This is the first in a series of postings we’ll be making under the heading of Cool Tools You Can Use. Our PeopleSoft product management team identified the need for this series after reflecting on the many conversations we have each year with our PeopleSoft community members. During these conversations, we were discovering that customers and implementation partners were often not aware that solutions exist to the problems they were trying to address and that the solutions were readily available at no additional charge. Thus, the Cool Tools You Can Use series will describe the business challenge we’ve heard, the PeopleSoft solution to the challenge, and how you can learn more about the solution so that everyone can be sure to make full use of what PeopleSoft applications have to offer.
The first cool tool we’ll look at is the Validation Template for PeopleSoft Contracts Process Requests, which was first released in December 2013 as part of PeopleSoft Contracts 9.2 Update Image 4.
The business issue our customers highlighted to us is the need to tightly control but easily configure and manage the scope of data that any user can process when initiating a process. Control of each user’s span of impact is essential to reducing billing reconciliation issues, passing span of authority audits, and reducing (or even eliminating) the frequency of unexpected process results.
Setting Up the Validation Template for a PeopleSoft Contracts Process
With the validation template, organizations can easily and quickly ensure the software restricts the scope of transactions a user can affect and gives organizations the confidence to know that business processes are being governed effectively. Additionally, this control of PeopleSoft Contracts process requests can be applied and easily maintained and adjusted from a web browser thereby enabling analysts to administer the rules without having to engage software developers to customize the software.
During the field validation template setup, an analyst specifies the combinations of fields that must contain values when a user tries to setup a run control and initiate a PeopleSoft Contracts process from a process request page. For example, for the Process Limits component, an organization could require that users enter a valid combination of values for the business unit, contract, and contract type fields or a value in the contract administrator field. Until the user enters a valid combination of entries on the process request page, he cannot launch the process.
With the validation template activated for process request pages, organizations can be confident that PeopleSoft Contracts users will not accidentally begin generating invoices or triggering other revenue management processes for transactions beyond their scope of authority.
To learn more about the Validation Template, please review the Defining Validation Templates section of the PeopleSoft Contracts PeopleBooks.
