Oracle Cloud HCM 24B Release: What’s New?

Does your company use Oracle HCM Cloud? If that's the case, you know Oracle's 24B release is almost here! The tentative Oracle 24B HCM release date is slated for May 2024. These mandatory quarterly releases ensure that your environment is up to date with the most recent features, fixes, and upgrades.  

This blog will provide a high-level overview of the new features included with the Oracle HCM 24B update. We'll discuss why rigorous testing is vital for the Oracle 24B version rollout and explore how Opkey's No-Code test automation technology can provide a simple and fast update certification.

Are you also interested in learning about the upcoming shift to Redwood? We have the info you need here.  

What New Changes to Expect From the Oracle Cloud HCM 24B Release?

Global Human Resources

Journeys

• Users can now create New Survey for the team by using the new survey UI.
• Physical Signature can be provided when using Journey task of type electronic signature.
• Email ID field can be hidden from the native signature task type.

Updates in Redwood experience

• Update Payroll Information in the newly added Payroll Details step in the Redwood Change Location Process.
• Update Payroll Information in the newly added Payroll Details step in the Redwood Change Working Hours Process.
• Enhanced the usage of the Redwood Employment Info page by giving users the ability to view assignment flex field information.

Core HR Features

• In the Request a New Position process and the Create Position page, the parent position is defaulted to the parent position of the currently logged in user. This helps managers as they often create a position in their team. For the professional user, it's less likely that the new position is within their own team.
• Automatically mass assign or inactivate and end-date representatives' areas of responsibilities (AOR) based on user-defined template criteria.

Learning

• Adding Related Skills and Qualifications from Learning Outcomes to Workers Talent Profile.
• This enables learners to get key assignment information from the page header, leaving more space on the page for the details of the activities they need to complete.
• Enrollment details page now provides more information about your selected offerings, including its title, and a streamlined way to accept or decline a seat.
• Assign learning to our team, request no catalog learning, or record external learning to the specified person's direct reports or entire organization.
• Managers have the flexibility to assign offerings to people on their teams based on the My Team Learning page that they're on.  

Absence Management

• New option called Absence Type Default in the Additional Attributes section used to configure the absence type to choose how the default absence type is displayed during absence entry and absence bid entry pages.
• Absence Balances can be seen during entering Time Cards
• Export absences information from Manage Absences and Entitlements page to excel spreadsheets.
• New ESS_Job_Request_ID column, now it is easy to identifying the last process that updated a transaction.
• Absence planning page has customer extensibility enabled to personalize their experience.
• Allow customers to enable auditing for following two database tables: per_schedule_assignments, per_schedule_exceptions

Benefits

• Additional 6 new plan type groupings along with the existing 12 to group benefit plans and plan types. This enhancement provides greater flexibility in using plan type groupings.
• Use the employee’s home address instead of the primary or work address for eligibility profiles.  
• The Timeliness Days field is now defaulted to 90 for new life events and any existing life events if their existing values are null. It ensures that the life events aren’t inadvertently backed out and it reduces the additional work for administrators.

Payroll

• Payroll background process runs continuously when entries such as compensation and time are loaded for an employee, and when processes such as Generate HCM Rates are submitted. The payroll application includes safeguards to ensure the process is running continuously, and if required it’s automatically restarted if it stops for some reason.
• Generate the archive-based Payment Register Report and Third-Party Payment Register reports in the language of your preference.
• Compress large output files of the Payroll Reports, Extract-based or BI reports, and log files of these reports, before you upload them to UCM.
• Use the Unit of Measurement (UOM) option to define how numbers are formatted and displayed on payroll reports.  

Talent Management

Goal Management – Redwood Experience

• Extend Goal Support
• Submit Individual Performance Goals for Approval
• Role-Based Performance Goal Approvals
• Enhanced Performance Goal Notifications
• Measurable Tasks for performance Goals  

Profile Management

• The synchronization or sync process updates and maintains position profiles by inheriting items from linked job profiles and keeping the job and position profile in sync.
• Enables organizations to streamline the validation of licenses and certifications by offering components for integration with any third-party providers.
• Enables approvers to view the item-level attachments during the item’s pending approval state.

Career Development

• Enable the Career Ambassadors feature using a new profile option ORA_HRD_CAREER_AMBASSADORS_ENABLED. This is used to display career ambassador suggestions in Skills Center and on the career details page.
• Align learning with development goals, fostering a strategic approach to professional growth.
• Use measurable goal tasks in the Redwood Goal Center to measure your progress toward the accomplishment of a development goal.

Performance Management

• Create or update feedback using HCM Data Loader (HDL) and HCM Spreadsheet Data Loader (HSDL).
• Restrict the auto transfer of performance documents to new performance document managers when an employee's assignment manager changes, to a specific manager type.
• Leverage enhancements added to All-in-One-Evaluations and streamline the evaluation process for managers.
• The Mass Action Processes for Performance Documents page lists all the mass action processes that a HR specialist can submit or preview and has been recreated in the Redwood toolset Visual Builder Studio (VB Studio) to provide an enriched user experience.
• Enables you to have an enriching check-in with the inclusion of competencies and skills related topics in an employee’s check-in document.

Talent Review

• Redwood Experience for Talent Review Meeting Configuration, Duplicate Meeting Configuration
• The business title of a worker is displayed in the Redwood Talent Review pages.

Succession Management

• Navigate to the Redwood version of the Create Succession Plan and Add to Succession Plan pages, making a consistent user experience with other Redwood pages and flows.
• Business Title Replacement in Succession Management    

HCM Common

HCM Data Loader

• Initiating Load, Roll Back and Extended Retention operations at both business object and data set levels along with dependable backend support from enhanced importAndLoadData REST/SOAP operations.
• With the new and enhanced business objects we can extend data loading capabilities.  
• Automate the HCM Data Loader (HDL) and HCM Spreadsheet Data Loader (HSDL) integrations using the dataLoadDataSets REST resource to upload files to the Oracle Web Center Content server and initiate HDL and HSDL and monitor the progress and status of your data sets.  

Time and Labor

• New database items are delivered to get premium codes and types for workforce scheduling shifts in time rules.
• Managers can now save, submit and approve time cards without having to wait for workers to submit pending attestations and improves the time card approval processing.
• Remove time card information (referred to as Time Record Group objects) related to workers with terminated employment or canceled work relationships from Oracle HCM Cloud.  
• The inclusion of on-call entries automatically defaulted to the time card. Also reduce payroll errors and the administrative burden of fixing time cards with incorrect entries.

Oracle HCM modules will likely see additional changes; for more details, see Opkey's advisory document.

Learn more about Oracle Cloud HCM testing

How Does Opkey Help?

We are aware that Oracle HCM clients will have a short window of two weeks to confirm that these modifications won't negatively impact their current business procedures. This can be difficult, but test automation is already transforming the way businesses test and shortening quarterly update cycles from weeks to 3 days.  

You'll need Opkey's managed Oracle Cloud quarterly certification to help you go through the 24B update on the Oracle HCM Cloud.  

Here's how we do that:  

• Quickly deploy our pre-built accelerator library, which includes over 7,000 Oracle Cloud business components and pre-built test scripts for various HCM modules.  
• Prior to updates, Opkey offers a detailed advisory document outlining the exact changes that might be expected.
• Our Impact Analysis reports identify significant changes that require evaluation by comparing processes as-is and to-be.

See how Northwell Health could cut their Oracle HCM Cloud implementation time by 2 months and save $1.2 million.  

We help Oracle customers quickly upgrade their workforce systems while reducing the risk of change. Opkey is part of the Oracle Partner Network. Our AI-powered solutions enable our customers to achieve resilient business agility with speed and assurance.