WestRock is recognized for deploying PeopleSoft HCM’s Fluid user interface, Guided Self Service, SmartHR templates and WorkCenters to more than 30 countries in more than 10 languages, all powered by Selective Adoption which allowed the organization to pick and choose the specific functionality they needed to meet their immediate business demands, without a costly upgrade or the requirement to deploy and test unwanted functionality.
After RockTenn and MWV were merged to form WestRock, we had to roll out PeopleSoft to over 30 countries in Europe, South America, Asia and Australia in multiple languages in order to extend PeopleSoft to former MWV locations.
Post merger, WestRock chose Fluid Self Service as the employee self service option, GSS to perform MSS actions and Smart HR Templates for Hire/ReHires for all Global countries. We first did a pilot for Mexico and India, then there was no looking back until it was extended to over 30 countries and 10+ languages.
Implementation of Fluid ESS and GSS in phases also prompted us to make use of some very simple, free (part of tools license) but effective Portal features like pagelets, navigation collections etc.
From a Technical standpoint - GSS is a powerful, versatile and configurable solution for a majority of our requirements that had to cater to 30+ countries. Though GSS was delivered to capture and write data to Position and Job Data components only, we were able to write data to other components like our custom bonus components module with minimal customization. Good part is that once customized for a country, it's configurable for rest of the countries.
Unlike most customers who would have extended GSS to Managers, we have used Group Build option as delivered and extended GSS to our Shared Service Center users in multiple languages across the Globe.
So, from our end user's standpoint, GSS has got a consistent and slick user interface for a variety of MSS transactions. The amount of training involved to use GSS is almost negligible (compare that to the effort required to create training guides and training them on how to use Job/Position Data components, what to/what not to key, what sequence to key, multiple tabs and all of this for 30+ countries and in multiple languages).
Smart HR templates (previously Template based hires) have been around for a number of years. We made use of this feature for our Hire/Re-Hire transactions for 30+ countries and it has been a breeze and fun to work with this feature. Our Smart HR Hire template is a single data entry form to capture everything that is required to Hire an employee – Personal data, Job data, multiple pay components, Bank data, Ethnicity, Citizenship, Bonus, Work Schedules etc, so that the users don’t need to maintain a checklist or go to multiple components to key the data.
Add to this, we have built a near real time integration solution between Corner Stone On Demand Recruiting application and PS Smart HR Hire templates. Recruiting data from CSOD get loaded into Smart HR templates in draft status within 15 minutes of a candidate is in ready to hire status and the rest of the hire information will be keyed in Smart HR templates and submitted by our users.
Just like GSS, the amount of training involved to use Smart HR templates is almost negligible. Our Shared Service Center teams use these templates extensively and it’s a breeze to key the data in these forms.
Add to this, our HRIS can expect to come up with new requirements in both GSS and Smart HR templates and be assured a super-fast turnaround time to implement it in production since majority of the new requirements can be handled by configuration.
Over a period of time, our custom application pages and run control pages had been scattered across different menus and so there was a need to re-organize them for better traceability and usage. This project was called “Menu ReStructuring” project. We believe with the implementation of Work Centers, this project is no longer required and can be scrapped. We are in the process of doing a proof of concept on the WorkCenters, once done we will not only be able to scrap Menu Restructuring project but also benefit from a lot of advantages that Work Centers provide for our users from a productivity and simplification standpoint.
Without an ability to pick and choose only the functionality that we would like to implement, it would have called for an upgrade or application of all images which would have potentially shelved our plan to implement Fluid ESS/GSS for a while and so we may have ended up building complex and time consuming custom applications in place of GSS and Smart HR templates.