Take a look around you.  You will find people fiddling around with their iPhones. According to Wikipedia Apple sold 6.1 million original iPhone units over five quarters in 2008-2009. Recorded sales have been growing steadily and by the end of fiscal year 2010, a total of 73.5 million iPhones were sold.  Numbers for Blackberry’s, Android based telephones as strong. Nokia the largest mobile manufacturer  has recently announced that all their smart phones will have Windows mobile. Thus we can safely assume that Windows Mobile OS  will get a huge boost in their sales too.  Currently 65% of mobile cellular traffic is from smart phones. Over the next five years the growth in traffic is estimated to multiply  700%.  Nielsen projects that smart phone sales will meet normal phone sales in 3^rd quarter 2011.

Why? It’s not just about owning and showing off a cool gadget anymore. It has become a way of life.  Since owning my first smart phone in just over a year I must confess I am addicted to it. I check and reply my work and private e-mails as soon as I receive these regardless if I am work, home or vacationing. I am always up to date with the tweets I am interested in. I check and update my social networking accounts regularly. I check my bank accounts and make transfers when and where I need it. I maintain my social and work agenda and the best of all I can audio or video chat with my family back in Pakistan 24 hours a day and for free. The bottom line is when I am not working I don’t need to switch on my Laptop any more.

Smart phones are already popular with the professionals on the go. Almost half of the work emails I receive have a tag line “Sent via iPhone ” or “Sent via Blackberry”  below the message.  More and more businesses are providing smart phones to their employees. It is not just the cool thing. It is practical. Their most popularity in the business world is primarily because of their e-mail function and having your calendar at hand all the time.  But is that all?

So what’s the value of a smart phone for modern businesses. Commercial businesses are successfully trying hard to get more out of the smart phones. Airlines offer applications using which a passenger can not only book his flight online, he can also check schedules, destination information, delays, flight information, online check in and digital boarding card. Web shops have their own applications for doing shopping over the net.  There are applications to locate parking spots, petrol stations, fast food restaurants and WiFi Hotspots. Supermarket chains have applications for grocery shopping. Popular pizza delivery chains offer apps for ordering pizzas. There are also applications to pay for parking and toll; getting real time traffic information and speed trap locations.

Good so we have we have plenty of commercial applications making use of the smart phone. But what about core backend business applications? Are there any General Ledger that interface to you smart phone, or a logistics system.  A quick search on Google revealed that SAP has been busy since 2007 in developing a mobile application that will communicate with their core SAP systems. They now have applications for alerts and approvals,  real time reporting, customer data and inventory monitoring.  Never wanting to stay too far behind SAP; in 2008 Oracle announced Business Applications for iPhone. They now have an Oracle Business approvals for managers which integrates with EBS.  They also have Business intelligence application and an Asset management application all integrated with EBS. On the PeopleSoft front I found iReceipt which is an Oracle product that interfaces with PeopleSoft Financials and Absence App which is a third party application developed by Succeed Consultancy.

So what about the HR Business. Ages ago PeopleSoft started on the mobile front when it was possible to create mobile pages of PeopleSoft screens using PeopleTools.  Somewhere between the hostile takeover of PeopleSoft and trying to prevent the PeopleSoft clients to jump the ship, Oracle let the functionality slip through the cracks. The Fusion HCM applications offer a module called Network At Work which more professional networking within the enterprise and does not extend to mobile devices. Morale of the story, there isn’t anything significant on the HR front.

To me there is no doubt that a good thought out HR application for mobile device will be priceless if properly launched and marketed. So why are the big companies does not seem to be interested in doing anything with HR for mobile devices? And if there is to be an mobile application for the HR business what would that be, what should it offer?

As stated in an earlier blog post  the new PeopleTools 8.50 really gives you a WOW.
And there are a lot of WOW’s. But do they come of the box or do you have to put a  lot effort  to get them available to the user when you are upgrading from an earlier version?
Here I’ll give an overview about what Oracle says about some of these, so you can get an idea.

On Tuesday March 31, 2009 the annual Oracle Benelux User Group will be held in Antwerp. Logica will be present as one of the gold sponsor. Our key presentation is focused on Flexible employee Benefits in Oracle.

Employee benefits are of increasing importance in today’s labor market. The relationship between employer and employees is more mature than ever, and employees are keen on making individual benefit choices. Facilitating those individual choices is becoming increasingly challenging, and costly, for HR departments. Giving employees freedom of choice by means of self service and showing, in real time, the financial implications of individual choices is both highly motivating for employees and highly efficient for the HR department. Logica will explain her vision on this development and will, based on the Tasper Benefit Shop explain how this can be supported in an Oracle / PeopleSoft environment.

In our stand we will present a running demo of the Tasper / PeopleSoft solution. We are also providing information on Famous, our conversion and migration factory and Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA).

The last event, held in Utrecht in 2007, attracted around 800 visitors. I’m wondering how the economic situation will affect the number of attendees and the topics presented. Focus should be on cost saving solutions. Also I’m looking forward to the presentation by José Lazares on AIA. Maybe not directly a cost saving solution, but certainly the way forward in embracing the future Oracle applications.

In Oracle EBS there are lots of list of values. Most of the times you can change these values by editing the lookup values. In some cases you want to show a subset of the lookup-values based on another field in the same form. In this blog-entry there will be an example how to do this based on the fields user status and employment category for contingent workers in Oracle HR. The case is that we only want to show the values in the list of values for the employment category that are eligible with the chosen user status.