Deakin University

PeopleSoft Innovator

Deakin University continues their multi-year innovation effort, using PeopleSoft to enhance experience for their users

Summary

Deakin University continues their multi-year innovation effort, using PeopleSoft to enhance experience for their users. Most recently, Deakin University selectively adopted a number of new features such as the mobile payslip, export org chart option for administrators, and, announcements tile. PeopleSoft Activity guide and workcenters are being used extensively to improve integral HR business processes, automate contract expiration management and more.

Deakin University, used Selective Adoption to deploy Fluid Direct Deposit, Fluid Leave Cancellation, the Data Privacy framework, and more, and incorporated live data on Fluid tiles such as cut-off dates and leave balances.

Deakin University, upgraded to PeopleTools 8.56 and deployed the new Classic Plus style sheet in conjunction with their new implementation of PeopleSoft ePerformance, delivering the ‘fresh, modern look and feel’ across all pages that their users expect.

Deakin University, in conjunction with their partner Presence of IT, is recognized for deploying Fluid self-service functionality for their employees and managers, as well as showcasing the power of Selective Adoption by rapidly adjusting their project timelines to deploy Fluid Candidate Gateway just 8 weeks after it was delivered.

Customer comments

In 2019, Deakin has continued our commitment to enhance the DeakinPeople (PeopleSoft) user experience. We have selectively adopted a number of new features such as the mobile payslip, export org chart option for administrators and announcements tile. The announcements tile has not only been a great tool to communicate upcoming upgrades and new features, but also provided a quick and easy way to broadcast key messages to our users.

In conjunction with a recent major upgrade to PeopleTools 8.57, PUM 31, Deakin has also implemented major process improvements by re-purposing delivered PeopleSoft frameworks to meet our business requirements.

Delivered activity guide functionality was used to automate Deakin’s contract expiry management process for fixed term staff. Replacing the highly manual process, previously consisting of emails and excel spreadsheets, user friendly activity guides now enable both managers and administrators to initiate either a non-renewal or reappointment process.

This automated functionality has provided many benefits including:

  • A centralised repository for contract expiry management – removing the need for email approvals, manual spreadsheets and constant back and forth between our Human Resources (HR) Division and area administrators across the organisation
  • Visibility of end-to-end approval workflow including online acceptance from the employee
  • System-generated HTML emails providing consistency in communications
  • Reduced processing times due to the automated update of job and position data.

The adoption of this new process was immediate with areas across the University choosing to use the new functionality on the day of implementation. In the first three weeks after go live, 195 fixed term employees have been through the renewal/non-renewal process via the contract management process in DeakinPeople.

Another crucial business need was enabling access for managers and supervisors to view and download reports for their staff. To deliver this requirement, Deakin leveraged the PeopleSoft fluid WorkCentre framework to develop a new Manager Reporting WorkCentre.

The WorkCentre (accessed via a new tile under Manager Home) contains a suite of commonly requested reports from managers and supervisors. Managers can now easily access reports, such as staff profile, leave balances, timesheets paid and training enrolments, for their team with the ability to set filters or export the data to excel.

The solution is highly configurable, allowing us to easily add or update reports as the needs of our managers evolve. The feedback from staff has been extremely positive as it’s given our managers easy access to information to help in their decision making - something they would have previously had to request from an administrator or HR.

Deakin has demonstrated that you can easily overcome business challenges by using PeopleSoft functionality in innovative ways. Re-purposing delivered frameworks such as activity guides and WorkCentre’s has enabled us to significantly improve integral HR business processes. All development was completed in house which was both cost effective and enabled express implementation. This has resulted in many benefits including:

  • Utilising existing functionality and frameworks removes the need for complex customisations
  • An improved user experience for managers, administrators and staff
  • Process efficiencies and significant time savings
  • Increased access to information and improved decision making
  • Increased business ownership and reduced reliance on HR

Customer comments

In 2018, Deakin University commenced a two-year journey to enhance and optimise the DeakinPeople (PeopleSoft) user experience by introducing an innovative ‘DeakinPeople Program of Work’.

Deakin decided to leverage PeopleSoft's modern functional and technical capabilities, with selective adoption at the core of this program.

The aim was to deliver efficiencies for all users, streamlining HR processes across three key areas:

  • Manager functionality
  • Administrator functionality
  • Payroll functionality

Customisations include:

  • Live data on fluid tiles (including cut off dates and leave balances)
  • Enhancement to manager-related actions functionality (providing easy access to key information for staff)
  • Notification and alert framework with the option to subscribe, select a notification type, and create HTML emails with Deakin branding
  • Job data enhancements and field validation with audit
  • Custom page to record Staff Service Awards
  • Built application engines to automate data integrity checks
  • Improved management of sick leave with data readily available for managers at the time of approval (includes sick leave with and without certificate entitlements)
  • Fluid tiles for compliance training and reporting via IBM Cognos

Selective adoption includes:

  • Fluid banking
  • PeopleSoft developer home
  • Cobol trace tool for pay run errors
  • Continuing to convert Classic pages to Classic Plus
  • Data privacy enhancements -- sensitive data masking
  • Fluid leave cancellation

This specialised program of work is unique in its scale - a significant number of enhancements have already been implemented in the past six months, and will continue to be implemented over the next two years, demonstrating Deakin’s commitment to innovation within the PeopleSoft system. The program is particularly outstanding as these rapid developments are being undertaken in-house.

Maximising PeopleSoft’s modern capabilities, benefits of this program of work include:

  • Improved user experience for managers and administrators
  • In-house development that is cost effective and enables express implementation
  • A commitment to continuously adopt new PeopleSoft functionality
  • Positive user feedback with zero ‘go-live’ defects reported
  • Automation of manual HR processes, enabling significant time savings

Customer comments

Early adopters of the Classic Plus functionality to support the implementation of the ePerformance module.

The Classic Plus functionality in PeopleSoft looks great and offers the fresh, modern look and feel of the Fluid pages that our users expect. Some HR functions don't have the need for mobility - when Deakin launched the ePerformance module in January we promoted it as a tool to support great performance and development conversations. The conversation is the key. We want managers to sit down with their staff and have a great conversation - the outcomes of this are then recorded in the ePerformance module. Deakin upgraded its version of PeopleTools in conjunction with implementing ePerformance specifically to enable the Classic Plus look and feel over the ePerformance pages.

Deakin embarked on a ‘Get Me Current’ exercise as an baseline to enable Self Service transformation for their employees and managers. The transformation of Self Service was scoped to include the roll out of Fluid including some minor customisations to meet the requirements of their users; user experience was the key driver for the changes. At the outset of the project, Fluid Candidate Gateway was not yet released therefore they had planned to remain with classic CG and wait for the delivered version. When the Fluid CG came out after the commencement of the Build phase, Deakin acted quickly to assess and roll this into scope, seizing the opportunity to further enhance the user experience with this change.

The innovation displayed by Deakin is evident in their approach to utilising and maximising PeopleSoft’s delivered functionality by acting extremely quickly and assessing the risk of bringing in a late scope change. Deakin committed to the challenge of being the first user to roll out Fluid CG and quickly resolved and worked around any bugs found and adjusted their change plan to suit.