HCM POST1 - What is Oracle Fusion/Oracle HCM Cloud?

 

What is Oracle Fusion?

Oracle Fusion is a cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution offered by Oracle Corporation. It provides a unified platform to manage core business processes across an organization.

Oracle Fusion includes several functional offerings, such as:

• Human Capital Management (HCM)

• Financials

• Supply Chain Management (SCM)

In this article, we will focus on the Oracle HCM Cloud offering, which is designed to manage employee-related data and HR processes within an organization.

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Oracle HCM Cloud Overview

Oracle HCM Cloud enables organizations to efficiently handle various HR functions, including employee records, workforce management, and talent processes.

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Key Modules in Oracle HCM

Oracle HCM consists of multiple functional modules, including:

• Core HR / Global HR – Centralized employee data management

• Absence Management – Tracks and manages employee leave and absences

• Payroll – Handles salary processing and compensation

• Recruiting Cloud – Supports hiring and talent acquisition processes

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Technical Components in Oracle HCM

In addition to functional modules, Oracle HCM includes several technical and configuration-oriented components:

• OTBI (Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence) Reports – Real-time reporting and analytics

• HDL (HCM Data Loader) – Tool for bulk data upload and migration

• Sandbox Configurations – Safe environments for testing changes before deployment

• Fast Formulas – Business logic engine used for calculations and validations

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Oracle HCM Versions and Releases

Oracle Fusion was initially released in 2011 with version R1, and continued through to R13 by 2018.

After Release 13, Oracle Corporation transitioned to a continuous delivery model:

• R13 became a static baseline version

• Updates are now delivered quarterly

Each quarterly update is labeled as:

• A (Q1)

• B (Q2)

• C (Q3)

• D (Q4)

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How to Check Your Oracle HCM Version

To identify the version of your Oracle HCM application:

1. Log in to your Oracle Fusion instance

2. Click on your Profile

3. Navigate to Settings and Actions

4. Select About This Application

Here, you will find the detailed version information of your environment.

This will give the version of your current application.

Understanding Oracle HCM Versioning

Consider the following version from a demo instance:

25C (11.13.25.07.0)

Since this blog is written in August 2025, the version can be interpreted as follows:

• 25 → Represents the year 2025

• C → Indicates the third quarterly release (Q3)

Therefore, the version 25C refers to the Q3 release of 2025.

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Breaking Down the Full Version Number

Let’s further decode the extended version string:

11.13.25.07.0

Each segment has a specific meaning:

• 11 → The initial release year of Oracle Fusion (2011)

• 13 → Refers to Release 13 (R13), which serves as the static baseline version

• 25 → The release year (2025)

• 07 → The starting month of Quarter C, which is July

• 0 → Typically used for internal patching or minor update tracking

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Summary

In simple terms:

• 25C = Year 2025, Quarter 3 release

• 11.13.25.07.0 = Detailed internal version structure representing release lineage, year, and update cycle

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This structured versioning helps track both the historical baseline (R13) and the ongoing quarterly updates delivered by Oracle Corporation.

How to Access Oracle HCM Cloud

Oracle HCM Cloud is a web-based application, and users access it through a secure URL provided by Oracle Corporation.

Each customer environment is uniquely identified using a POD (Point of Delivery) and a region in the URL.

URL Structure

https://<POD>.fa.<region>.oraclecloud.com/fscmUI/faces/FuseWelcome

URL Components Explained

• <POD> → Instance name (e.g., abc-dev1, xyz-prod)

• fa → Stands for Fusion Applications

• <region> → Data center location (e.g., us2, emea, ap1)

This structure ensures that each customer accesses their own isolated environment.

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Oracle HCM Home Screen Overview

After logging into the application, users land on the home page, which contains several key components.

1. Springboard and Functional Areas

The Springboard is the main navigation area that provides access to various modules and functional groups. From here, users can perform transactions and access configuration tasks.

The same navigation options are also available through the Navigator (hamburger menu) located at the top-left corner of the application.

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2. Settings and Actions Menu

For implementation and configuration tasks, one of the most important sections is the Settings and Actions menu.

• Located at the top-right corner, accessible by clicking the logged-in user icon

• Widely used by implementers and administrators

Key Options

• Preferences
  Allows users to configure:

• Date format

• Time format

• Number format

• Setup and Maintenance

• Core area for performing system configurations

• Commonly referred to as the Functional Setup Manager (FSM)

• Used extensively during implementation and system setup

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3. Informational Sections

At the bottom of the homepage, you will find:

• Things to Do
  Displays tasks and actions relevant to the user

• News and Announcements
  Provides important updates and organizational communications

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Summary

Accessing and navigating Oracle HCM Cloud is straightforward once you understand:

• The URL structure and environment identification (POD & region)

• The Springboard and Navigator for accessing features

• The Settings and Actions menu for configuration tasks

My First Azure Function Adventure

Turning Invoices Into Insights

After earning my Azure Cloud Foundations certification, I started exploring cloud tools, especially Azure, with the goal of building something useful and interesting. Invoices felt like a good place to start—they are widely used, often unstructured, and contain critical information for organizations. Most organizations also rely on invoice-based expense approvals submitted by employees.

With this in mind, I decided to build my first Azure Function App that can read and understand invoice data, apply organizational policies and rules, and approve only those items that comply with the policies defined in the system prompt.

The Idea

Think of it like this:

• An invoice arrives.
• Instead of someone manually checking line items, the app automatically extracts the details.
• Then, it applies a set of rules to decide what’s acceptable.
• Finally, it produces a neat, structured response that’s easy to trust.

I wanted the process to feel seamless, almost like having a digital assistant that never gets tired of reading receipts.

The Building Blocks

To make this happen, I combined two powerful Azure services:

• Document Intelligence: This is the part that “reads” the invoice, pulling out structured data like amounts, dates, and item descriptions.
• OpenAI on Azure: This is the part that “thinks,” applying organizational policy rules and shaping the final structured output.

Together, they form a pipeline: one extracts, the other reasons, and the function app ties it all together.

Why Azure Functions?

I chose Azure Functions because they’re lightweight, serverless, and perfect for small experiments. I didn’t need to worry about managing servers or scaling infrastructure. Instead, I could focus on the logic: receive a request, process the invoice, return a clean JSON result.

It felt empowering to see something so compact handle such a meaningful workflow.

What Happens Behind the Scenes

Here’s the flow in simple terms:

1. Receive the invoice (uploaded as a file).
2. Extract the data using Document Intelligence.
3. Apply policy rules through OpenAI prompts.
4. Return a structured decision — success or rejection, with clear details.

To showcase how this function works in practice, I built a simple Azure Static Web App.

• The web app provides a clean UI where users can upload an invoice file.
• Behind the scenes, it calls the API I created in the function app.
• The response is then displayed in a structured, easy‑to‑read format.

This demo is just a proof of concept, but it highlights how the architecture can be extended. With a bit more integration, the same design could plug into enterprise‑grade systems like PeopleSoft, making invoice approvals faster, smarter, and policy‑compliant.

What’s Next

This post is more about the story and the vision. In Part 2, I’ll dive into the technical details — how the function is set up, the schemas, the prompts, and the deployment process. That’s where the nuts and bolts will come in.

For now, I hope this gives you a sense of how a simple idea — “read invoices automatically” — turned into my first Azure Function adventure.

Here is a quick sneak peek of the POC that was built. If you’d like to learn more or connect to make it more intelligent and streamlined, feel free to leave a comment or message me.

Drop Zones - Isolate Customizations

Drop Zones

One of the most powerful aspects of peoplesoft is its ability to customize the application to cater the unique business requirements of the customer.

However, this comes with a cost of huge maintenance and slow uptake of the latest updates/images from Oracle.

Peoplesoft has come up with a new feature -  Drop Zones, that allow customers to continue with their customizations and at the same time isolate these changes from the delivered product.

In this post I will give detailed steps on how to use the Drop Zone feature in peoplesoft and also how to combine the event mapping framework to achieve business customizations without touching the delivered code.

For our example, we are going to take the Department table -

Root > Set Up HCM > Foundation Tables > Organization > Departments

Below is the delivered Depatment table page:

Let us assume now the Customer wants to capture additional information apart from what is delivered.

If you open the page DEPARTMENT_TBL_GBL in app designer, you can find  the stub placed by peoplesoft for the drop zone configuration and this is at level 0.

Step1 - Creating a Sub Page to store custom detail

 

I have created a physical table as below to capture the custom business information:

Create a sub page with the appropriate scroll level and add the custom fields on to the sub page:

Step2 - Linking the Custom Sub Page to the Component

PeopleTools > Portal > Configure Drop Zones

Navigate to the Configure Drop Zone page and Search for the Component Department Table.

Associate the custom sub page that we created above to the appropriate Drop Zone.

For more details on information about the fields in this page, click here - Peoplebooks.

This completes the steps to add Customizations to achive unique cases for customers without impacting the delivered objects.

Navigate to the department table component to see the newly added custom fields to capture additional information.

Tracking Assets in Peoplesoft HCM

With the Covid-19 pandemic across the globe, many organizations have asked their employees to work from home. Most of these organizations allow employees to take home the organizations assets. It is very important for any organization to track and maintain a record of the assets.

A recent blog from Oracle introduced me to this capability available within Peoplesoft HCM to track the Company's assets. This blog is a detail on the exploration that I have done on that feature.

Setting up the Company assets is very easy. You need to navigate to the Setup HCM > Product Related > Workforce Administration > Company Property. This set up allows you to add the various assets in your organization. You can save information like the make, manufacturer as well as the model number. There are different property types available. You can add your custom property type by navigating to the PeopleTools > Utilities > Administration > Translate Values  or through your application designer.

The Property Value tab lets you tag the asset to a department. Also you can capture the Serial Number, Asset Number and property value.

This property can then be easily tagged to the employee by navigating to the Workforce Administration > Job Information > Company Property

For More Information: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/F26419_01/hcm92pbr33/eng/hcm/hhaw/task_HandlingCompanyProperty-647c01.html

Employment Model - Part 2 Explained

This post is in continuation to my previous post on the Employment Model in Oracle HCM. You can find the previous post here.

As explained earlier, there are two types of employment model in Oracle HCM Cloud

• 2-Tier Model

• 3-Tier Model

The employment model can be set up at the enterprise level or at the Legal Employer level (this overrides the enterprise setup) by using the Manage Enterprise HCM Information and Manage Legal Entity HCM Information tasks in the Setup and Maintenance work area respectively.

Below is a detailed list of Employment models available in Oracle HCM:

• 2-Tier Single Assignment
• 2-Tier Single Assignment with Contract
• 2-Tier Multiple Assignments
• 2-Tier Multiple Contracts with Single Assignment
• 3-Tier Single Employment Terms - Single Assignment
• 3-Tier Single Employment Terms Multiple Assignment
• 3-Tier Multiple Employment Terms Single Assignment
• 3-Tier Multiple Employment Terms Multiple Assignments

Based on the number of assignmnets a worker can have in an organization you can chose from any of the above options. As explained in the previous post, employment terms is of great advantage if a worker can have similar assignments within a single work relationship.

The 2-Tier Multiple Contracts with Single Assignment is a feature added as part of the Oracle Global Human Resource R13 (updates 17B - 17D). This employment model allows to manage contracts for workers having mulitple assignments. Each assignment can be associated with its individual contract and it does not allow the same contract to be shared across multiple assignments.

The 2-Tier Multiple Contracts with Single Assignment  and the 2-Tier Single Assignment with Contract, lets the system capture the contract information along with the assignment for any work relationship. Including the contract information in the assignment is optional.

By default every enterprise uses the 2-Tier Single Assignment model. Whenever a work relationship is created with a legal employer one assignment gets created automatically. With 2-Tier Multiple Assignments, it allows you to add additional assignments later manually. 

Note: A person can have one or more work relationship with the enterprise

The 3-Tier Model is also similar to the 2-Tier model in terms of the Single/Mutliple assignments except that it has Employment terms in between the work relationship and the Assignment. The employment terms will contain the contract or the trems and conditions that govern one or more assignments.

The below diagram summarizes a 3-tier model with a worker having muliplte relatonship with an enterprise and  employment terms to govern one or more assignments.

The 3-Tier model provides the ability to control assignment attribute values and enforce consistency across multiple assignments within an employment term. This model also provides the ability to have multiple assignments governed under a single contract.

Each model has got its own advantages/disadvantages. It depends upon the clients operating model to chose the correct employment model, which is a fundamental decision. This decision must be made because it affects other related implementation decisions, including several HR processes and the end user experience. In addition, it may not be easy (and not possible in certain cases) to switch from one employment model to another after you deploy HCM.

Person Model in Peoplesoft - Employment Model in Oracle HCM

In this post I will walk you through the concept of the Person Model in Peoplesoft and the Employment Model in Oracle HCM Cloud. Both describes how a person or a human resource is attached to an organization. The concept of Person/Employment model is some what similar in both Peoplesoft and Oracle HCM with some new features or concepts added in Oracle HCM.
You will be able to understand those differences at the end of this blog.

Person Model - Peoplesoft

Person Model in Peoplesoft is a way in which the person's demographic information and his/her realationship with the organization is stored in the Peoplesoft database.
Some of the important terminologies are:

• Organizational Relationship
• Organizational Instance
• Job Assignment

Organizational Relationship

There are three different ways in which a Person can be related to the organization. This is know as the Organizational relationship and is identified by the field PER_ORG.

1. Employee (PER_ORG = EMP) - These include the regular employees within the organization, employed and paid by the organization
2. Contingent Worker (PER_ORG = CWR) - A non-employee who is part of the workforce, e.g Contractors. They not have a legal relationship with the organization and are employed and paid by some other organization
3. Person of Interest (PER_ORG = POI) - A non-employee who is not a contingent worker as well but is of interest to the organization

Organizational Instance

 When an organizational relationship is created for a person an Organizational Instance is created in the database. This is identified by the field ORG_INSTANCE_ERN. The organizational instance can be an Employment Instance, Contingent Worker Instance or a POI Instance. The first Organizational instance of a person is his primary/substantive job.
The substantive job is the one that defines the Hire Date, Seniority Date, etc.

Job Assignment

The organizational instance is followed by an assignment creation, which has the Job information.

The below diagram summarises the Person Model showing an eample of a person with multiple assignments and multiple relationship with the organization.

Person Model

Employment Model - Oracle HCM Cloud

Employment Model is an important concept in Oracle HCM cloud which gives information about how a worker is related to the organization or to be more specific a Legal entity/Legal employer in HCM Cloud. The Oracle HCM cloud employment model can support simple or complex global work relationships. To configure employment models for the enterprise or for individual "legal employers", use the Manage Enterprise HCM Information and Manage Legal Entity HCM Information tasks in the Setup and Maintenance work area respectively.

Employment model has three entitites:

• Work Relationships
• Assingments
• Employment Terms

Work Relationships

Like the Org Relationship in Peoplesoft, is the way in which a worker is related to the legal employer. A worker can have multiple work relationship, but only one must be identified as primary. This is identified by the PRIMARY_WORK_RELATION_FLAG attribute, setting to Y at the Work Relationship level

Assignments

Every Work Realtionship should have atleast one assignment created in the system for that worker. An assingment provides information about a person's job, position, pay, compensation, managers, working hours, and location. A worker can have mulitple assignments but one must be identified as the primary assignment. A worker assignment can be made primary by setting the PRIMARY_ASSIGNMENT_FLAG to Y at the assignment level

Employment Terms

This is a new concept introduced in the Oracle HCM. It contains set of terms or conditions that governs an assignment. This can also contain some of the informations like Grade, Working Hours, etc. These values are defaulted from the employment terms to the assignment, which can be later overridden at the assignment level based on the enterprise/legal employer configuration.

The employment model can be divided into two primary categories:

• 2-Tier Model
• 3-Tier Model
  

For use cases where a worker could have similar assignments within a single work relationship, then the legal employer can use 3-tier model making use of the employment terms and have the assignments automatically inherit any information at the employment terms level. The information inherited from the employment terms can also be overriden based on the option "Allow Employment Terms Override at Assignment" in the Manage Enterprise HCM Information.

This is at a high level information about the Person Model in Peoplesoft and the Employment Model in Oracle HCM. Both these products have their own terminologies and features available.

Oracle HCM Cloud - How to get Started Learning

This post is to guide you to the various resources that I have come across online to understand and learn Oracle Fusion HCM/Oracle HCM Cloud.

When I first wanted to learn about Oracle HCM I started researching in the internet for various economical resources. These below resources would only help if you have prior experience in using other HCM systems like peoplesoft, eBiz. There are plenty of training institutes that provide trainings on Oracle Cloud application. But all those come with a heavy price.


What is Oracle Fusion/Oracle Cloud?
Fusion is a term that Oracle uses to refer to its Cloud infrastructure(Fusion Middleware) and the new suite of applications specifically designed for the cloud.

Unlike the on premise application like peoplesoft which used to be hosted on servers/data centers in the client premises, the Oracle Fusion Applications for a client are stored in remote servers and hence the term 'Cloud'.

Oracle has got different models of its cloud offering. Oracle HCM cloud is an offering of SaaS model.

Oracle Cloud Models

I will later on write a detailed post on the various modules and offerings available in the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Lauchpad
https://learn.oracle.com/ords/launchpad/learn?page=index
Oracle has come up with this Oracle Launchpad to provide an easy way to start learning about its cloud applications. It is built in a more intuitive way and there are thousands of topics to learn about the cloud application.

Oracle launch Pad has got a wonderful UI, which lets you filter based on the area of interest.

Area of Interest Filter

These topics are also categorized based on the role that you play in the organization. Oracle launchpad is a perfect place to start learning about the various cloud applications. After completing each topics, there are quizzes that you can complete. Completion of these quizzes gives you points, which inturn gives you badges that can be shared in social platform like LinkedIn,Twitter, etc. For taking quizzes users are supposed to have an Oracle SSO.

 At anytime you can visit your profile to see the points and the badges earned. Oracle launchpad can be used to sharpen your Oracle cloud skills as well as your marketability by earning points, badges and bragging rights.

Oracle Launchpad Profile

Oracle Cloud Community
https://cloudcustomerconnect.oracle.com/pages/home
Oracle Cloud Customer connect is another good way to connect with people of same interest around the globe. For connecting to the SaaS community Oracle mandates that the user should have have/use his/her corporate emailID and also you need to have a CSI number for your organization.

Oracle Docs
https://docs.oracle.com/en/
This is another source for learning all authenticated material from Oracle themselves. These are not just usual guides but they contain a whole lot of information on the various SaaS offerings. I recommend using this on a regular daily basis to understand and learn Oracle cloud

Demo.oracle.com/partner.oracle.com
If you are working for a platinum partner organization then you can use https://demo.oracle.com/ and https://www.oracle.com/partners/index.html. These are a very good source to learn oracle cloud, giving you access to Sandbox environment to practice.



Udemy
There are many paid courses in Udemy that gives you detailed explanation about various concepts in the Oracle HCM cloud. I am listing few which I found really good. Though there isnt any prerequisites for these courses, I felt like for people having prior working experience in any other HCM system like peoplesoft or eBiz, these courses are an easy way to understand the concepts in Oracle HCM cloud.

Core HR Concepts:
https://www.udemy.com/share/101WAO/


Oracle HCM Cloud Implementation Concepts
https://www.udemy.com/share/101GAm/

These are some of the resources that are available easily for any one to start their first step with the Oracle Cloud applications. If you know of anything more, please feel free to update in the comments

Thanks!!