Maximizing Business Efficiency and Flexibility With PeopleSoft
Workers’ Compensation Board–Alberta sought solutions that would continually modernize human capital management (HCM) and financial supply chain management (FSCM) systems without interrupting business operations or impacting client services.
The organization engaged NTT DATA in long-term consulting services that span system upgrades, new cloud deployments and application management to deliver improved HCM and FSCM capabilities, streamline workflows and reduce costs.
Business Needs
Through consultation with NTT DATA, the WCB-AB decided to upgrade its PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM systems to 9.2 to ensure continued Oracle Support, leverage the Oracle Continuous Delivery Model, implement new functionality and replace customisations where possible.
WCB-AB ran their PeopleSoft environments on a mainframe operating system with DB2 databases for the database server infrastructure and Windows for the application and webservers. The upgrade scope included seven financial environments and five human resource environments. The PeopleSoft modules upgraded were: receivables, payables, general ledger, purchasing, core human resources and the payroll interface with integrations to several internal and external third-party systems.
Outcomes
- Retires customisations and enjoys further automation of business processes
- Completes HCM and FSCM projects on budget and ahead of schedule
- Experiences no interruption to WCB-AB business operations
- Transitions easily from the upgrade project to AMS support
Solution
Over a decade of successful PeopleSoft projects
NTT DATA has been working with the WCB-AB for more than a decade supporting their PeopleSoft environments.
The WCB-AB wanted to accommodate their normal business cycles, while ensuring that the upgrade timeline met their organisational need for adequate user acceptance testing to reduce risk. With this understanding and deep knowledge about their PeopleSoft environments, NTT DATA planned two separate upgrade projects for HCM and FSCM that were executed over a 17-month timeline. Both projects were upgrades of the existing data and re-implementation of required customisations from version 9.1 to version 9.2 with some targeted areas of added business value. The following new areas of functionality were investigated for inclusion in the current or future upgrades:
- Work centres
- Online pay cycle manager
- Deposit Loader
- BI publisher check templates
Improved automation of business processes
WCB-AB realised benefits from the 9.2 upgrade by retiring customisations and enjoying further automation of business processes. NTT DATA managed and executed the upgrade projects with smooth delivery and no interruption to WCB-AB business operations.
The HCM environment went live first, on time and within budget. The FSCM upgrade followed with a successful launch a few months later, also on time and within budget. Both upgrades ran ahead of schedule, given NTT DATA’s staff efficiencie – but the original go-live dates were kept because of predefined production outage windows for cutover activities.
Several of NTT DATA’s Application Management (AM) Services staff were integrated as part of the project team to ensure an easy transition from the upgrade project to AM support. These upgrade projects were completed seamlessly with no unintended downtime and no increase in support tickets.
*This case study was originally written by Sierra Systems Group Inc., which has become NTT DATA Services as of 17th December 2018.
About Workers Compensation Board Alberta Client Story
Workers’ Compensation Board upgrades HCM and FSCM system on time and on budget for improved efficiencies and automation.