Senate Workforce Planning Case Study

Oracle’s Master Data Management software (Data Relationship Management – DRM) to retire the existing Peoplesoft EPM system. The Hyperion Planning solution was integrated with Peoplesoft Human Capital Management (HCM) system to make use of recorded daily employee activity to include hires, transfers, terminations, and salary changes in order to produce a precise payroll projection that was in line with actual payroll expenditures. Senate operations include more than 7,500 employees supporting more than 700 offices located in Washington, DC and around the country. The Senate’s payroll projection required support for uniquely complicated HCM transactional activity related to interns, expense reimbursement policies, shared office contributions, and special Senate governed salary constraints. Additionally, the Senate’s staff supported offices that were funded by different fiscal funding cycles (traditional fiscal year-based funding versus legislative committee-based funding).

Definitive Logic employed a rapid agile development methodology to iteratively define requirements, implement and validate the solution by managing a business-driven approach and facilitating numerous stakeholder reviews to align the solution with interests among finance, administrative and operating offices. Definitive Logic understood that data quality and business process challenges can have a costly downstream impact that is inefficient to maintain. Definitive Logic also analyzed complex source transactions and worked closely with the business to define and prioritize requirements which often involved an evaluation of opportunities to clean source data, modify the business process or change the authoritative source system.

Prior to the execution of this contract, it was discovered that Senate offices were not using existing Peoplesoft EPM reports because they were difficult to access, data was not reliable, and they didn’t align with data reported and controlled by the Finance office. Senate offices found Definitive Logic’s solution to be more accurate, timely, aligned with business-standard terms/definitions and more accessible than the previous solution. Definitive Logic’s business-driven approach resulted in a more efficient financial systems landscape that gained buy-in from senior stakeholders throughout the Senate.

In summary, Definitive Logic was able to accomplish the following:

• Improve the utility of financial reports and reduced the time required to access the reports from several minutes to a few seconds. Due to this improvement, new financial reports were used by Senate offices
• Improve the accuracy of financial projection
• Enhance visibility into employee activity to explain the reasons for payroll fluctuations
• Improve the Senate’s business processes