a Process Scheduler domain that is dedicated to run the Resource Optimization feature on a separate physical server, or on a shared physical server with enough dedicated CPU and RAM resources for the Resource Optimization feature.

Understanding Storage of Resource Resume Attachments

PeopleSoft Resource Management enables you to attach a resume document to a resource profile to provide more information about a resource's skills and background. The resume attachments are indexed so that they can be evaluated by Resource Matching. Staffing coordinators and managers can also view and print the resume document for a resource when evaluating candidates, and they can attach the resume to an email and send it to a prospective customer.

PeopleSoft Resource Management uses File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers to store resume documents. To support the attachment of a current resume document to each resource's profile in Resource Management, you must establish an FTP server with adequate disk storage to store the resume documents.

Note. PeopleSoft software supports two types of data storage systems for document attachments—a file server or database tables. However, PeopleSoft Resource Management supports only one option for document attachments—a file server.

Access the URL Maintenance page for the RS_RESUMES URL identifier and enter the URL in the format ftp://<username>:<password>@<machinename>/directory name. The user name and password are critical, as the system uses these to connect all users to the FTP resume attachment server. The <machinename> is the physical name by which the FTP server is identified on the network. You can include the directory name on the server where the resume attachments are stored, or you can store the resume attachments in the root directory of the FTP server. If you store the resume attachments anywhere but the root of the FTP server, it is necessary to append the directory name to the URL.

Note. You should configure the FTP server on the same platform as the Process Scheduler server—either Windows NT or UNIX. The FTP server and Process Scheduler server should also be on the same machine. This will help facilitate resume indexing by Verity for the Express Search.

See Enterprise PeopleTools PeopleBook: System and Server Administration