Profit Magazine - August 2011

SOA-Powered Oracle Fusion Applications

In IT environments where multiple applications interact, it is critical to
have stable, standards-based inter-
faces that promote the sharing of
data. Service-oriented architectures
(SOA) can do just that and Oracle
Enterprise Repository is a powerful
metadata tool that provides a single
source of information for SOA assets
and their dependencies.

it possible for IT staff at the Principal to integrate an existing on-premises PeopleSoft HCM solution with the private-cloud Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management product without custom development or dual data maintenance.

The Principal’s Oracle relationship includes PeopleSoft applications for human resources, financials, and procurement, as well as security products and an Oracle Real Application Clusters database environment. The addition of Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management to the application ecosystem provided features and deployment options that matched the Principal’s business and technology needs.

“Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management offers the Principal a way to solve some key business challenges and also get some exciting new functionality,” says Ness. “The integration with our PeopleSoft Enterprise implementation was a key consideration in our decision to adopt Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management. The flexibility to use the Oracle cloud infrastructure to quickly implement Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management made our decision even easier.”

CLOSING THE TIME GAP

Successful management strategies and solutions translate well
across different resources and processes. “At the Principal,
we are very good financial managers,” says the Principal’s
Souhrada. “We want to provide that same level of holistic
management with our human capital as well. The Oracle
Fusion Human Capital Management applications really
provide the business intelligence that we need to connect the
dots when it comes to talent so we can drive the bottom line
by increasing our performance overall.”
In addition to compressing business process times, Oracle
Fusion Applications continue to make a good impression on the
Principal’s management.

“Our leaders appreciate Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management applications because they can see the work loading, they understand where it is going, and they have visibility across their organization,” Ness emphasizes. He adds that overall feedback from senior leadership has been very positive, with more than 80 percent of the team expressing their willingness to be an advocate for Oracle Fusion Applications.

In the second half of 2011, the Principal will begin rolling
out Oracle Fusion Performance Management and Oracle Fusion
Goal Management applications within the Oracle Fusion
Human Capital Management family, and by the end of the year
the company plans to further expand its use of Oracle Fusion
Workforce Compensation. “The overall timing is still to be
determined,” explains Ness, “but we’re also looking at deploy-
ing other Oracle Fusion talent management capabilities.”
Ness’ staff is also working on a pilot of Oracle Fusion
Procurement, for greater control of the Principal’s supplier
and procurement processes. With embedded analytics,
unified workflow, and packaged adapters for PeopleSoft
applications, the goal is to have both Oracle Fusion
Procurement and Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management
applications in the same environment. “A single instance of
Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management and procurement
applications allows us to make steps forward in managing
that data consistently,” says Ness.