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Automating Advance Payments at the City of Atlanta Bret Swenson June 13, 2014
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
