Saint Paul Public Schools moved all their PeopleSoft systems to Exadata Cloud Service

Summary

Saint Paul Public Schools, in conjunction with their partner psadmin.io, moved all their PeopleSoft systems to Exadata Cloud Service. They use PeopleSoft Cloud Manager to manage their non-production environments. Saint Paul Public Schools has taken a “fluid first” approach enhancing user experience for their users with fluid approvals, fluid navigation collections and homepage tiles, configurable search, and real-time indexing. Saint Paul Public Schools uses delivered configuration utilities such as Page and Field Configurator, event mapping, drop zones, and form builder to isolate and manage customizations.

Customer comments

Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS) is Minnesota's second-largest school district, educating over 33,000 students across 69 schools.

PeopleSoft footprint

Saint Paul Public Schools uses PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM. PeopleSoft HCM modules used include Human Resources, Benefits Administration, Time and Labor, Recruiting, Candidate Gateway, and Payroll for North America. PeopleSoft FSCM modules used include General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Purchasing, eProcurement, Supplier Portal, Project Costing, Grants, and Billing.

Cloud transformation

All of Saint Paul Public Schools’ PeopleSoft systems are on Exadata Cloud Service. Saint Paul Public Schools uses Cloud Manager to provision and manage all the demo environments, PeopleSoft images, and a few short-term project environments. Additionally, Oracle Vault, alarms with monitoring, email delivery service, and certificate service are also used.

PeopleSoft Cloud Manager is used for automatic PeopleTools upgrade and testing, PUM auto deployment, IDPK patching, and auto start and shut down using policies. They also used Cloud Manager to upgrade an environment to PeopleTools 8.60 overnight as part of their participation in the early adopter program.

User experience

Saint Paul Public Schools uses full fluid across both HCM and FSCM. Where fluid is not available, SPPS has enabled classic plus for all supported pages. SPPS has created custom navigation collections and homepage tiles for all the business roles and end user functions. Each business function has a custom navigation collection that contains all the pages and queries needed to accomplish their daily tasks.

Saint Paul Public Schools uses four different approvals that were developed with the approvals page composer:

Reported time approvals.
Life events approvals.
GT forms approvals.
Vacation delegations.

Saint Paul Public Schools uses Elasticsearch to power the navigation search (including recently visited and searched), for item search in eProcurement, company directory, job postings, and applicant searches in HCM. The menu search indexes all have real-time indexing enabled. Configurable search is used for job data search.

About 15% of Saint Paul Public Schools’ traffic is from mobile devices. In FSCM, mobile usage is primarily for approvals and delegations. In HCM, mobile devices are used for fluid time entry, approving time, and benefits open enrollment from the employees. Saint Paul Public Schools also sees over 20% of its external applicants using mobile devices to search and apply for jobs.

Configuration

Saint Paul Public Schools used the Page and Field Configurator not just to eliminate over a dozen modifications, but also to enable changes the business requested on pages because we could use the Page and Field Configurator. Many of our page changes are on the job data and open enrollment components to change verbiage to be more inclusive.

Saint Paul Public Schools took an “event mapping first” approach to customizations when upgrading from 9.1 to 9.2. About 25% of our customizations in HCM were replaced or modified to use event mapping. The upgrade team took an “event mapping first” approach to customizations, and only if event mapping, Page and Field Configurator, or form builder could not be used would the modification be done the traditional way.

Saint Paul Public Schools uses drop zones in the recruiting module. The additional fields are used to collect information specific to Minnesota teacher requirements and allowed Saint Paul Public Schools to gather that information without customization.