ORACLE PROJECTS &

HR/PAYROLL
CAN ACCOMMODATE YOUR
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
BOSS

PRESENTATION
Speaker: Susan Beals
Reference Number: #29767
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Presentation available Website
WELCOME!
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SPEAKER INTRODUCTION
Susan Beals
Consultant for BOSS Corporation
Functional, Project Mgmt, Design
Over 8 years with Oracle Applications
Certified Management Accountant
Oracle Fin Apps, HR/PR and Projects
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INTRODUCTION

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INTRODUCTION
Companies Change
They Buy other companies;
Are Sold;
Are Acquired
Are Merged with others;
Experience Internal Changes...

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INTRODUCTION
Many facets of your Oracle System
can be impacted when change occurs
- organizational changes, people
move and/or hierarchy restructuring

Greater impacts when your company is

running a fully integrated system, including
Oracle Projects, Financials and HR/Payroll.

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INTRODUCTION
Further considerations are the impacts
of data loads - when acquiring new
employees from another company.

Organization change is part of core

functionality of Oracle.

There are considerations to be

addressed and Lessons to Learn
from past experience.
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PROJECT
BACKGROUND

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PROJECT BACKGROUND
In December 2000 TMP Worldwide (Monster.com)
purchased SPEC Group Holdings Inc. (Pittsburgh,
PA)

In October 2001 BOSS was engaged

to assist in the implementation of the
new organization structure.

SPEC had 1,300 active employees.

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PROJECT BACKGROUND
An additional requirement was to load 400
employees onto Oracle from a subsidiary
(in Tampa, FL) running on PeopleSoft.

The existing SPEC system , R11.03, went

live on Jan 1, 2000 and included: PA, GL, AP,
PO, AR, HR and PR. A later addition was FA.

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PROJECT BACKGROUND
The modules impacted by changes to
the organization structure included;
PA, HR, PR, AP and PO.

Payrolls two biweekly, one weekly

The other consideration at TMP was the
different year-end dates for FIN (Dec 31) and
HR/PR Weekly (Dec 23) & Bi-Weekly (Dec
16)
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SCOPE
&
OBJECTIVES
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OBJECTIVES
The Project Objectives included:
An Accurate organization hierarchy;
Ability to Grow the hierarchy, flexible;
Meet the different Year-end requirements;
Minimize process Re-design;
No Customizations, core functionality;
Minimize Conversion & Programming.
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SCOPE
The Project Scope included:
Process Reengineering - None
Customizations - Maintain Existing
Training - Not Required
System Interfaces - Maintain One

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SCOPE
The Project Scope continued:
Automated Processes to be Used:
Update employee assignments
Load new employee records (using APIs)

Unit Testing - Individual Modules

Integrated Testing - All Modules Together
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CRITICAL SUCCESS
FACTORS

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Critical Success Factors

Strong project SPONSORSHIP at both the global and
local levels.

Adequate project STAFFING.

Detailed PROJECT PLAN outlining the
milestones and deliverables.

Available TEST INSTANCE.

Agreed upon GOALS.
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KEY
ASSUMPTIONS

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Assumptions

Strategy to move to R11i in the future.

Current operations are not multi-org
One Set of Books
One Business Group

No change to Business Group setup Manual numbers, Flexfields,

etc.

Rename two of five legal entities

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PROJECT
TIMELINE

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Project Timeline

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WHAT DID WE DO?

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Configuration Steps
1. Create Locations All organizations require a location. The new
organizations must have locations created

2. Rename Business Group

TMP was not multi-org in R11.03 and therefore
had one business group. In order to
accommodate the org change, we simply
renamed the existing business group.

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Configuration Steps
3. Rename Legal Entities
TMP had five legal entities and were eliminating
three. Two were simply renamed for continuity.
Figure 1: Old Legal Entity

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Configuration Steps
Figure 2: Renamed Legal Entity

4. Create New Operating Unit

Operating units in multi-org, partition the data. During the original
implementation the Business Group was classified as the OU.
A new, separate, operating unit was created

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Configuration Steps
5. Create Chart of Account Values
Chart of account values are used by the
accounting flexfield. The new organizations require
that new values be added
Generally a responsibility of the FIN Team
Figure 3: Flexfield Value Set

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Configuration Steps
Figure 4: Value Sets

Note: The values cannot be changed, you can disable existing

ones. Instead, create new values or change the description.

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Configuration Steps
6. Set of Books
The existing set of books included the old
company name.
Figure 5: Set of Books

Note: The name cannot be changed, only the Short Name

and the Description

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Configuration Steps
7. Create New Organizations
The new organizations must be setup and linked
to a location (see Step #1).
Organizations must also be classified as
required. If using Projects there are three
classifications to consider.

Issue Found
Classifying organizations when using both HR
Organization and Project Task Owning
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Configuration Steps
Issue Described
We setup our organization.
Classified organization as HR Organization and
completed the additional information.
Classified as Project Invoice, Project
Expenditure/Event, Project Task Owning
When all organizations were defined, they were
added into the new Hierarchy
Problem: In PA we could not see our new orgs
(after system implementation options changed)
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Configuration Steps
Issue Resolution
Searched Meta Link
Issue was raised in July 2000 with a
corresponding Bug # 1136773
Workaround available, meant all our orgs had to
be deleted from the hierarchy, classifications
disabled and then classified again, but with a
twist.

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Configuration Steps
New Setup
After removing organizations from the hierarchy.
Disable ALL classifications.
Classify the organization with all three of the project
classifications.
Add the organization back into the hierarchy
Then, classify the organization as an HR Org
Oracle Projects will now be able to see the
organizations in the project and template list

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Configuration Steps
Org Classification

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Configuration Steps
8. Create New Hierarchy
The new hierarchy was created more then once
based on the problems with Org Classification
The new hierarchy was not defined as the
primary hierarchy at this time.

9. Define People Group

The original setup used the People Group for
element link criteria and reporting unit costing.
People Group was defined as Default
eliminating Linking criteria based on P.G.
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Configuration Steps
First Issue Found with People Group
Issue #1 - Loading a numeric value through API
proved difficult. We believed we could resolve
the issue, but we chose not to because of the
time constraints.
Original setup was a one segment people group flexfield.
We opted to use 99 as our value for no specific reason.
However, when there were problems loading the 99 we
simply used an alpha value - DEFAULT

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Configuration Steps
Second Issue with People Group
Issue #2 - When the programmer was updating
the assignments he could not see the Default
Value in the database.
In order for the programmer to see the value we
had to manually use this new People Group
value and commit it for one employee. Then it
was active.
May have been the same problem with our
numeric value.
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Configuration Steps
10. Create New Pay Methods
Pay methods cannot be renamed
Created new pay methods using TMP

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Configuration Steps
11. Rename Payrolls
Three Payrolls - two bi-weekly and one weekly
Payrolls can be renamed. Rather then create new payrolls, we renamed existing payrolls.
The current business design used six payrolls of these four were linked to employees.
TMP only required three payrolls that were renamed.
The three remaining were left unchanged and would not be assigned to employees.

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Configuration Steps
Payrolls - Rename, watch DateTracking
Used Update for the Payroll Rename

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Configuration Steps
12. Assign Valid Pay Methods to Payroll
The new pay methods were assigned to payrolls

Pay Methods must be added to the payrolls so

they can be assigned to employees

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Configuration Steps
Recap Steps

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Configuration Steps
13. Employee Data Load
400 employees to be loaded.
Using the APIs available we loaded:
People information
Address
Assignment Information
Pay Method
Not included; Salary Basis and Tax Withholdings
(only because of time).
Manually added Salary and Tax Information

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Configuration Steps
14. Element Linking
Elements initially were linked with criteria - for
every element there were 20 links created.
A total of 1,978 element links existed!!
Eliminating criteria reduced links to 139!
Big Decision - End date(s) to use.
Did Bi-Weekly pay matter?
Weekly pay?

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Configuration Steps
Element Linkscontinued
The following was decided after much discussion
and consideration. We still missed a few things!
Links - End dated 16-Dec, linked 17-Dec
Assignments & Pay Methods (same dates)
Element entries - started on 17-Dec-01
These dates were for ALL employees,
regardless of their payroll (bi-weekly or weekly).
Note: Encountered employees with future dated
elements, prevented end dating. Query required

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Configuration Steps
Original Element Link - End Dated

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Configuration Steps
New Element Link - 17-DEC-01

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Configuration Steps
15. Update Employee Assignments
All active employees were impacted by the
changes made and the following information had
to be updated.
Assignment - Org, People Group, Payroll, GRE
Pay Method - Nacha & Pre Noting
A BOSS programmer was engaged to write the
update program required. We had no more then
80 hours (2 weeks) to complete this update in
PRODUCTION!

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Configuration Steps
Updating Issue
The end date issue alluded to for assignment
linking soon became apparent.
Assignment Dates mattered for weekly and biweekly employees.
Recap: 2001 Payrolls
Weekly 2001 Final Pay = Dec 23
Weekly - 24-Dec-01 Assignment start
Bi-Weekly 2001 Final Pay = Dec 16
Bi-Weekly - 17-Dec-01 Assignment start

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Configuration Steps
Updating Issue
The programmer included this requirement into
his program.
Note: Found another issue with employees linked
to the former IT Solution Payroll which is
discussed later.

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Configuration Steps
Assignment Screen - after update
The from date is not 17-Dec-01 - another issue for IT Solution EEs was not found until the 2001 final payroll run.

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Configuration Steps
16. Update Employee Pay Methods
All active employees pay methods were updated on
the same date as their assignment.
Issue was what to do with pre-noting?
This is not a database item a programmer can easily
update. To avoid support issues the programmer did
not update this field
Instead HR Specialists manually pre-noted all active
employees (1300). This only took 2 hours however, in
hind sight, this was not the best decision we made.

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Configuration Steps
Original Pay Method Setup

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Configuration Steps
New Pay Method Setup

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Configuration Steps
Pre-Note Issue
In our eagerness to not interrupt payments to
employees we opted to issue pre-notes.
The problem - the update, employees bank
information was loaded incorrectly (human error) and
some employees received multiple deposits, others
received none.
As it was we had less then a 5% error margin, only 70
employees impacted at a cost of $30K
Had we let Oracle do the pre-note for us we would
have found this problem.

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Configuration Steps
17. Final 2001 Payroll Run
Final pay runs for the old information were
processed for bi-weekly and weekly, one snag.
When it came time to process the NACHA for the old legal entity IT Solutions we
ran into a problem. The system was looking for this Legal Entity on the Pay Date,
24-Dec (pay date). It was not linked to EEs. We end dated on 17-Dec.

Solution - we manually changed the assignment

screens for 50 employees to start on 25-Dec
instead of Dec 17th (they were all bi-weekly).
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Configuration Steps
18. Element Entry (Employees)
When the element links were end dated the elements
were end dated on the employee element entry screen.

We had to give the correct elements back to

each employee (both current and data load).
We used Oracle Functionality - Batch Element
Entry to load elements on element entry screens
Biggest challenge was creating the listing of
elements by employees. Did this by data dump
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Configuration Steps
Batch Element Entry Example
Watch Your Date Tracking!

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Configuration Steps
19. Set Primary Hierarchy
After the final payroll for 2001 completed the
primary hierarchy was set on the new structure
At this point the financials, particularly Project
Accounting continued to point to the original
hierarchy for year-end processing.

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Configuration Steps
20. First Payroll for 2002
Ready to process the first payroll of 2002, using the new
organizations, hierarchy, payrolls and the GRE changes.

We believed that the majority of our issues had already been found.
We also reduced the issues because we renamed many of the
fields.
Issue encountered - Wage Attachments. This was the direct result of the setup
of garnishments and having multiple Priority 1s on an employees pay
method.

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Configuration Steps
21. Year-End Processing
The financial group was now beginning their
year-end processing.
After the 2001 closing the modifications would
be made to Project Accounting.
It should be noted that those things that could be updated in PA were - for example
Auto accounting rules
Burden schedules

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Configuration Steps
22. Disable Org Classifications
The classifications for the old organizations could
be disabled. Removing the check mark.
Organizations could be end dated.
Note: TMP opted to delay this step until Mid-2002. This was decided in the event
of any information in the interface tables that had to be imported from any subledgers.

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Configuration Steps
23. Close Projects
Projects that were not going to be required for
2002 could be closed (part of year-end process)

24. PA Implementation Options

System options had to be changed to point to
the new Org Hierarchy

Remember you cannot select an organization if it is not

in the hierarchy the Implementation Options point to.
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Configuration Steps
PA - System Implementation Options

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Configuration Steps
25. Burden Hierarchy
The burden hierarchy includes those organizations
that can be included in burden schedules.

The burden hierarchy is linked at the Business

Group level and cannot be changed
The only available work around is to include those new
organizations for burdening in the burden hierarchy created.

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Configuration Steps
26. Burden Structures
The burden structures were created at SPEC to
apply additional costs to work performed.
The burden structures were named with SPEC.
The mandate we used was change SPEC to TMP
where the system permitted.
Burden structures that have schedules attached cannot be renamed.
Therefore we left them with the original naming convention.

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Configuration Steps
27. Burden Schedules
The burden schedules names were left alone
There were two options for changing the existing schedules:
End date existing schedules and create new ones using
the new organizations or;
Add the new organizations into existing schedules

The second option was chosen for the simple reason if

an old organization was used it would still be burdened.

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Configuration Steps
Burden Schedules - Old & New Orgs

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Configuration Steps
28. Non-Labor Resources
There was only one non-labor resource. Like the
burden schedules, rather then end date, we
simply added the new organization.

29. New Templates

Organizations in templates cannot be changed.
TMP copies from existing templates an changes the Org
information as required. Therefore there was no need to
create new templates.

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Configuration Steps
30. Change Project Organizations
Projects spanning 2001 and 2002 were pointing
to the old organizations
The project and task organizations had to be
changed.

31. Update Auto Accounting

Auto Accounting, based on Organization, was done as we
went along.
However, there was a review and modification undertaken to
insure accurate setup.

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TEST, TEST and TEST

AGAIN!!

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Module & Integration Testing

Module Testing
Focused on the specific modules - GL, HR,
Payroll, PA, AP, AR and PO
Testing base functionality of the applications
Confirm business processes

Integration Testing
Modules continue to work with each other
Roster continues to function
Reports can be run after changes

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Module & Integration Testing

Issues Discovered
Payable Issue:
Encountered processing employee expenses.
When expenses are pulled from PA into AP the system
determines if the employee is setup as a supplier.
If they are not AP sets them up based on their HR information name, number and address from the HR tables.

Only Data Load employees were impacted

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Module & Integration Testing

Payable Issuecontinued

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Module & Integration Testing

The default payment method is Check and for some it is
changed to Electronic. Trying to change caused the following:

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Module & Integration Testing

Issues Resolution
The technical team sought the cause and solution
The functional team sought a workaround including manually reentering the Address information into HR (using the forms) and
pulling the information into AP.

We hoped that the updated information from the form would over write
the AP address and eliminate whatever was causing the problem.

It didnt work!
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Module & Integration Testing

Issues Resolution
On Meta Link there were similar issues, all pointing to a spacing
problem, that would have occurred during out data load.

It wasnt spaces, but unprintable characters

Approximately 569 records were impacted.
PROD was copied to TEST, a script was found and run against TEST to
remove the characters and tested.

Successful! Script was run against Production.

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Module & Integration Testing

System Delivery
When all testing was completed the steps were
repeated in Production
The system was delivered on time
There were no issues, relating to the
Organization changes found after delivery.

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LESSONS LEARNED

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Lessons Learned
Summarized and Simply Stated:
Let Oracle functionality operate as designed, dont try to shortcut to avoid impacts.

Remember, it is easier to manage expected change then

the unexpected change that can occur from errors.

Unprintable characters in the data load. For next

time we know to avoid this
Enhance the data load program to avoid the manual entry to salary and tax
withholding

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ABOUT BOSS
Web Site: www.bosscorporation.com
Phone: (770) 622-5500
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BOSS Overview
About BOSS, The Company:
Founded in 1995 to create Better Organization Service Solutions.

Focused to provide expert Oracle Application

consulting services.

An active member, since 1996, in the Oracle

Applications User Group (OAUG)
Oracle Certified Solutions Partner (CSP)

Authors of Special Edition: Using Oracle 11i

and Using Oracle Applications
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BOSS Overview
About BOSS, The People:
Involved with more then 15 Oracle Application 11i
projects - implementations and upgrades.

Managed several multi-million dollar Oracle HR/Payroll,

Financial and Manufacturing Implementations.

Managed several of the first HR/Payroll

Implementations in the USA (first 2 of 3).

Our consultants, on average, have at least 5

implementations with Oracle Applications.
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BOSS Overview
About BOSS, Our Next Event
BOSS Training at Spring OAUG - Toronto
BOSS 11i Training: Install & Administer Workflow.
BOSS 11i Training: Oracle Training Administration.
BOSS 11i Training: Oracle Advanced Benefits.

BOSS Fast Formulas at Spring OAUG

Fast Formulas For: Advanced Benefits, PTO Accruals and Payroll
Fast Formulas: The Key to Simplifying Your Users Life

BOSS Panels
Customizations, CRM and Public Sector
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QUESTIONS
&
ANSWERS
Email: susan.beals@bosscorporation.com
Cell Phone: (416) 433-2292
BOSS