Overview

The HESA staff return for 2012/2013 has changed from previous years in that:

1. New fields are to be included in the return
2. Definitions of data for some of the existing fields has been changed
3. The format of the final return has been changed. In recent years, the return has been in the form of 3 csv files, one for staff , one for contracts and one for grades. The return will now take the form of a single xml file containing details of all staff and their associated contracts. There is a one to many relationship between staff and contracts but an individual staff member must appear in the return only once.

In addition to the changes required specifically by HESA, initial analysis has resulted in a requirement to migrate the HESA administration screens used by HR from Oracle forms to an alternative  technology. Applications Division are looking to move away from Oracle forms and since there are changes required to support the addition of the new HESA fields, it makes sense to do this now.  The proposal is to migrate the forms to APEX as this is a supported method of extending the r12 HR application and we have an existing APEX infrastructure that was created when we upgraded the HR application last year.

There are also some redundant fields in the extract and code relating to 'additional positions' which we no longer use so these should also be removed now. In the past they have been left as they did no harm but the process is complicated to understand as it is without the complication of including redundant code.

The above will involve:

• Creation of new fields within the HR application to store the data for new fields where the information is not already held in HR
• Amendment of some existing HR lists of values
• Amendment of HR Manager Self Service Termination screens to include new fields
• Amendment of the plsql packages which carry out the data extract to reflect the new and changed fields and remove redundant code
• Amendment of the plsql procedure which carries out the archiving process of data after each year to include the new fields and remove redundant ones
• Amendment of the underlying HESA extract database tables to include the new fields and remove redundant ones
• Amendment of the PPIPMI management information extract package to include a subset of the new fields and remove redundant ones. They are not all being included - the BRD lists those which are required.
• Amendment of the PPIPMI extract database tables to include the new fields and remove redundant ones where possible.
• Amendment of the PPIPMI Business Objects universe to include the fields (including making sure that correct security applied to those which are 'sensitive')
• Creation of an annual upload procedure to populate the hesa extract tables with golden copy information from the PURE research management system. This is required as some of the data for the new fields will be managed within PURE and not held inside the HR application.
• Creation of a process for generation of the final xml file.  The csv files were generated via an HR application concurrent request and it is proposed to continue with this approach for the xml file
• Migration of the HR administration screens to Oracle APEX and addition of the new fields
• Addition of new ACTSOC field and ACTHQUAL fields to the eRecruitment BOXI universe.