Oracle HCM Cloud Absence and Time and Labor: 23D Key Features
Oracle Absence Management and Time and Labor are two key umbrellas which empower organizations to manage the time offs and time worked effectively.
Both these modules are ever evolving and with the latest 23D release Oracle has not just added Absence or OTL specific enhancements but taken a step further in integrating these modules in a smoother way.
We have analyzed the features for both the modules and tried to categorize it in the below segments making it easier for you to understand the impact.
Business Benefit — Justifies how important this change could be based on the business requirements and categorized as High/Medium/Low
Configuration Time — Time and effort needed to enable that feature categorized as High/Medium/Low
Business Preparation Time — Time and effort needed by the business to put in data/process data to use the new feature categorized as High/Medium/Low
Absence Management
Control the schedule hierarchy start point by an added option of Work Patterns
The duration of the absence entry and payments can be controlled by the schedule hierarchy start point option on the Absence type level, and it has a new selection of “Work Patterns”.
Here the application will search at the work pattern of the employee to begin with and then drill down until it finds the relevant working hours for the employee.
Automatically Reprocess Absences when the work schedule changes
Instead of running various processes in the background to reprocess the absences if the work schedule of an employee changes, we can now automatically do that.
To configure, we need to go to the HCM Experience Design Studio and create an event condition. We then add this event on the absence type level under Additional details.
By doing this config, all the work schedule changes will automatically reprocess the absences without a need to manually run background processes.
Link Global Absence DFF to timecard
We can now pass the cost overrides entered against an Absence Entry on a timecard to Absence Management in the system.
Previously, cost overrides entered against an absence entry on the time card were ignored as the values didn’t flow to Absence Management, and therefore didn’t flow to payroll. With this release, Time and Labor will pass the cost overrides to Absence Management.
However, this is done by default in the new time and labor integration to Absence Management so will by default be there in the new implementations. For existing implementations, we need to upgrade the old architecture to the new one.
If it is not a new implementation, then the configuration time would be changed, and we will need to upgrade the architecture.
Geography Tree Nodes for Loading of Public Holidays
Previously, Oracle delivered the geography trees and Tree nodes for 15 predefined countries. If we wanted to leverage and use these seeded geography trees, the primary step was to manually create the geography tree nodes and I admit it was quite painful task in multi country implementations.
Now, with this latest release, Oracle delivers the tree nodes as well for all these countries, so we do not need to manually create them now.
To enable this, we do not need to do any additional setup as well!
The list of trees delivered are — Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and United States of America.
Redwood Experience
Vacation Bidding
With this feature, the Redwood UI brings in a Vacation bidding page, where employee can bid for multiple days of leaves. They can submit the absence with 2 sets of dates based on their preference and it is then routed to the manager for approval. This will really help managers in cases where there are multiple overlapping absence dates for their team while ensuring right resource allocation.
Under Me > Time and Absences, there is a new section of Absence Bid. From this page the members can bid for the absences.
Employees can also add the bid from the absence balance page.
Managers can view the bids under My Team > Show More > Absence Planning
To Enable this, we just need to enable the checkbox of “Enable Bidding” on the absence type level
One thing to note in this bidding update, is that it only works for the absences with UOM as hours and the pattern being Generic.
Redwood experience for Managers making an adjustment to a Compensatory Plan.
For Managers, they can now go to the Absence Balance page under My team and click on the details of the compensatory plan. Here they can simply click add and then make adjustments in the new Redwood UI.
To enable this, we simply need to go to Manage Administrator Profile values and enable the profile option ORA_ANC_PLAN_BALANCE_VBCS_UI_ENABLED and select the level as Site.
About the Author
Husain Poonawala is an Oracle Cloud HCM Lead Consultant with experience in Absence Management, Time and Labor, Core HR at Version 1. In the short span of career of 3+ years, he has helped organizations transform digitally to Oracle system, from requirement mapping to a new software to help setting up new business processes for a smoother experience by working in both implementations and managed services. He has experience in Construction, Government and Private sectors. You can find him on LinkedIn.
