An Oracle White Paper

October 2013

Fusion Human Capital Management

Business Units
 Fusion Human Capital Management

Disclaimer
The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes
only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or
functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and
timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of
Oracle.
 Fusion Human Capital Management

Contents
Executive Overview ........................................................................... 1
Introduction ....................................................................................... 3
Best Practice ................................................................................. 5
Use Case #1 ........................................................................................... 6

Use Case #2 ........................................................................................... 7

Use Case #3 ........................................................................................... 9

Configuration Details ................................................................... 10
During Implementation ......................................................................... 10

For Maintenance ................................................................................... 12

Conclusion ...................................................................................... 16
 Fusion Human Capital Management

Executive Overview
Based on the PWC CEO Survey 2013 Report1, the focus of CEO’s today is:

• Targeting pockets of
opportunity
• Concentrating on the
customer
• Improving operational
effectiveness

Organizations are trying to cut costs without causing negative change to the
workforce. With this, any opportunity to streamline business processes to
more effectively manage their worker population will align with your CEO’s
objective.

Fusion provides configurable organization units to support the streamlining

of your business process to manage your workforce. Business Units are
the logical units in your organization that you manage to align, track and
report specific business rules to share data. The definition of Business
Units are not restricted but rather based on how your organization defines
them. Since Business Units enable the configuration of rules for data
management, the application definition is based on your configuration.
Organizations can have multiple Business Units to minimize process
administration and reporting as well as manage security access to core data.

Fusion HCM supports the requirement to manage Business Units in an

integrated environment with Global HR, Payroll, Benefits, Compensation
as well as Financials. Centralizing the configuration of business rules with
Business Units enables organizations to minimize maintenance effort as
well as errors in redundant information.

1 PWC 16th Global CEO Survey January 2013

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Introduction

In Fusion Human Resources, Business Unit configuration defines the rules

for managing workers. You can assign the rules to single or multiple
Business Units with the use of Sets.

InFusion
Corporation

US Europe Middle East

Division Division Division

Extensions for
Localization
Support

- UAE
- Saudi Arabia

US UK France
Tax Reporting Tax Reporting Tax Reporting
Unit Unit Unit
Legal Legal Legal
Entity Entity Entity
Legislative Legislative Legislative
Data Group Data Group Data Group

Business Unit Business Unit Business Unit

Cost Cost Cost Cost

Center Center Center Center
Sales Marketing Marketing Sales
Department Department Department Department
(US) (US) (UK) (France)

This white paper will focus on the solution options for customers to
optimize the use of Business Units from an HCM perspective.

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Best Practice

Business Units can be defined based on your organizational needs and specific
deployment of HCM.

From an HCM perspective the main purpose of Business Units is to segregate the data for
the set-enabled objects.

Sets are used for partitioning reference data into smaller portions. These sets can then be
assigned to different Business Units. With each Business Unit you can only associate
exactly one Set for each set enabled object.

The set enabled objects are:

• Departments
• Locations
• Jobs
• Grades

So with each Business Unit you can associate only one Department Set, one Location Set,
etc. The same Set can be associated with multiple Business Units.
When you create these objects the Set is a mandatory field, so they are always created
within a Set. There is a Set available out of the box that is called ‘Common Set’. This is
used for all objects that are global and should be available across the enterprise.
If you don’t have requirements to segregate your data, then you don’t have to define any
Set because the Common Set is seeded. However, you have to define your Business Units.
Out of the box the Common Set is associated automatically with all Business Units that
you have created.

Positions are not set enabled but are defined within a Business Unit.

There is no relationship between Business Units and Legal Employers, however, the
recommendation is that Business Units should not span Legal Employers but there should
be a 1:1 relationship or many Business Units within a Legal Employer.
The reason is that in Financials a Business Unit is used to roll up financial transactions
usually within a Legal Entity.
If you are planning to implement also Fusion Financials, then you shouldn’t set up
Business Units at a higher level than Legal Entities as this would not be supported in
Fusion Financials.

Even though there is no relationship between Business Units and Legal Employers, your
reporting can still be based on a combination of these two organization units as the
employee is hired into a Legal Employer and a Business Unit.

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Based on the selected Business Unit in the assignment, the workforce structures lists of
values are filtered.

For example when you hire a worker into the UK Business Unit, then selecting the job,
the list of values is filtered to bring back only jobs in the UK Job Set (assuming the UK
Job Set is associated with the UK Business Unit) plus all jobs in Common Set (as these are
the global jobs).

Use Case #1

Let’s take the example as given in the diagram in the introduction section:
There is a Sales Department in the US and in France. There are two options how to
implement this:

a) Create only one department ‘Sales’ in the Common Set and use the same department
for the US and France sales employees.

b) Create two separate departments ‘Sales US’ in the US Set and ‘Sales France’ in the
France Set.

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These are the impacts and the advantages of these 2 options:

• Creating only one department has the advantage that reporting across sales
employees might become easier. If a lot of processes are the same for all sales
employees no matter if they are in the US or France, if it is the same cost center
and the same department manager, then this might be the better option.
• Creating two separate departments has the advantage that the data is segregated in
the employment processes. For example if a line manager transfers one of his
directs, then the department LOV will include all departments of the Set
associated with the Business Unit (for example all departments in the France Set)
plus all departments of Common Set. This means if there are fewer departments
in the Common Set, he will see fewer departments to select from which reduces
data entry errors.

Use Case #2

Looking at the diagram in the introduction section, let’s assume Jobs are the same for all
employees in the enterprise, whereas Grades are shared across the US and the UK but
France has their own Grades as they have a different pay structure.

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For this case the following set up is needed:

• All Jobs would be created in the Common Set, so there is no country specific Job
Set needed.
• To segregate the Grades, a US/UK Grade Set and a France Grade Set needs to be
created.
• The US/UK Grade Set is associated with the US Business Unit and the UK
Business Unit.

With this set up if you hire an employee in the US Business Unit, the Job list of values
would include all jobs across the enterprise, the Grade list of values would be filtered to
only include Grades that have been created in the US/UK Grade Set (plus all Grades that
were created in the Common Set if any existing).

If you hire an employee in the France Business Unit, the Job list of values would include
all Jobs across the enterprise, the Grade list of values would be filtered to only include
Grades that have been created in the France Grade Set (plus all Grades that were created
in the Common Set if any existing).

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Use Case #3

Let’s assume due to an acquisition now a new Legal Employer in India is added and in
India they have separate grades but they will use the same jobs as in the other countries.

For this case the following set up is needed:

• A new Business Unit for India needs to be added.
• A new Grade Set need to be associated with that Business Unit.
• The Indian Grades would be created in the Indian Grade Set.
• No new jobs need to be created. All jobs of the Common Set will be available
instantly.

If you hire an employee in the India Business Unit, the Job list of values would include all
Jobs across the enterprise.
The Grade list of values would be filtered to only include Grades that have been created
in the India Grade Set (plus all Grades that were created in the Common Set if any
existing).

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Configuration Details

During Implementation

If you are setting up a new implementation from scratch you can use the Enterprise
Structures Configurator that guides you through the most important steps for setting up
your enterprise structures.
Use the Establish Enterprise Structures task:

From the Manage Enterprise Configuration page you can load and roll back
configurations and configure jobs and positions:

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Click the create icon to navigate to the guided flow to start a new configuration:

Based on your answers in the interview the system will suggest the configuration for your
enterprise structures.

Alternatively, if you want to enter your Business Units without using the Enterprise
Structures Configurator, having added a new implementation project, you can find the
relevant tasks in the offering Workforce Deployment under Establish Enterprise
Structures > Define Business Units for Human Capital Management:

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Please refer to the next section on details of using these tasks.

For Maintenance

If you are adding or modifying Business Units at a later point in time, you can use the
dedicated tasks.
To create or update Business Units navigate to the menu item Setup and Maintenance.
Search for the task ‘Manage Business Unit’.
You can see the two relevant tasks Manage Business Unit and Manage Business Unit Set
Assignment in the search results. Use the Go to Task icon to navigate to these UIs:

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This is a screenshot of the Manage Business Unit UI. You can search for existing Business
Units, edit them or create a new Business Unit:

From the Manage Business Unit UI you can select a Business Unit from the search results
and click on Actions > Manage Set Assignments to get directly to the Manage Set
Assignments UI to associate the Sets for the selected Business Unit:

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Alternatively you can use the task Manage Business Unit Set Assignments from Setup and
Maintenance Task Search. In this case the system will prompt you to select a Business
Unit first or create a new one.

In the Manage Set Assignments UI scroll down to the object that you want to associate a
Set with. Out of the box all objects will be associated with the Common Set.
If you want to associate a different Grade Set, then select the row ‘Grades’, now the Set
becomes editable and you can then search for the Set you want to associate:

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If you want to associate a new Grade Set as in our Use Case # 3 above, then you need to
create the new Set first using the task ‘Manage Reference Data Sets’. Click on the plus
icon to add a new Set:

Then go back to the task Manage Business Unit Set Assignments and associate your newly
created Set for the row ‘Grades’ you have created for India in our example.

Please refer to the Oracle Fusion Applications Workforce Deployment Implementation

Guide for more details on how to set up Business Units and Sets and associating the Sets
to the Business Units and many more implementation considerations.

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Conclusion
Oracle’s Fusion Global HR provides the flexible solutions to support your competitive
needs through rules driven configuration. This is demonstrated in the ability to define
and use Business Unit and Set configuration options for your deployment.
As part of our development effort, we will continue to investigate opportunities to
simplify and optimize the configuration options to manage the viewing of and acting on
historical data. For more information on the development efforts, please contact your
Customer Success Manager.

For additional information on any products, please review our datasheets located in
Fusion HCM Resource Library.

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August 2013
Author: Product Development
Oracle Corporation
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