Release 12.1 RCD (ML note number 561580.1) for CRM has this information about some great features that are either planned to be or will be released as part of R12.1.

Enhancements are around these three areas:

• Efficient and effective way of Compensation plan building
• First cut of fusion features by integrating Peoplesoft HRMS with Oracle Resource Manager
• Integration with BI Publisher to create PDF file for the plan for approvals.

Compensation Plan building process made easy

With this release plan administrators can do the following:

Plan Modeling

Modeling a compensation plan is a complex process as it has to keep the financial and sales performance objectives in mind.  The designed plans should motivate the salesforce and at the same time should be cost effective for the company. But it so happens that we will not be able to know how they will work until we actually deploy them and see the results. With this feature, we can create multiple scenario plans with the underlying plan components like elements and rules. You can test these scenarios with historical and forecasted transaction data. Once these scenarios yield desired results, approvals can be sought and copied into a plan in production. 

Scenarios building

This is a new interface where you can group scenario plans for comparision. This facilitates the comparison of plan results or compensation costs for an assigned role in the a specific scenario plan with other. Meaning how a salesrep will be compensated in one plan can be compared with other other plan in the same scenario. These scenarios can also be associated with different operating units. This is very effective.

Producing plan report

Once the plans are finalized based on scenarios, you can use XML publisher to produce a report of complete plan for review and approvals. There is an RTF template available that can be customized per needs of the business. What is not clear is whether these are approvals are online where the approvals can be captured in the database or offline where PDF files are bouncing back and forth in the emails.

In-line copying of Plan and components

The offshoot of the above these features is copying of plans or plan components to create new. Once those scenarios are finalized and approved, they can be copied into a final plan that can be used in production. In all the search pages of plan components (Plans, Plan elements, Formulas, Rate tables, Expressions, rate dimensions) a duplicate icon is introduced which allows you to one click copy. This will be a great time saver where clients want to keep the date based compensation policies that require us to create new plans on yearly basis.

Moving the plans from one database instance to another

This is a big relief. Now you can move all (Plans, Plan elements, Formulas, Rate tables, Expressions, rate dimensions)  between instances (except plans that are customized for a specific resource (s)). It uses the XML technology. I am sure this is part of the iSetup framework where you can export setups from source instance and import into the destination. This is not clearly mentioned (may be added to iSetup RCD), but I assume that is the direction.  Will have to test this when the software is released.

Scenario simulation

We can calculate commissions and bonses against the scenario plans which are seperate from actual plans that are used for compensation. Reports can also be run against the scenario plans.

Peoplesoft Integration

Peoplesoft Employees as Oracle Resources

With SOA technology (business events, JMS queues, and BPEL) now the employee that is created in Peoplesoft HRMS will be synchronized to be created as a resource in Oracle. Both initial conversion and incremental dataloading are supported. With this integration,  I am not sure whether the employee is also created in Oracle HRMS. If not the only question is how resource will be categorized in Oracle (employee or any other type). Obviously this has to be employee type in an environment where Peoplesoft HRMS and Oracle CRM foundation are working in harmony, otherwise it becomes data redundancy. But the security model in Oracle for users expects employee to be available in Oracle HRMS, unless that is changed too.This signals data model changes to resource manager functionality as well. But will have to wait and see.

With this synchronization, job codes in Peoplesoft become salesroles and Department tree in Peoplesoft will be used in sales group hierarchy definitions. It is assumed that position hierarchy in Peoplesoft is not used for OIC purposes in Oracle hence Department hierarchy is chosen to build sales comp hierarchy. Ideally an option could have been given between the two. But I am not sure how many companies actually use department hierarchy available in Peoplesoft as Sales Compensation hierarchy in Oracle. Nevertheless now we have a platform which can be extended per needs.

Several new business events

Once these resources are created and appropriate roles have been assingned based on the Job codes on Peoplesoft HRMS, several OIC  business events are triggered. Based on the jobs (roles in Oracle) the OIC business events will automatically assign plans, assign the resources to appropriate pay groups. Also several updates like terminations in Peoplesoft trigger ending of plan assignments and holding payment statuses. We can modify these event subscriptions to match the business needs. Need to test whether these events are fired only for the Peoplesoft integration or also with Oracle eBusiness suite environment.

Overall, these features are worth considering for upgrade to R12.