In this pursuit, Ness’ department faced a common IT challenge: how to manage heterogeneous information systems, integrate disparate systems through complex business processes, and
continuously refine operations to stay competitive and realize
the maximum return on IT investments. What he found was an
uncommon solution: applications built to address differences
among IT deployments that let business managers focus on
business processes—and on realizing return on their technology investments. Oracle Fusion Applications, based on open
standards, are designed to coexist, integrate with, and enhance
applications across Oracle’s broad application portfolio, including Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s PeopleSoft, JD Edwards,
Siebel, and Hyperion product lines.
Fusion Talent Review—all part of the Oracle Fusion Human
Capital Management family.
“We worked with our business units to understand their
workforce needs. We then took the outputs of that information
and laid out a roadmap for our systems implementations,” says
Jay Fogarty, director of information technology at the Principal.
“We worked with Oracle to do that, and we also looked at
Oracle Fusion Applications and how that could fit well within
our roadmap.”
HIGH-ENERGY HR
“Oracle Fusion Applications are much, much more than just
the next release of Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel,
or Hyperion applications,” explains
Gretchen Alarcon, vice president of
human capital management appli-
cations strategy at Oracle. “Oracle
Fusion Applications are a merger
of the best functionality from all of
those applications, incorporating
the top thought leadership and busi-
ness practices in the HCM [human
capital management] marketplace.
More importantly, Oracle Fusion
Applications are all based on the
same new standards-based technol-
ogy platform.”
Oracle Fusion Applications deliver
business services in private, public,
and hybrid cloud deployments. And
while all Oracle Fusion Applications
are designed with business and busi-
ness users in mind, one family in the
Oracle Fusion Applications line—Oracle Fusion Human Capital
Management—is focused on the business of every company’s
greatest resource: its employees.
At the Principal, changing times required a change in HR
IT strategy. According to Kathleen Souhrada, assistant vice
president of human resources at the Principal, the company’s
workforce is seeing a surge in international hiring on track with
its global expansion. While that may be exciting (and good for
business), it also presents some new challenges. “We have built
our systems around a domestic population, and with this rapid
global growth many of our global leaders were using disparate
systems,” she says. “From an overall HR perspective, we really
That led Ness and his team to take a closer look at a new
IT solution for the HR department. Ness turned to Oracle
Fusion Human Capital Management, and specifically to Oracle
Fusion Workforce Compensation, Oracle Fusion Performance
Management, Oracle Fusion Goal Management, and Oracle
MODEL EMPLOYEES
The IT staff at the Principal chose Oracle Fusion Workforce
Compensation as the foundation for the company’s global
compensation management platform. Working with Oracle
partner PwC, the Principal took only four months to establish
a pilot Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management instance
for selected global users to work with. The instance was set
up in a secure and private Oracle
cloud computing environment to
manage data about the company’s
employee population.
“Working with PwC and the
Principal was outstanding,” says Ness.
“We were able to achieve the target
dates that we set out as well as most
of the project goals.”
The implementation will provide
advanced functionality to HR staff
around the world: automated multi-
currency support and a broader orga-
nizational view. Integrated workflow
and flexible configuration capabilities
also support the Principal’s interna-
tional growth strategy.
But most importantly, Oracle
Fusion Human Capital Management
allows global HR leaders to perform
in-depth, real-time compensation modeling and calibration.
This drives an equitable pay-for-performance culture while
providing greater line-of-sight information in the budgeting
and distribution cycles of annual compensation planning. The
multicurrency global employment capabilities allow leaders to
manage compensation across the entire global workforce.
“Our current system was designed to handle compensation
planning for domestic employees. We did not have the capability to model compensation for our international employees
and the compensation planning for them,” says Fogarty. “So we
were using different tools, like spreadsheets, in order to support
those audiences.”
>>SNAPSHOT
Principal Financial Group
principal.com
Location: Des Moines, Iowa
Industry: Financial services
Revenue: US$9.16 billion in 2010
Employees: 15,000
Oracle products and services: PeopleSoft
human capital management, financial
management, and supplier relationship
management applications; Oracle Fusion
Human Capital Management, including
Oracle Fusion Workforce Compensation,
Oracle Fusion Goal Management, Oracle
Fusion Performance Management, Oracle
Fusion Talent Review, and Oracle Fusion
Workforce Lifecycle Manager; Oracle
Database; Oracle Real Application Clusters
PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE
The Principal IT staff manages other Oracle technology, so it was
critical that the Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management pilot
integrate with those existing systems. Oracle’s delivered and supported coexistence strategy for Oracle Fusion Applications made
