Earlier this year there was a split in the timelines for when Recruiting becomes mandatory in Redwood. Requisition Management, Job Applications and Candidate Management are all mandatory by Release 25C. Offer and Interview Management, Campaigns, Event and Agency Hiring are now mandatory by Release 26B. With this in mind, there are a lot of new features in release 25C to prepare for the second phase of Redwood for Recruiting. Oracle continues to deliver innovation, with new features rolling out throughout the quarter. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the updates, and if anything particularly noteworthy emerges, I’ll share a follow-up post to keep you in the loop.
Updated Redwood Timeline
This release introduces Redwood functionality for Offers. It’s now possible to both create and delete an offer within Redwood. It’s possible to override information from the position during the offer process, unless Position Sync is switched on and then the option is greyed out. As with all new Redwood pages, I would recommend switching it on in your Development pod and checking out the functionality as soon as you receive 25B. The earlier you start testing, the easier it will be to adopt Redwood for Offers.
Create an Offer in Redwood
In this release Oracle have split out the Hiring tab, into two separate ones: Hiring and Candidate Sourcing. The Hiring tile now contains these tabs: Activity Centre; Messages; Requisitions; Offers; Candidate Search; Pools; Campaigns and Events. The new Candidate Sourcing tile contains these tabs: Events; Candidate Search; Pools; Messages and Campaigns. The separation of tiles will automatically happen if you have the ORA_REC_RECRUITING_REDWOOD_ENABLED profile. Only users who have security access to Candidate Sourcing will have access to the tile and it’s content.
Hiring Tile and Candidate Sourcing Tile
Whilst Job Applications are mandatory in Redwood by Release 25C, Oracle have added extra functionality within VBS to personalise the Job Application page. This is following customer feedback that requested additional fields to be available within Job Applications. Whilst the move to Redwood hasn’t always been smooth, I do think Oracle’s response to client feedback on additional personalisations that are requested and movement on mandatory timelines has been significantly more flexible than I would expect of an organisation of their size.
Visual Builder Studio to Personalize the Job Application Page
The Send Job Requisition and Job Application Related Messages to members of the hiring team has now been moved to Redwood. You can use a template to create the message or create it from scratch. The Recipients list will automatically display all the hiring team members, but you can type in the list to find other recipients. When you’re ready to send it, you can preview the message to ensure the content is correct and tokens are being resolved as expected. Once the message is sent, it’s available on the Messages tab of the job requisition, and on the Activity tab of the job application.
Send Message to Team Panel
As I said earlier, Oracle generally continue to add new features throughout the quarter. I’ll be keeping a close watch on the updates, and if anything particularly impactful comes through, I’ll share a follow-up post to keep you informed and ahead of the curve. Please check out my blog on the new features in Core HR for Release 25C here.
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Everyone who knows me, knows that Quarterly Release time is my favourite time of the quarter, as I love finding out all the new features that Oracle have released. Payroll is mandatory in Redwood by release 25C, therefore there isn’t a large number of new features for Global Payroll in this release, but there are still some significant changes! Oracle will continue to roll out new features throughout the quarter. If any additional updates stand out, I’ll share a follow-up blog to keep you informed.
The first key point of note is that the Payroll Activity Centre will be automatically switched on in 25C. Given that it’s a really helpful tool, I would imagine this won’t cause any Payroll users hassle, but I wanted to flag it in case any organisations have delayed their move to Redwood for Payroll. If you don’t know what the Payroll Activity Centre is, it’s a one stop shop for all your payroll needs. You can run flows, check person results and do all of your usual Payroll transactions from one place. I’m a massive fan of all the activity centres, but this one is a massive leap forward for Payroll users.
Payroll Activity Centre
A number of pages have made the move to Redwood in this release. These include the Payroll Costing Setup and Process Summary pages. The Process Summary page allows for a high level summary of all payroll processes that have been submitted. The new page can either be accessed from the Payroll Quick Actions or the Payroll Activity Centre. This a much more user friendly way of reviewing any processes that have been submitted.
A new feature has been introduced to control how Retropay results are processed. Oracle have introduced the Retroactive Overpayment and Recovery for Earnings Elements process. How this differs from current behaviour is that rather than automatically processing the deduction for the overpayment in full, it is now offset resulting in no immediate impact to the employee’s net pay. You can then chose to setup and track repayments by the employee until it is paid back in full. This will ensure the fair recovery of overpayment.
For those customers in the US, there is a significant change to US Payroll Engine. Oracle have introduced the new US Oracle Payroll Tax Engine (USOPTE) solution. The key change is that all statutory tax data information is now maintained and delivered by Oracle Cloud. These include wage limits, filing statuses and allowance amounts. The new Engine will also perform federal, state, and local tax calculations within the payroll product and provide improved visibility of tax calculations with a Tax Calculation Statement.
US Payroll Engine Changes
As mentioned earlier, Oracle often roll out new features throughout the month. Should these updates turn out to be significant, I’ll publish a refreshed blog post. Please check out my blog on the new features in Core HR for Release 25C here.
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It doesn’t feel that long since we started talking about 25B, but now its time for 25C! With Core HR being mandatory in Redwood by Release 25C, I would be lying if I said there were a significant number of new features for Core HR in 25C, but there are some features of note! Please keep in mind that Oracle will continue to roll out additional features throughout the quarter, if there are any subsequent features of note, I will do a follow up blog on these.
A lot of organisations, particularly in the public sector have been eagerly awaiting the changes to the Public Worker Search functionality. For those of you who don’t know what Public Workers Access is, it determines which employee records are returned in searches and other public-facing views. This allows for controlling the visibility of sensitive information like job codes or positions by applying user-defined criteria. 25C is the first release that brings Public Worker Access support to Oracle Search and Redwood. So what does this mean? If you need to limit employees or positions being available in Public Search due to the confidential nature of their role, now you can! It can be configured in a variety of ways including adding exclusion criteria.
Public Worker Access
In addition, Oracle have introduced the ability to export your Public Worker Access between pods. This will allow the migration of Public Worker Access configuration to be much simpler and remove any risk of human error. It will ensure that the config that has been tested in your development pod is the same as what is deployed in Production.
Exporting Public Worker Access Configuration
There are a lot of Journey related features in this release. One I particularly like is quite a simple change but I think it will add significant value. The ability to easily schedule recurring Journeys will make Journey administration a lot easier. The flexibility of being able to chose the frequency, but also limit the number of times the Journey is assigned makes this such a great addition.
Journey Scheduling
The final Journey feature that I want to highlight is the ability to embed Multi Agents into Guided Journeys. This will allow a variety of different AI Agents to be embedded into pages with ease. Added AI Agents to pages is done via Guided Journeys and this new functionality makes it much easier. This is the perfect time for this improvement when we’re all prepping for the introduction of AI Agent Studio to speed up the process of creating AI Agents!
Embedded Multi AI Agents in Guided Journeys
The other area of Core HR with significant changes are within the Workforce Structures workspace. There are a number of new pages that have moved over to Redwood, including the Legal Entity HCM Information and Legal Reporting Unit HCM Information pages. Additionally Oracle have given more flexibility in adding extra attributes on the summary of changes page for all Workforce Structure changes. These fields can be added in via VBS to allow for the easy review of changes to fields that are important to your organisation.
Additional Attributes in Redwood Workforce Structures Change Summary
As mentioned earlier, Oracle plans to roll out new features in Core HR later this month. Should these updates turn out to be noteworthy, I’ll publish a refreshed blog post. Additionally, keep an eye out for upcoming posts that will cover other modules within Fusion for Release 25C!
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Today I went to the lovely Oracle offices in Moorgate for a Journey Mapping Bootcamp. I will be honest, I’m not sure what I was expecting from the day but it was nothing like I had anticipated. It was honestly a fabulous session.
CX Framework
The purpose of the day was to empower Oracle Fusion customers, irrelevant of the modules used, to be able to take a holistic approach to their customers / suppliers / employees and to understand what the customer experience looks like for them.
How the Journey is Perceived by the Customer
There was a lot of focus around each of the touch points a customer has with an organisation, how the process will make them feel and very importantly, how is the whole journey perceived by the customer. When analysing hyperthetical scenarios, it was easy to see that most interactions a customer has with an organisation are unlikely to be ones that exceed their expectations.
Change Effectiveness Equation
Having recently completed my PROSCI Certificate in Change Management, I particularly enjoyed the focus on change management. It was useful to see some other approaches that can be used. I felt it was important that other customers were provided with these theoretical frameworks to be able to take their learning back to their organisation.
Relationship between Employee Experience and Customer Experience
Towards the end was the first time that systems were mentioned. It was really helpful to see how the journey for different customers can be managed through the use of Oracle Fusion products. It took the theory and applied it to real use cases for the customers in the room.
Oracle Products Helping with Organisational Transformations
Overall I would highly recommend that organisations who are undergoing change or those that wish to improve their current approach to customer experience attend one of these Journey Mapping Bootcamps. Whilst I work for an Oracle Partner, I still found it massively beneficial as I can use my learning to improve the experience for my customers but also to help them improve the experience for their customers. This is a phenomenal opportunity that Oracle are providing to their customers and I’d recommend anyone who has the opportunity to attend, to sign up for the next one!
If you want more details on the subject of CX, Ian Golding who hosted the session has written a book. Details below:
It’s my favourite time of the quarter again, new features time! 25B is an important one for Core HR as it is mandatory for Core HR to have made the move to Redwood by 25C. This is really your last chance to make that move to ensure you remain in support with Oracle. So what’s new in 25B? Lets take a look! Please keep in mind that Oracle will continue to roll out additional features throughout the quarter, if there are any subsequent features of note, I will do a follow up blog on these.
I love the Activity Centres and in 25B the Team Activity Centre has had some enhancements. If you don’t know about Activity Centres, check out my post on them here. Oracle have added in a lot more attributes that can be added to the page via VBS, including additional fields relating to employment, compensation and talent on the Worker View. Additional fields can also be added to the Position and Offer Views. Following feedback, the Vacancies quick action has now been removed from the Team Activity Centre as it wasn’t being utilised. In the top right hand corner of the image, there is a new ‘Needs Attention’ flag. These appear for employees in the Person Activity Centre if they have a KPI that requires attention. It should be noted that the Populate HCM Data Feed Information ESS process needs to be run for these to display, with the Data Feed Flow parameter set to ‘Team Activity Center’.
Continuing the Activity Centre theme, I’m delighted that Guided Journeys are now supported on the My Activity Centre and the Person Activity Centre. As the name suggests, Guided Journeys help guide a user through a process. They are particularly useful in adhoc scenarios that the user might only do once or at most, infrequently. The introduction of Guided Journeys on the Activity Centres is the final piece that many organisations were waiting for to complete their Redwood move.
One thing Oracle have done really well during the process of moving to Redwood is to listen to their customers. On many other Redwood date effective pages, it is possible to see prior and future dated records, but it wasn’t possible on the Additional Person Info page. Now it is! Not only that, but they’ve added in extra validation to control who can see what. If you’re accessing your own Additional Person Info page via ‘Me’, you will only be able to see current and future dated records, but if you access via ‘My Client Groups’, you will be able to see historic, current and future dated records.
One of the key points of interest to most customers is the addition of AI to pages. Surveys within Journeys have always had analytics as part of them, to enable organisations to analyse the responses. Now it’s possible to incorporate Gen AI to not only analyse the data, but display it in a graphical format of your choosing. Additionally it will summarise the key text based responses. All of this will speed up the analysis and make it easier to present the findings to other relevant parties. For more details of the use of AI in HCM Cloud, please check out my blog here.
As mentioned earlier, Oracle plans to roll out new features in Core HR later this month. Should these updates turn out to be noteworthy, I’ll publish a refreshed blog post. Additionally, keep an eye out for upcoming posts that will cover other modules within HCM Cloud for Release 25B!
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As you will know, Redwood is mandatory for Global HR from Release 25C, so now is time to make the move! The first question I am asked is will there be a replacement for Person Management? I’ll be honest with you, I love Person Management! The good news is that Oracle have confirmed that there will be, the ‘HR Activity Centre’. The date for release hasn’t been confirmed, but it is coming. Oracle have caveated that it won’t be a like-for-like replacement, but it will be a centralised location for transactions rather than having to go to different quick actions.
Oracle massively ramped up the number of Global HR features available within Redwood in 2024, so the majority of features are already available to you right now. As the picture above shows, if you’re not currently using autocomplete rules and have no requirement for creating unsupported defaulting rules, you can move to Redwood for Global HR right now. If you do have a requirement to default in data using rules, the amount of rules for defaulting data available will be significantly increased in 25B. This doesn’t mean wait for 25B though, it’s important that if you haven’t started, to start the switch in a non-production pod. Using a dedicated Redwood pod is always my recommended approach as it won’t impact on quarterly regression testing or issue resolution, due to the pod not matching what is currently in Production.
Global HR differs slightly to other modules when moving to Redwood. There are the usual steps, enabling Oracle Search, Updating Custom Security Roles; Reviewing and Migrating Personalisations using the Personalisation Helper Tool and Switching on the Redwood Flows via Profile Options. For Global HR, there are two additional prerequisites. Firstly, to be able to use the Redwood pages for Termination and / or Resignation, you must have migrated to Termination V3. To be able to use the Redwood page for Seniority Dates, you must be using Version 3 of Seniority Dates. So what happens if you’re not using one or both of the prerequisite versions? For terminations and resignations, you won’t be able to use the Redwood page. For Seniority Dates, there is an alternative, you can manage the dates via the Redwood Work Relationship page. If you want the full Redwood experience, I would recommend making the move to the latest versions of both Termination and Seniority Dates. My other recommendation is to migrate the V3s now, not after you’ve moved to Redwood. This will make the process more straightforward and therefore easier.
So what are my top tips? The Redwood ‘Bible’ only lists the key flexfields the need switching on. Check the What’s New Documents for all related modules for all the historic Redwood updates. Have you seen the Feature Listing Report on the Cloud Readiness website? From here you can download every upgrade since 2023 for every Fusion module in a handy spreadsheet. You can then use filters to find all the Redwood features for a given module.
A lot of users have reported issues with flexfields whilst testing Redwood. If this happens, redeploy the flexfields and make sure all flexfield personalisations have been migrated. Likewise if you’re having issues with pages, firstly ensure that the appropriate profile options for Oracle Search are switched on. If that doesn’t work, ensure custom roles have the correct privileges.
The Redwood Personalisation Tool is extremely helpful. Whilst it can’t migrate all personalisations, it will migrate some of them and reduce the amount of manual personalisations that will need to be applied. I would always recommend only using it in Migration mode for a small subset at a given time. Preferably one flow at a time. This gives you the chance to review the personalisations and make corrections more easily. Additionally once the tool has been used to migrate a flow, you can’t use it again for that specific flow. Even if a newer version of the tool provides more migration options within that flow.
Finally, use the new Activity Centres. Within the Global HR space, there is currently one for employees and one for line managers. These are a one stop shop for users to access all their and their team’s HR records and carry out their tasks. As I said earlier, one for the HR Team to replace Person Management is coming, so watch this space! Check out my earlier blog on Activity Centres here.
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Have you heard of Oracle Modern Best Practice? It’s actually not a new thing, Oracle have been talking about it for nearly 10 years, but with the introduction of the amazing tool Cloud Success Navigator, Oracle Modern Best Practice (OMBP) is now taking centre stage! Oracle have created OMBPs for Cloud Fusion products for the first time and they will prove invaluable.
So what are OMBPs? They are common business processes that Oracle have optimised to improve the performance of applications using the latest technology. Oracle have done thousands of implementations and have taken learnings from both the successful and unsuccessful ones. These learnings have been analysed by Oracle experts to put together their OMBPs and related process flows. These flows incorporate scalable and efficient practices which empower the business’ process owners which will, in turn, produce improved results. Oracle are constantly evolving their Fusion product and as such, the OMBPs are also evolving. OMBPs can be used to educate users; demonstrate business processes; help to plan an adoption path and structure the scope of an implementation.
So what is included in an OMBP process flow? They incorporate all of the required steps within the process. Often users can miss a step as they don’t appreciate the criticality of it and this will prevent this from happening. My favourite part of the OMBPs are the recommendations on analytics that provide organisations with key metrics that they might not have been aware of. Analytics help organisations to monitor performance of specific areas of the business and gain a better understanding which will help with decision making. Additionally the OMBPs incorporate AI and Machine Learning. The processes incorporate innovations which aim to automate processes and help organisations make faster decisions.
OMBPs are currently available for the majority of an organisation’s processes. These include ERP, EPM, HCM, SCM and CX. Additionally there are industry specific OMBPs, including Banking, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, Public Sector, Utilities and Retail.
So why should you care? Organisations always ask me, ‘What is the Best Practice?’. The introduction of OMBPs enable organisations to have access to this information at their fingertips, without needing to search for it. This will ensure your organisation is using the latest functionality with the greatest efficiency. Cloud Success Navigator incorporating Oracle Modern Best Practice within the tool will make this even easier. Please check on my blog on Cloud Success Navigator here, for more details.
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Oracle announced the Cloud Success Navigator at CloudWorld in Vegas in September 2024 and will be launching it at CloudWorld in London in March 2025. So what is it? It’s an interactive tool to help existing and new customers of Oracle Fusion / SaaS products to get the most value from their implementations. The tool helps right from the beginning of an implementation project through to when the system is fully established, by helping with by the road-mapping and adoption of new features from the quarterly releases.
Cloud Success Navigator has many different facets. As the name suggests, it ‘navigates’ you through your whole Oracle Cloud journey. As someone who is involved with volunteering in Scouting, I love all the outdoor references in Oracle’s training materials. Every time I see a compass or someone climbing, it makes me smile. Whilst it might not seem relevant to everyone, I think it’s a really great metaphor and it shows how Oracle is investing in working with Customers and Partners to ensure that every customer gets the most value from their Fusion implementation, whatever stage of the journey they are currently in.
So, when will I get it? Some partners and customers have been part of the ‘Limited Availability’ programme since June 2024 and I was delighted to be a part of this. General availability of the tool will be after CloudWorld on 20th March 2025, via your Customer Success Manager, Partner or by direct request. Being part of the Limited Availability programme gave me the opportunity to be involved early and provide feedback to Oracle to help shape the future of the tool. When I initially used the tool, it was very implementation centric, but the focus over the past six months has moved more towards the ‘Evolve’ stage to enable customers to take advantage of new features more easily.
There are so many features the Cloud Success Navigator provides. These include Starter Configuration; Oracle Modern Best Practice; Deployment Guidance; Cloud Quality Standards; Milestone Dashboard; and Quarterly Release Environments. Most of these features will be included in the General Availability version, but Oracle have big plans to develop it further.
The Starter Configuration is aimed at customers right at the beginning of their implementation or those who will be carrying out an implementation of a new module, post go live. The starter configuration requires a completely empty pod to be deployed into. The configuration is the same data that Oracle puts in their Demo pods, often referred to as Vision data. Whilst it’s not unique to the customer’s data, it does allow users the opportunity to go into a pod and have a play with processes, to enable them to understand them without having to wait for their organisation’s configuration to be created in a environment. This is particular useful for people who learn best by ‘doing’ and can be a useful tool in workshops. Have you considered exploring Oracle Guided Learning (OGL)? The Starter Configuration includes OGL, allowing you to test it with users and assess its value; but also it can help to guide your users through new processes that might be unfamiliar to them.
One of the things I particularly love about the Oracle Modern Best Practices section is the simplified process flows that have been incorporated. Within E-Business Suite there have always been process flows that you could download, but these were lacking in Fusion. There are videos, process flows and information which explains every step of a process that an organisation would carry out. This information can be used to explore how the business’ current processes can be mapped to those in Fusion. Alternatively they can be used retrospectively to see where current processes deviate from Oracle’s recommended approach. There are helpful suggestions as well and all of it is presented in different mediums to accommodate the majority of learning styles.
Deployment Guidance might be the area of the tool that most organisations feel they already have covered and therefore least likely to use. Before you jump to this conclusion, I’d really recommend checking it out. There’s advice and guidance from Oracle, based on the thousands of implementations that they have experienced and it’s in one handy place. It’s useful from a Change Management perspective and gives easy access to documents that your Project Sponsors and Stakeholders will appreciate in a business appropriate style. There are also example Cut Over Plans and Business Transition Documents which could reduce the time the business needs to develop these.
The Cloud Quality Standards section of the tool does ‘exactly what is says on the tin’. This section provides you with learning content and guidance at every step of the implementation journey, to ensure that you’re adhering to best practice, which in turn will lead to a more successful Cloud implementation.
The Milestone Dashboard is a wonderful addition to the tool which allows you to assess where you are at every key milestone in the project. You answer questions and it produces a helpful chart to highlight your progress towards the milestone. This visual summary would be helpful to share with Senior Managers for a quick overview of how close the project is to achieving the next milestone. It may help determine whether that milestone can be formally signed off and the important ‘Go / No Go’ decision.
The Quarterly Release section is my personal favourite and this is where Oracle has been focusing a lot of their efforts recently. There are lots of features coming in this section which I desperately want to share with you all, but have promised my Oracle partners I won’t ruin the announcements coming at CloudWorld! I can assure you they are really exciting advancements and everyone will want to utilise them when they are available. I’ll do a follow up blog on these additional features after the CloudWorld announcement. Despite the exciting additions coming, there are already great features for quarterly releases in the tool. Oracle has incorporated every feature from all Fusion modules from 24A onwards into the tool. Every feature has detail from the What’s New page, but some additionally have a short video demoing what the feature does. It’s also possible to share a link to a specific feature to a colleague, for them to easily check it out!
Finally, I wanted to highlight the new Adoption Centres. At the moment these focus on Redwood and AI as these are the key focus for the Oracle Cloud products at the moment. The Adoption Centres have training embedded in them to help speed up the adoption of these key new features and help organisations adapt to the new technologies.
Please let me know what you think of the Cloud Success Navigator and keep an eye out for my next blog!
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Have you seen the new Oracle HCM Cloud Activity Centres? They’re a fundamental part of the new Redwood pages and I love them! When they first came out, they were called ‘Spotlights’, but they’ve since been rebranded and now there are 4 Activity Centres.
The original Activity Centres were for Employees and Line Managers. All Activity Centres are ‘One Stop Shops’ for the relevant user. Focusing first on the Employee Activity Centre, this is where an employee can view / update their personal details; view their payslips; book annual leave and absences and many other things. If there is information that need to be shared with employees in bulk, they can be posted on there too. Any activity the employee is likely to carry out can be linked from the activity centre. If there are tasks that aren’t needed, they can be easily hidden via VBS.
Employee Activity Centre
In the Manager Activity Centre, Line Managers can easily access all of their team members records in one place. From here you can view employment and compensation details and also monitor talent and performance. Again important communications for line manager can be posted in here. Additionally bulk actions can be carried out for team members, such as creating communications, adding Journeys and creating surveys for feedback.
Manager Activity Centre
The Recruiting Activity Centre was the first one that was launched as an ‘Activity Centre’ and I regularly talk about it to my customers. It’s a great landing site for the Recruitment team to use. Originally it was only available to Recruiters and Hiring Managers, but last year it was extended to Collaborators too, so the whole team has access to this great tool. It summarises key data like high priority tasks and the number of new applicants that need reviewing. It’s easy to view the status of requisitions and offers and, my personal favourite, communication history between the Recruitment team and the candidate in conversation format. This is something that a lot of my customers have enquired about in the past.
Recruiting Activity Centre
The final, and most recent, Activity Centre is the Payroll one. It allows the Payroll team to view all payrolls in one location, easily view notifications that might indicate their has been an error or significant disparity in a payroll run and investigate the root cause. All the usual actions that the team would need to carry out are easily accessible, such as calculation cards, element entries, costing etc as well as to be able to submit payroll flows. It speeds up the time to run processes and investigate issues.
Payroll Activity Centre
The Activity Centres are all designed to improve the user’s experience and reduce the number of menus / clicks they need to make. It has all the information that you need at your fingertips and in my personal opinion, is a massive improvement! I’m sure this won’t be the last of the Activity Centres that we see and Oracle are constantly improving the existing ones, so keep an eye out on those quarterly release updates for more news.
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I’ve already blogged about the Key Note from Chris Leone that kicked off the HCM Cloud Centre of Excellence Customer Summit. If you haven’t seen it, check it out here. The main themes for the summit were AI and Redwood. The ‘Jump Into Redwood Session’ with Laura Froehlich and Todd Wall was extremely interesting and a good follow up to the key note on the first day.
Having recently completed my Prosci Certified Change Practioner qualification, I was delighted when the session kicked off with ‘Why Change’. I think this question is often skipped because it’s a mandated change from Oracle, but as there are so many benefits to moving to Redwood, it’s a really important question. It’s true that change can be scary and users and organisations can be reluctant to do so, but there are so many advantages when you embrace that change.
One of the key benefits is the integration of AI. It’s so fundamental to the way businesses anticipate operating, a number of customers have added objectives to their team to incorporate AI into their daily work. Oracle are making it so much easier to achieve this goal by embedding AI and AI Agents into the Redwood applications. Whilst not everyone wants to use AI, Oracle have incorporated in such a way it can appease both those who do and those who don’t want to use AI. For those who don’t want to use it, it is delivered switched off. For those that do, a quick change to the page in VB Studio, involving ticking a box and publishing it and you have AI embedded in the particular page. It really is that easy! It should be noted that AI functionality is not available to all users, it depends on the server / region the organisation is in. Those in the UK Government Cage cannot access it at present, but it will be available in 2025.
When talking to customers about the new features being delivered in a particular quarterly release, they often only apply to the Redwood versions of the pages. So, if you want the latest functionality, switching to Redwood is your only option. The final key benefit is the improved performance Redwood brings. This wasn’t just a ‘lift and shift’ project to create the Redwood pages, they were completely rewritten from scratch in a new toolset.
5 Myths about Redwood
One of the stand out parts of the session was the 5 myths about Redwood. Some I’ve heard before and some I haven’t, but I thought they were interesting and I wanted to share them with you. The first one about the profile options being automatically switched on when reaching the the quarterly update uptake date is actually a complex one. Whilst the quarterly release date is when it is mandatory to have made the move, it’s not actually delivered switched on. If you raise an SR after the uptake date, the analyst will advise you to move to the Redwood page, as the non-Redwood pages are out of support. One key announcement during this session was that in 25B, Learn will be delivered switched on in Redwood and in 25C, Timecards will be delivered with Redwood switched on. Whilst this isn’t on the uptake date, it’s 2-3 quarters later, it does mean that at some point Redwood will be automatically switched on for all organisations.
The second myth is around the product not being ready yet and therefore there is no point in starting work on testing and personalising pages. Whilst new features are constantly being released in Redwood, the uptake date is just that, the date you should have made the move for that module, it’s not a date to start making the move. The third myth is that it’s a massive and complex reimplementation. The move is only complex if the organisation chooses to make it such. It is possible to switch on the Redwood pages, make the appropriate security changes, migrate personalisations (using the Personalisation Helper Tool), test and deploy. If you wish to make it more complex by revisiting features that weren’t previously implemented or fundamentally change your existing configuration, this is when it becomes a reimplementation.
The fourth myth is that Redwood is optional. It really isn’t, if you wish to continue being in support, you must make the move. As announced on the session, eventually Oracle will force Redwood on users by delivering it switched on. It’s better to do it early so you’ve got time to test and update users as once it’s automatically applied, it will be too late. The final myth is not one I’ve come across, but that organisations are going to wait until ERP and SCM is available in Redwood, before moving HCM over. It might be because I’ve been regularly discussing the disparity between the timelines of ERP and HCM in terms of Redwood, that I haven’t heard this discussion before. With regards to SCM, Self Service Procurement is mandatory in Redwood from 25C, so this is on a similar timeline to HCM anyway.
The final item I want to share from the session is the Redwood Adoption Checklist. This is really helpful to remind us all of the steps involved in moving to Redwood. If you’re anything like me, you’ll love ticking items off the list!
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K8 Mead 