Oracle PeopleSoft HCM - Still great, but...

I wish I could score it higher. In my opinion, the product is very non-intuitive and has remained so for decades. The idea that a cosmetic overlay of new navigation tools would fix this was shortsighted, at best. The system, even with all new updates working, I feel, is still hard to learn and understand. The learning curve makes the implementation very difficult, and new hires have to train incessantly for hours just to understand basic data entry routines and processes within the system. This unfortunately creates extra expenditures from the organization to train everyone appropriately. You need many training consultants to accomplish a good training program - in my opinion, Oracle's out-of-the-box training is simply not easy to understand, and is not appropriate for advanced enterprises who need to heavily customize the product. That said - there are not a whole lot of choices in HCM for large enterprises that offer such a high ability for customization, so Oracle PeopleSoft HCM remains as a top-tier product for many enterprises.

Oracle PeopleSoft HCM is great for onboarding new hires. The process, including some newer direct entry features, has been streamlined and made more intuitive. However, there is a steep learning curve for those who are completely unfamiliar with enterprise systems as a whole. In my experience, Oracle PeopleSoft HCM's updates have historically failed to improve the intuitiveness of navigation and features even through a move to a SaaS configuration in the cloud. This makes it hard to train new HR staff because there may be five different ways to accomplish the same thing and none of them are intuitive enough to just "figure out". This has been a bone of contention for me for all Oracle products for my entire 20+ year career, and it has never been fully addressed.

It is most likely we will integrate to a new platform in the next 5 years.

In my opinion, training in Oracle PeopleSoft HCM is arduous at best. In my experience, there are numerous issues with creating training environments and that makes practice in a sandbox costly. I prefer asynchronous simulated environment training for this reason, but that costs even more due to the development and testing time needed to create that training. eLearning is always there with only the need to keep it up-to-date.

Better suited for the long-term, I think developing an eLearning protocol helped our organization to train users much more efficiently. After an initial training round, the upkeep of instructor-led training is also very costly and difficult. I think eLearning objects from the beginning are better suited for implementation of Oracle PeopleSoft HCM.

In my experience, it takes a lot of effort and money to configure Oracle PeopleSoft HCM. There is no way around the need for technical experts to help with this. In my opinion, the costs are enormous. Anything you can dream, you can pretty much customize and do - but the capital you'll need to invest is equal to the difficulty of implementing the configuration or customization.

You may as well plan on having support in-house if you are a large organization. In my opinion, the generic help from Oracle is of little to no value for most organizations. Be prepared to hire people to support you - or, at minimum, hire a team that can actually work with Oracle to support you. You will need experts to help you do this.

This product can be scaled however you like. There is no limit to what you can accomplish with a large enough budget. This product is always going to require upkeep, maintenance, and updates. Keep this in mind. Your implementation is not a one-and-done - you'll need to constantly and consistently seek ways to improve data flow, solve issues, streamline processes, and add new features.

Typically, our systems are well maintained and do not go down. Once you've gotten to this point, the product is solid. Oracle technical teams are helpful to backend support (IT personnel in our case) and they help in realtime, making it efficient for our technical team to solve issues quickly if they need additional help.

This is highly dependent on the server setup you implement. You need to make sure you've included enough hardware to support your users. Not enough power will quickly rear its ugly head. If you've got the correct setup, the product will operate quickly and provide a good user experience. Oracle is slowed down by certain realtime interfaces to other systems, but this can be addressed by your technical team relatively easily.

I feel it's an arduous technical task. There is nothing I'd call "easy" to integrate with Oracle products. Very specific technical skillsets are required by your resources to accomplish this. We integrate with numerous systems, and the proper human capital is a must-have. You'll need someone with experience integrating that specific product, or someone with the deep knowledge required to integrate a home-grown system (which will take longer to perfect and require multiple testing cycles).

It's really easy to buy any Oracle product if you've got the enormous amount of money required. The sales team is great - but don't be fooled. In my opinion, it's never as easy as you think to implement this solution for your enterprise. I've seen implementations go for two or more years and then completely fail because questions about functionality were never asked up-front. Don't do that - get the information from people who have been through it before and don't get caught paying for app customizations that you can never use.

In my experience, support is not there for end-users. Tech teams get great support. I know this is by design because enterprises have their own needs for support, but it's hard as a user to not be able to get an answer from the creators of the product itself. If self-service were available to users, I'd give this section a higher rating. That said - a bit of advice - make sure your in-house training and training team is exemplary.