Automating Advance Payments at the City of Atlanta Bret Swenson June 13, 2014
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Automating Advance Payments at the
City of Atlanta
Bret Swenson June 13, 2014
City of Atlanta General Information
• Population – 450,000 • Number of:
– Active Employees – 8,500 – Retirees – 5,000
• 22 departments • Oracle Products
– E-Business Suite – OBIEE – Hyperion – CRM
City of Atlanta EBS 11.5.10.2 Environment
• Implemented 01-Jan-2008 • Database 10g • AIX 5.3 • Financials (PO, iProcurement, iSupplier, GL, AP, AR, FA, PA,
PN, GMS, CM, Treasury), HCM (HR, Adv Benefits, PAY, OLM, Self-Service)
• Single production RAC instance, 2 RAC test instances, 4 single-node test instances, 1 audit instance (DB only)
• Reporting – Oracle Reports, Discoverer, BI Publisher • Staffing: PMO, Technical Manager, 5 Technical, 4 Functional,
2 onsite DBAs, Oracle consulting
Agenda
• Old way
• User Requirements History
• New way – Goals & Objectives
• Functional & Technical Changes
• Screen Shots
• Fun Facts
• Q & A
Old (Paper) Process – Advance Request
• Employee prints off and fills out the form
• Employee turns form in to a “manager”
• Manager fills in remainder of form (cost center, additional instructions, signature)
• Manager manually routes to others for approval
• If approved, form is sent to Payables
• Payables enters the advance (prepayment) and files the form for audit purposes
• Advance is approved via Oracle workflow
• Check is printed for employee to pick up
Old Process - Disadvantages
• Paper form
• Requires manual intervention and routing
• Employee does not know what “status” the form is in, i.e. who still needs to approve, is it in Payables yet?
• Payables personnel have to enter the advance (prepayment)
• Paper form kept for auditing
User Requirements History
• First meeting: “All we want you to do is replace the paper form”
• Solution:
• Create a web application using APEX that contains the same fields on the paper form
• Have a field to place an email address
• Have a “Submit” button that emails the completed information
• Development time: 1 week
User Requirements History
• Second meeting: “Well, we like the web form, but can you add validation and GL list of values?”
• Solution:
• Requirements from first meeting
• Add validations for dates and GL LOVs
• Development time: 2 more weeks (Total 3)
User Requirements History
• Third meeting: “Great, but what we really need is a workflow for the manager to approve then route to Payables”
• Solution:
• Requirements from second meeting
• Create custom workflow to route to employee’s manager, then send a notification to Payables
• Development time: 2 more weeks (Total 5)
User Requirements History
• Fourth meeting: “This is perfect, but can you go ahead and load the data for us?”
• Solution:
• Requirements from third meeting
• Add additional fields to the APEX form
• Use Oracle APIs to load to invoice interface table after manager approves
• Development time: 3 more weeks (Total 8)
User Requirements History
• Fifth meeting: “All good, but we didn’t tell you that each department has a separate approval requirement, and that within some departments, the approval chain is different”.
User Requirements History
• Fifth meeting: “All good, but we didn’t tell you that each department has a separate approval requirement, and that within some departments, the approval chain is different”.
New Way – Goals & Objectives
• Eliminate the paper form and its associated processes
• Allow employee to enter the Advance Request
• Allow employee to be able to track the advance from entry to approval to payment
• Workflow approval process
• Process to be applicable to 90% of employees
Use Internet Expenses
• Employee enters the advance request using the Internet Expenses responsibility
• Use the current expense approval workflow hierarchy to approve the advance
• Employee is notified when the advance is approved
• Payables imports the advance as a “prepayment” invoice
• Advance is automatically approved
• Check is printed for pickup or direct deposit
Advantages
• No paper form
• Employee is able to see where advance request is in the process of being paid
• Payables does not have to enter the invoice
• Approvals are kept in the system
Responsibility: Internet Expense Administrator
• Expense Administrator allows future dates to be entered
Resp: Internet Expenses Setup and Administration
Function: Internet Expenses Setup
Tab: General Options
Responsibility: Payables Manager
New Expense Template is created (technical requirement that template begins with “Advance Request”)
Technical Changes
• Personalizations
• New concurrent request set
• Modify the profile option to display expense header descriptive flex fields (DFF)
• Add DFFs for the expense report table and the invoice table
• Programming changes: Java (1), PL/SQL (3)
• Workflow (Expenses)
Coding Changes
• Modify a Java program to pass expense template to PL/SQL package AP_WEB_OA_CUSTOM_PKG
• Modify package AP_WEB_OA_CUSTOM_PKG to prefix “expense report” with ADV
• Modify package AP_WEB_EXPENSE_CUST_WF
• Create a custom PL/SQL package to change the imported “expense report” to a prepayment
Fun Facts
• Took 18 months to finalize the solution
• Since implementation in Feb-2014, process approximately 180 advances/month
• AP manager can disable for year-end close-out
• Data-entry savings approximately 8 hours/month plus reduction in errors
Q & A
Thank you
Bret Swenson
404-546-7719
www.AtlantaGa.gov
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