PeopleSoft HRMS 8.9 Upgrade

Yeah, I’m not going to excuse myself this time… 3 months I know!

Lets get straight into some tips, this is something that I thought will be useful for people involved in PeopleSoft upgrade (Yes! That’s what I’m gonna start with this time too.) Certain watch out tips for Peopleinvolved in upgrade to 8.9….

So, we all know that PeopleSoft in 8.9 brings ‘PERSON MODEL’ (So what??). We got a copy of production, upgraded the system to 8.9 – Tried hiring an employee. First add a person and then “add the relashionship”. No!!! The person will simply not get hired into our system. We checked the customizations (Yeah! We should have read the PeopleSoft Red Papers!) and damn the system will simply not hire the employee. Then we found the most basic difference; there was no EMPL_RCD on any of our search pages (“Multiple Jobs Allowed” Checkbox in PeopleTools options). Yes Peoplesoft in 8.9 requires “Multiple Jobs allowed” to be turned on for the system to work. That is the business process on which the entire “HR 8.9 – PERSON Model” stands on. I’m still thinking why did they leave the checkbox… if it can take only one value! Neverthless never underestimate PeopleSoft.

What are the other impacts of the above-mentioned problem? All custom interfaces need to include Empl_Rcd value to search for an employee. Take a lot of caution while handling your SQR programs and Application Engines too.

EMPLOYMENT is a view in 8.9 – This is common knowledge, but the PeopleSoft Red Papers talk a lot about “PER_ORG_INST” being the virtual parent of PER_ORG_ASGN. So this is just an extended feature to distinguish concurrent and non-concurrent jobs. Get clear indicators of the customer’s business process to move the custom fields from EMPLOYMENT to either of the above-mentioned tables.

EMPLOYMENT still contains REHIRE_DT – But, this is the Last Start Date from job and hence will have the value of HIRE_DT for employees who were never terminated. Custom programs need a closer look to take care of this.

DEPENDENT_BENEF is a view… All the peoplecode from tables in old release must be moved to appropriate tables in 8.9 – Careful!

JOB.ACTION is no longer a translate – It is a prompt from ACTION_TBL. SQRs must select appropriate data.

Employee Review is obsolete! This means the customer can only use that for viewing history data… Please don’t make customizations, as they will be useless :(. Customers must use the ePerformance module.

Security! – Whats new??? The person model allows non-employees so expect Security to be driven by OPRID instead of EMPLID – makes sense.

PeopleCode tip – from 8.17 to 8.46 – ViewURL function needs to be replaced with ViewContentUrl function.

PeopleTools 8.48 – Haven’t really worked on it, but this is what I heard – Composite reports to compare more than two databases! File References (SQRs, COBOLS and DMS) are comparable objects. PeopleCode “Merge and Compare utility”.


Uh!! I can keep writing on this topic but for now, got to get back to my GMAT preperation ;).