Understanding Reward Data Sources

The key challenge in generating a total rewards statement is the ability to combine information from a wide variety of sources, and then combine those sources into a meaningful context with instructional text and analytics. In addition to this, the extracted compensation ultimately needs to be formatted, organized, and summarized into a total rewards statement. The business process of generating total rewards statements is to first identify the source of compensation, then retrieve data from the source, and finally display the information, which is configured through a template definition. This feature primarily deals with the business process to extract and summarize compensation data for a total rewards statement. This component covers these elements:

Foundational components to support the data extract mechanism.
Data extraction processes that retrieve compensation data for a single total rewards statement.
Administrative console to initiate and monitor the process of generating a total rewards statement.

One of the primary goals for the new Total Rewards functionality is to streamline the overall process and provide a more configurable table driven solution that enables the customer to define and extract employee level rewards data that is required for their total rewards statements.

In future releases, PeopleSoft plans to provide a set of reward items that map to a delivered set of data sources for existing data within the HCM application suite. This will allow you to quickly create a total rewards statement based on known data in the HCM system. Reward items will be considered system data.

The building blocks of the total rewards solution include:

Reward Data Source - Table containing multiple sources of reward data.
Reward Items - Table containing multiple items of reward data retrieved from a reward data source. Reward items are displayed on a total reward statement.
Reward Template - Table containing multiple templates detailing the structure and layout of reward items displayed on a total reward statement.
Reward Statement - Table containing multiple statements detailing the parameters used to generate a total reward statement for a specific group of employees for a particular reward template and period of time.

The goal of the reward data source is to provide a common definition (or set of metadata) that will be utilized by a single Reward Extract program to generate SQL to retrieve and load reward data for the total reward statement being processed.

To generate the SQL, the reward data source definition will take into consideration the parameters used for the total reward statement being processed.

Since a reward statement can be processed for a group of employees or an individual employee, different SQL criteria is generated based upon the run parameters to process a total reward statement. In addition to this, the values of the run parameters may be incorporated into the SQL differently based upon the reward data being extracted.

Moreover, there are other controls that can be put into place to enable the compensation administrator to specify the reward data they want to retrieve, For example, instead of defining a separate reward data source to retrieve earnings from North American Payroll for each configured earning code, the compensation administrator can specify the earning code as a reward item filter that they want to retrieve from the reward data source.

In addition, there are other ways to define a generic reward data source with some ability to enable the compensation administrator to specify parameters to control the data to be extracted.

Finally, the extracted data needs to be mapped into a set of common reward results tables to store the rewards data that will be displayed on the total rewards statement. The reward data source configuration is broken down into the following elements:

Element	Description
Extract Temporary Table	The system extracts a temporary table that will initially store extracted rewards data retrieved for a specific total reward statement. The Extract Temporary table has a key structure that uniquely identifies rows of reward data being retrieved. The Extract Temporary table is created in Application Designer.
Extract Table	The system creates one or more records or record views that are used to retrieve data that will be loaded into the Extract Temporary table. Similar to a query, record views are utilized because they provide the ability to combine data from multiple tables. Record views are defined through Application Designer.
Extract Filters	The system appends standard filter types to an SQL SELECT statement against the Extract table. Extract filters only incorporate reward statement run parameters to extract the reward data for the total reward statement being processed.
Reward Item Filters	The system uses additional filters that can be specified at the reward item level. This provides additional control to the compensation administrator to specify the data that the system will extract from the data source.
Reward Item Outputs	The system maps extracted data from the Extract Temporary table to the Statement Reward Item Detail table. Numeric reward data is mapped to these columns: Employee Paid Employer Paid Units Company Provided Rate Per Unit Other detail fields can be used to display additional reward data when the employee drills down into a specific reward item. Some detail fields will require a description to be displayed instead of a code; therefore the Detail Record and Description fields can be specified. For example, the system extracts the field COMPANY code, but you want to display Company description from the PS_COMPANY_TBL. To do this, specify the column heading description for an output field in the detail rewards data.
Reward Item Calculations	The system performs calculations on data in the Statement Reward Item Detail table to calculate final rewards data. Application Packages are also used to manage reward item calculations.

Note: The expectation is that most reward data being extracted for a total reward statement has been calculated. However, reward item calculations provide the ability to use Application Packages to create additional calculations that can be performed against the extracted reward data.