Quest recently spoke with Daniel Rech, Director of Information Systems at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA. Daniel and his team are responsible for supporting the Medical Center’s PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM platforms. Our conversation focused on their Selective Adoption Strategy as well as their use of Fluid User Interface.

Key takeaways:

About Beth Israel Deaconess Medical

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) is a world-class teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. Their PeopleSoft technology team is made up of one system administrator, three developers and four functional analyst who work closely with Oracle DBAs and Linux server teams. They began their journey with PeopleSoft in 1996 when they implemented HCM and expanded their offerings when they implemented FSCM in 2005. They use many modules in HCM and FSCM that include Human Resources, Benefits Administration, Payroll and Self-Service as well as General Ledger, Asset Management, Payables, Inventory, Purchasing, eProcurement, Billing and Receivables. They are currently on HCM 9.2 Image 16 and FSCM 9.2 Image 21, both on PeopleTools 8.55.

What does your company selective adoption strategy look like?

We drastically reduced our level of customization during our 9.2 upgrades—FSCM in 2014, and HCM in 2016—with the end goal of getting current, i.e. applying a full PUM image, annually. In between we selectively package bug fixes as needed and new features as desired.

What is your experience to-date with PeopleSoft Update Manager and selective adoption?

Very positive overall. We experienced some frustration early on but we’ve seen the platform improve with each successive image released.

How have your system maintenance business processes changed since selective adoption?

Our system administrator downloads and deploys the latest PUM images as they are released so we can use the environment to replicate an issue or extract fixes.

How have your feature adoption business processes changed since selective adoption?

We periodically review the cumulative feature overviews and PUM image contents to see if anything looks interesting.

How are your technical and functional teams working together with selective adoption?

They mainly collaborate on bug fixes. The functional analysts might submit service requests with Oracle Support and keep track of when a given fix is expected to be released. Then they inform the system administrator of the image number, release date and update ID so that it can be extracted once available.

What would you tell a customer that’s about to begin the process of selective adoption?

You’ll love it!

Are you using Fluid? If so, where and how?

Yes, we are. Fluid homepages provide casual users with easy access to self-service features and other commonly used pages, plus separate homepages/dashboards for certain departments.

What were the drivers for you to begin using Fluid User Interface?

We wanted to improve the user experience with a contemporary look and feel and simplified navigation.

How are you rolling out Fluid User Interface to your end users? (e.g. Pilot, Phased, Big Bang, etc.)?

Mostly big bang, with additional homepages and tiles deployed over time.

What was your experience in deploying Fluid? What did you learn that other customer could benefit from?

We had a very positive experience overall. Never underestimate the “wow” factor of a slick interface. Also, be mindful of optimizing the real estate that a homepage offers. Too many items can be just as bad as too few. We provided direct link tiles for high frequency, high impact menu items and offered navigation collections for other related features.

What obstacles, if any, did you encounter in deploying Fluid?

We encountered a few quirky Tools bugs for Fluid Navigation Collections for things like related content and timeouts.

What concerns, if any, did your company have in deploying Fluid?

None.

Are you deploying Fluid as delivered? If not, how customized or modified are you and why?

We are deploying Fluid mostly as delivered. Some of the delivered HCM tiles required minor app package mods to hide some tabs/functionality, whereas we could leverage security for others. We also made the call to prevent end users from personalizing their homepages and instead administer those centrally and uniformly. This required some minor mods as well.

Since deploying Fluid, what benefits have you seen for your and your company?

Users seem to enjoy their PeopleSoft experience more. This includes my own team for which we launched a Fluid homepage as a support dashboard for troubleshooting things like batch processing and Integration Broker as well as administering security.

Where do you want to take your company’s Fluid strategy in the next two to three years?

Whereas our focus until now has been on static navigation tiles, we’d like to begin developing our own actionable live tiles—displaying counts of items requiring attention or perhaps pivot grids and charts for analytics.

How involved was your company in utilizing the Quest community, or any other user group, during the upgrade process?

We are big fans of Quest International Users Group and tune in to as many webinars as possible. We enjoy hearing how other organizations are leveraging their PeopleSoft investment and consuming and deploying new features.