Does your organization use Oracle HCM Cloud? If so, it’s time to prepare—Oracle’s 25D release is here. The Oracle HCM 25D release became available in non-production environments on October 6, 2025. The deployment to production environments is scheduled for November 3, 2025.

Opkey’s Advisory for Oracle Cloud’s 25D Release. Download now.

Oracle’s quarterly updates aren’t just routine—they’re essential to maintain system security, compliance, and performance. The Oracle HCM 25D release brings significant enhancements around Redwood, delivering a refreshed user experience and powerful new features tailored to your HCM environment.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through a high-level overview of the key updates in Oracle HCM 25D release. With every new release comes the challenge of timely testing and validation—but that’s where Opkey steps in.

Powered by Agentic AI, Opkey’s Enterprise App Lifecycle Optimization platform simplifies Oracle updates by automating testing, improving coverage, and reducing risk. Keep reading to explore what’s changing in this quarterly release, the business benefits it brings, and how Opkey ensures a seamless transition for your workforce systems.

Details of the Oracle HCM Cloud 25D Release Notes: What’s New?

Global Human Resources

• You can now restrict users from uploading documents on the Redwood Document Records page through the enhanced properties available for the Attachments section. This enhancement allows employees to view attachments uploaded by others while preventing them from uploading their own files.
• The usability of the Redwood Document Types and Document Type Delivery Preferences pages has been enhanced with the introduction of user preference persistence. Personalizations made using the Column Selector, UI Filters, or Saved Searches are now retained across sessions.

Absence Management

• Absence Plan Create and Edit pages now feature the Primary Assignment option in the Processing Level list. This option limits enrollment to the primary assignment for workers with multiple roles, maintaining the plan balance exclusively against that enrollment. Subsequently, any absence recorded by the worker across assignments in the same legal employer will consume the plan balance from this single, primary enrollment.
• Compensatory plans now fully support negative earned transactions and negative balance adjustments. The system enforces the defined negative limit to prevent the balance from dropping below the floor when processing these transactions.

Time and Labor

• The Mass Submit and Approve time card functionality now requires specific security privileges. This enhancement ensures that only properly authorized managers can perform submit or approve actions through the mass processes, maintaining the security of team data.
• Attendance Rules now include options to specify if Manager Acknowledgment is required for a violation. You can also define an automatic dismissal period (in days) if the manager fails to act. Managers are notified of violations and can use the notification or the Attendance Violations page to acknowledge or dismiss the violation.

Talent Management

• HR Specialists can create up to 13 bulk check-ins for employees by defining details like manager type, employee group, and discussion topics. Check-ins can be created for individuals or groups using specific criteria. A configured HR job role of ORA_PER_HUMAN_RESOURCE_SPECIALIST_JOB is required to perform this action.
• Managers can now generate AI comments at the Section Summary level for Competencies, Performance and Development Goals. Some data sources are now summarized first using child prompts, before being passed to parent prompts to generate evaluation comments, this supports larger volumes of data and better identifies themes. You need to configure the profile options ORA_HCM_VBCS_PWA_ENABLED and ORA_HRA_PERFORMANCE_DOCUMENTS_AND_GOALS_REDWOOD_ENABLED for Redwood performance documents.

Learning and Development

• Managers now have enhanced flexibility when assigning required, external, or noncatalog learning. Learner selection options have been simplified by integrating reporting structures, and a new, searchable Person list facilitates easy multi-learner selection. After submission, managers are automatically navigated to the new Learning Assignments I Made page, where they can track the real-time status of each assignment. A detailed drawer view provides assignment status transparency (Success, Processing, or Failure with explanations), streamlining the overall workflow.
• The Reconcile Learning Assignments action is no longer available to administrators. Continuous assignment reconciliation is now managed by setting up the site-level profile option ORA_WLF_AUTOMATE_RECONCILE_ENABLED to Y.

Recruiting

• Candidates can now discover job opportunities that match their profile and skills by activating the Job Recommendations Agent and the Job Fit Agent. These agents appear to the candidate as a single experience called Career Coach.
• Fast Formulas can now be used to build conditions for automated candidate selection process actions. These conditions can reference the reasons selected when moving job applications to a terminal state (Rejected by Employer, Withdrawn by Candidate), providing granular control over whether an action is performed.

Benefits

• Oracle Benefits is a flexible solution that lets companies design and manage both simple and complex employee benefit plans, with easy self-service enrollment and built-in guidance.
• The Redwood Self-Service Benefits experience now features an Enhanced Legal Disclaimer. This clearer, more intuitive page requires users to explicitly accept the disclaimer before making enrollment changes, which improves compliance and reduces user confusion and errors.

Payroll

• In UK Payroll, a new Error Number input has been added to the TPS When Earned Details element. This enhancement allows employers to directly capture and report error codes when processing Monthly Contributions Reconciliation (MCR) corrections, significantly improving the efficiency and accuracy of Teachers’ Pension reconciliation.
• The new LGPS Pensionable Pay calculation now accurately handles mid-period absences and nonrecurring payments by separating regular and irregular earnings. This enhanced logic ensures the correct determination of employee contribution tiers and employer contributions, maintaining full compliance.

Compensation

• Managers can now use a currency switcher on Redwood compensation pages to view salary and history details in their preferred currency, making reviews easier and more user-friendly.
• The Review Proposed Salary Changes and Rate Values page has been re-created in Redwood. Compensation managers can now use this modern, user-friendly experience to review current and proposed salary details, search results, and error details with improved clarity.

Technical Updates

Transactional Business Intelligence Enterprise

• OTBI is a real-time, self-service reporting solution for Oracle Cloud application users, providing critical workforce information for decision-making, including costs, staffing, compensation, talent management, and succession planning.
• Compensation assignment segments help analyze workers’ values and segments, such as calculating bonus components for promotions.

Recruiting

• Add WhatsApp as a Communication Channel in HCM Data Loader.
• Update Job Requisition Start Date and End Date in HCM Data Loader.

Learning

• HCM Data Loader and EnhancedTalentProfile.dat enable bulk association of dynamic skills with learning, including self-paced courses and specializations, with supported attributes like skill level and related indicators.

Talent Management

• As administrators, you can now add conditional expressions to page properties when you edit Goal Management Redwood pages in Visual Builder Studio to ensure that the changes apply conditionally.

Benefits

• The Benefits Bill Payment business object allows users to load benefit billing payment data in bulk using Oracle HCM Data Loader or HCM Spreadsheet Data Loader.

We understand that Oracle HCM clients have a tight window of just two weeks to ensure these upcoming changes won’t disrupt critical business processes. It’s a daunting task, especially with so much at stake. This is where Opkey’s Enterprise App Lifecycle Optimization Platform comes in.

How Opkey Can Help

Opkey’s AI-enabled, Enterprise App Lifecycle Optimization platform helps businesses validate new Oracle releases seamlessly, enabling them to unlock the full potential of their Oracle environment. Opkey reduces test cycles and helps businesses achieve improved risk coverage with the power of Agentic AI.

Want to learn more? Book a demo today!