Extending Oracle HCM with HR Helpdesk

‍Introduction

How do you track all the HR requests coming in and ensure they’re dealt with appropriately? Are they arriving by email and being bounced about between the team? Do some fall through the cracks?

And are you allowing your employees to find the information they need themselves? At a time and through a channel they choose?

Maybe you’ve already got Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) but now recognise the need for a knowledge and ticketing solution. Perhaps you need a complete revamp of your HR system including these capabilities. Let us tell you more.

‍Knowledge

First of all, let’s focus on empowering your employees to find what they need, sometimes referred to as ‘deflection’.

We categorise these as follows:

1. Static information that is relevant to everyone, e.g. the address of the London office, the homeworking policy, who to contact if you lose your building pass, when is pay day?

Here, from within HCM, the employee can search:

The employee has then drilled into the knowledge article that is most relevant, and they find what they need: self service ✓

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2. Information that varies depending on who you are, e.g. eligibility for occupational parental pay, holiday entitlement. More on this below.

Grabbing Data

But first the system needs to know who is interacting with the system. The good news is that the employee is always logged into HCM so the system knows who they are, and can grab data from their HR record. Typical data items include:

• the employee’s name
• their start date
• their grade
• their salary
• …as well as anything else that could be useful

With these available the system can work out eligibility for various schemes as well as payment related projections and schedules. An example could be that if the employee’s length of service is more than 12 months then the employee is entitled to enhanced maternity pay (and of course that can be easily calculated once we know the employee’s start date).

‍Interactive Forms

So the employee clicks into the knowledge article and rather than static text being displayed an interactive form is presented instead, which could look something like this. 

In the example above the employee can dive into the process that is relevant to their query and can respond to questions that can cover all manner of input types, a selection of which are shown below - a date picker, a slider, a radio button and a dropdown:

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Employee entered data can be validated at point of entry. This could be based on individual data items but also across multiple data items.

And the interactive forms will not just display the same set of questions for everyone; the forms will respond to what’s already known and will adjust itself accordingly. For example if an employee is interested in adoption leave then the date of placement is required, whereas if the employee is interested in maternity leave then the child’s date of birth needs to be collected. No need to collect anything superfluous.

Here’s an example of Shared Parental Leave. As you can see from the "i" icon, useful information can be displayed to the employee so that they can understand what’s being asked. And the form responds to what’s known or what’s been collected. The first orange box shows the entitlement and how it’s been calculated, and that will also drive the validation, i.e. the employee will not be able to enter more than 38 weeks.

The second orange box is a real time calculation of the blocks that the employee has entered in the lower part of the screen.

And the third orange box shows the end date of each block which is calculated based on the start date and number of weeks.

And of course, read-only data that has been seeded in can be displayed as well, if that’s helpful to the employee.

The point is that the system has or can collect all it needs. And with this it can work out all sorts of things and advise the employee accordingly, e.g. you are eligible to switch to the new pension scheme, or your payment schedule whilst you’re on Shared Parental Leave, or when you’re entitled to upgrade your company car.

Just Playing

Now sometimes an employee might just want to explore something but not actually do anything, e.g. my partner is in the early stages of pregnancy and I want to understand Shared Parental Leave but I don’t want to apply for it nor want anyone to know about it. That’s fine, the interactive form can allow you to do just that, and then exit gracefully.

Submittal

At other times the employee may want to take the process through to completion by submitting the form. Upon submitting, there are, broadly speaking, two paths that can be followed:

1. A ticket is created in the HR Helpdesk application and routed to a staff member who is best placed to handle it. And this allows that staff member to work the ticket through to completion by, for example, referring to knowledge articles, continuing the conversation with the employee by updating the ticket, and perhaps contacting the employee’s line manager for approval. And of course the ticket can be subject to service level agreement and can be reported on. 

You’ll want to record some of the data items entered by the employee and to store the decisions that the interactive form made. The HR Helpdesk object is extensible so additional fields can be added to achieve this. Once persisted it’s available to the staff member who is working on the ticket and also available to the reporting engine.

A PDF documented can also be generated that’s presented to the employee who can download and keep it for their own records; and a copy can be attached to the ticket so that the advisor can refer to it.

2. An update it made directly into the HCM application, for example an Absence record is created. And that would be the end of the process.

So overall, all the main use cases are catered for.

What’s the technology under the covers?

• Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) is the core HR solution.
• Oracle HR Helpdesk (HRHD) is the knowledge and ticketing solution.
• Oracle Intelligent Advisor (OIA) is used for the interactive forms and for complex processing around eligibility and payments.
• Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA)… Read the text below:

And if you want even more, then a Digital Assistant, invoked from within HCM, can provide a conversational user interface that allows for the display of knowledge and also gives you access to the interactive forms and the ability submit requests. 

‍What a project could look like

This depends on a number of factors. Is HCM firmly embedded and well adopted in your business? Is your knowledge base up-to-date and being used? What is your current process for handling requests from employees? How many processes would you like to be represented through intelligent forms?

‍Conclusion

Employee and advisor journeys can be intuitive and even enjoyable. And they should be. Throughout this blog we’ve demonstrated how a well thought out solution, powered by Oracle, can help you to maximise your investment. 

If you’d like to book a discovery call, then we’re just a few clicks away: https://magiaconsulting.com/contact-us

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