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Business Intelligence|
Knowledge
Management Solution |
eDevelopment
PeopleSoft Implementation | PeopleSoft
DBA Tuning | ERP
Application
Oracle
Database Administration
Background
The role of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Human Resources
is to plan and manage personnel assignments, workforce planning,
personnel information, employee services and personnel policy. The
Bureau must manage the responsibilities of personnel processing
for 19,000 employees. Before Buchanan & Edwards came to the State
Department, the Bureau kept its records on an out-of-date mainframe
that was non-Year 2000 compliant. Because of this problem, the Bureau
of Human Resources decided to modernize by moving away from their
old system and implementing PeopleSoft's Human Resource Management
System (HRMS) to support its core personnel processing requirements.
Buchanan & Edwards
supported the PeopleSoft implementation as the lead developer for
the effort, working with the Bureau's staff to enhance applications
and integrate them into the systems. B&E developed, maintained and
executed the data conversion process, converting data from the old
system to the Bureau's new system, the Global Employment Management
System (GEMS). GEMS is a customized version of PeopleSoft, specifically
addressing the needs of the users accessing the Bureau of Human
Resources data. B&E was also involved in change management initiatives
to conform further to current Information Technology practices:
by converting the old data to PeopleSoft-usable data, a relational
database (Oracle) now powers the entire GEMS system. B&E also customized
PeopleSoft to give it the look and feel of the Bureau of Human Resources.
Problem
PeopleSoft does not always work at its optimal level when installed
in its off-the-shelf form. However, PeopleSoft's versatility allows
the software to be customized to fit the needs of a particular organization's
system. After our initial install and configuration of PeopleSoft,
giving it the look and feel of the Human Resources Bureau, the next
step was to harness the full power of PeopleSoft. GEMS, which is
in a unique environment, had to be tuned to particular settings.
Tuning improves performance and reduces maintenance costs. The risks
of working in a non-optimized environment are system crashes and
slow performance from adding more users to the system. This fix
can only be done after investigating the environment as PeopleSoft
runs under its default settings. Also, tuning allows more users
access to the system and ensures that additional users do not hinder
performance. By optimizing PeopleSoft to perform best in the Bureau's
PeopleSoft-Oracle environment, the entire database system works
more efficiently.
B&E's
Right Solution
Buchanan & Edwards supports the Bureau's Oracle-PeopleSoft environment
through Database Administrators working with the Bureau's database
systems and applications. Our team customized PeopleSoft by investigating
the GEMS environment and tuning the application for higher efficiency.
The investigation focused on the potential problems in the hardware
and networking architecture. After finding any sub-optimal configurations,
we recommended changes to improve performance.
Result
B&E was able to suggest more appropriate parameters in order for
the Bureau to change the sub-optimal default parameters. Now PeopleSoft
performs more efficiently in its environment and can accommodate
the future increase of users as the user base grows to a global
audience.
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