Is your organization using Oracle Cloud HCM? If so, it’s time to gear up for the Oracle HCM Cloud 24B Release, expected to roll out in May 2024. As part of Oracle’s regular quarterly update cycle, this release brings a suite of mandatory enhancements, security patches, and new features to keep your HR environment modern, compliant, and efficient.
In this blog, we’ll provide a comprehensive overview of the key highlights in Oracle HCM 24B, focusing on enhancements across Core HR, Talent Management, Payroll, and other modules. We’ll also emphasize the importance of proactive validation and testing before enabling new functionalities in your live environment—ensuring a seamless transition for your teams.
What New Changes to Expect From the Oracle Cloud HCM 24B Release?
The Oracle Cloud HCM 24B update delivers a robust set of enhancements across various modules, including Global HR, Core HR, Learning, Absence Management, Benefits, and Payroll. These updates focus on improving user experience, increasing automation, and aligning HR processes with modern workforce needs.
Global Human Resources
Journeys
- Create Team Surveys with a New UI: A redesigned survey interface now empowers HR teams and managers to build and distribute surveys more efficiently. With an intuitive layout, users can collect team feedback, monitor responses, and enhance engagement across departments.
- Support for Physical Signatures in Journeys: Oracle Journeys now allows users to capture physical signatures as part of electronic signature tasks. This ensures a secure and compliant process for document sign-off, especially for onboarding, policy acceptance, or contractual workflows.
- Hide Email ID Field in Signature Tasks: Administrators can now hide the Email ID field in native signature task types, offering a cleaner interface and better privacy for end users. This enhancement supports data minimization and improves user experience.
Redwood Experience Enhancements
- Add Payroll Details During Location Changes: A new step in the Change Location process enables users to directly update payroll information. This ensures accurate and real-time payroll adjustments aligned with job location updates—minimizing manual corrections post-transfer.
- Update Payroll During Working Hours Changes: Similar to location changes, the Change Working Hours process now includes a dedicated step to update payroll details. This integration supports payroll alignment with shift modifications and reduces processing delays.
- View Assignment Flex Fields in Employment Info: The Redwood Employment Info page now provides visibility into assignment flex field data, giving HR users and managers deeper insights into employee assignments and structure—enhancing decision-making and organizational clarity.
Core HR Enhancements
- Auto-Assign Parent Position Based on User: In the Request a New Position and Create Position processes, the system now defaults the parent position to that of the logged-in user. This streamlines the creation of roles within the same team and reduces configuration errors for managers.
- Mass Assign or Inactivate AORs with Templates: Organizations can now use user-defined templates to automatically assign, inactivate, or end-date Areas of Responsibility (AOR). This bulk processing capability significantly reduces administrative overhead and ensures policy consistency.
Learning Management Enhancements
- Sync Learning Outcomes to Talent Profiles: Completed training now contributes directly to an employee’s Talent Profile by automatically syncing skills and qualifications from learning outcomes—improving visibility into workforce capabilities.
- Improved Enrollment Details View: The Enrollment Details page has been enhanced to show more offering information, including titles and streamlined accept/decline options, enabling learners to make quick and informed decisions.
- Manage Learning Across Teams Easily: Managers now have more control to assign, record, or request learning for team members. Whether assigning catalog offerings or submitting external learning, these actions are now available within a unified interface.
- Smarter Learning Assignment from My Team Page: From the My Team Learning dashboard, managers can easily assign offerings to individuals or groups. This empowers leaders to drive learning initiatives aligned with team goals and performance needs.
Absence Management Enhancements
- Configure Default Absence Type Display: A new “Absence Type Default” setting in the Additional Attributes section gives HR teams the flexibility to define how default absence types are shown on absence entry and bidding pages—creating a smoother, more personalized user experience.
- View Absence Balances During Time Entry: Employees can now see their absence balances while entering time cards, reducing leave submission errors and encouraging better planning of paid time off.
- Export Absence Data to Excel: HR professionals can export absence records to Excel directly from the Manage Absences and Entitlements page. This improvement simplifies reporting, analysis, and compliance tracking.
- Easily Track Absence Updates with Job Request ID: The new ESS_Job_Request_ID column allows teams to identify the latest process that updated a leave transaction, improving auditability and reducing investigation time for historical changes.
- Personalize the Absence Planning Page: With customer extensibility now enabled on the Absence Planning page, organizations can customize layouts and workflows to match internal leave management policies and preferences.
- Enable Auditing for Scheduling Tables: Auditing capabilities can now be extended to two critical database tables: per_schedule_assignments & per_schedule_exceptions. This ensures better data tracking and compliance for employee scheduling records.
Benefits Enhancements
- More Flexible Plan Grouping Options: Oracle HCM 24B introduces six new plan type groupings (in addition to the existing twelve), giving HR administrators more ways to organize and manage benefit plans tailored to employee demographics and organizational needs.
- Use Home Address for Eligibility Checks: Eligibility profiles can now leverage an employee’s home address—in addition to or instead of the primary or work address—enhancing accuracy, especially for hybrid and remote workforces.
- Default Timeliness for Life Events: The Timeliness Days field is now automatically set to 90 days for new or null-value life events. This helps prevent accidental event expiration and reduces manual intervention by benefits administrators.
Payroll Enhancements
- Continuous Payroll Background Processing: The payroll background process now runs persistently to handle real-time updates from time entries, compensation changes, and other activities. If interrupted, the process automatically restarts, ensuring uninterrupted payroll operations.
- Multi-Language Support for Payroll Reports: You can now generate Payment Register and Third-Party Payment Register reports in your preferred language, supporting localization for global payroll processing and reporting needs.
- Compressed Uploads for Large Reports: Large output files—including BI reports, payroll extracts, and logs—are now automatically compressed before being uploaded to Oracle UCM, reducing storage usage and improving system performance.
- Customize Payroll Reports with UOM Settings: A new Unit of Measurement (UOM) configuration allows payroll users to control how numeric values are formatted and displayed in reports, offering more consistency across reporting formats.
Talent Management Enhancements – Oracle Cloud HCM 24B
Goal Management – Redwood Experience
- Expanded Goal Support in Redwood UI: The Redwood Goal Management experience now supports a broader range of individual and organizational goals, helping employees set and align their performance objectives with greater flexibility.
- Submit Performance Goals for Approval: Employees can now submit their individual performance goals for managerial approval. This feature ensures alignment between personal objectives and broader business priorities.
- Role-Based Approval Workflows: Oracle HCM 24B introduces role-based goal approval, enabling customized approval paths based on user roles—ensuring the right stakeholders review and validate performance objectives.
- Improved Goal Notifications: Enhanced goal notifications provide real-time updates on goal submission, approval, and progress—keeping both employees and managers informed throughout the performance cycle.
- Track Measurable Goal Tasks: Users can now add and track measurable tasks within performance goals in Redwood, offering clear milestones and tangible progress indicators tied to each goal.
Profile Management
- Sync Job and Position Profiles Automatically: The system now automatically synchronizes position profiles by inheriting attributes from linked job profiles. This ensures consistent data between job roles and positions without manual updates.
- Streamline License & Certification Validation: Oracle now offers integration components that allow organizations to validate licenses and certifications through third-party providers—simplifying compliance tracking.
- Attachment Visibility During Approvals: Approvers can now view item-level attachments while a profile item is in a pending state. This improves transparency and accelerates decision-making during profile approvals.
Career Development
- Activate Career Ambassadors via Profile Setting: A new profile option, ORA_HRD_CAREER_AMBASSADORS_ENABLED, allows organizations to activate the Career Ambassadors feature—suggesting mentors and role models on the Skills Center and career details pages.
- Align Learning to Development Goals: Oracle 24B makes it easier to connect learning plans with career development objectives, helping employees follow a structured, strategic growth path.
- Track Development Progress with Measurable Tasks: Using the Redwood Goal Center, users can now track measurable tasks tied to development goals—offering clear insights into personal growth and goal attainment.
Performance Management
- Manage Feedback with HDL and HSDL: HR teams can now use HCM Data Loader (HDL) and HCM Spreadsheet Data Loader (HSDL) to create or update performance feedback—simplifying data management at scale.
- Control Auto-Transfer of Performance Documents: Admins can now restrict the automatic transfer of performance documents to new managers by configuring transfers based on specific manager types, maintaining performance continuity.
- Enhanced All-in-One Evaluations: Enhancements to All-in-One Evaluations improve usability for managers and streamline the end-to-end review process within a unified interface.
- Redesigned Mass Action Processes Page: The Mass Action Processes for Performance Documents page has been rebuilt using Redwood Visual Builder Studio (VB Studio), offering a cleaner, more intuitive layout for HR specialists to manage bulk performance actions.
- Smarter Check-In Conversations: Check-in templates now support skills and competency topics, allowing managers and employees to have more meaningful and development-focused discussions.
Talent Review
- Redwood Talent Review Configuration Options: Oracle HCM 24B introduces a Redwood-based interface for configuring Talent Review meetings, including the ability to duplicate meeting setups for easier planning.
- Display Worker Business Titles in Talent Reviews: Business titles of employees are now prominently shown on Redwood Talent Review pages, providing better context for evaluators and reviewers.
Succession Management
- Redwood Pages for Succession Planning: Users can now access Redwood versions of the Create Succession Plan and Add to Succession Plan pages, ensuring a seamless experience consistent with other updated modules.
- Display Business Titles in Succession Management: Oracle has replaced job titles with business titles in Succession Management views, helping stakeholders better identify individuals and roles within planning workflows.
HCM Common Enhancements – Oracle Cloud HCM 24B
HCM Data Loader (HDL) & Spreadsheet Data Loader (HSDL)
- Execute Load, Rollback & Retention with Greater Control: The 24B update allows users to perform Load, Rollback, and Extended Retention operations at both the business object and data set levels. This gives administrators more control over data integrity and history retention.
- Expanded Support for Business Objects: Oracle has introduced new and enhanced business objects that expand the scope of data load operations, helping HR teams handle more complex integration needs with ease.
- Automate HDL and HSDL with REST Integration: Using the new dataLoadDataSets REST resource, you can now automate HDL and HSDL processes—from uploading files to Oracle WebCenter Content to initiating loads and tracking progress in real-time. This helps reduce manual interventions and streamlines end-to-end HCM data operations.
Time and Labor
- New Database Items for Premium Shift Types: Oracle now provides additional database items that allow HR and payroll teams to retrieve premium codes and shift types more accurately. This supports better configuration of time rules related to workforce scheduling.
- Approve Time Cards Without Pending Attestations: Managers can now save, submit, and approve time cards even when workers haven’t completed their attestations. This enhancement significantly accelerates the approval cycle and ensures payroll isn’t delayed due to pending validations.
- Remove Time Card Data for Ex-Employees: The system now supports the automatic removal of time record data (Time Record Group objects) linked to workers who have either left the organization or had their work relationships canceled. This keeps your time and labor records clean and compliant.
- Auto-Add On-Call Entries to Time Cards: On-call hours are now automatically included on time cards where applicable, reducing the risk of missed entries. This automation helps minimize payroll discrepancies and lowers the administrative burden on HR and timekeeping teams.
Final Thoughts
The Oracle Cloud HCM 24B Release brings a powerful combination of usability enhancements, automation, and Redwood Experience improvements across modules like Global HR, Talent Management, Core HR, Payroll, Learning, and more. These updates are designed to help organizations streamline HR operations, increase workforce engagement, and maintain compliance with evolving business needs.
As with every quarterly update, it’s crucial to review, validate, and test new features before deploying them in your live environment. A proactive approach ensures that your Oracle HCM Cloud system remains stable, optimized, and aligned with your HR strategy.
Stay informed, stay prepared—and make the most of what Oracle Cloud HCM 24B has to offer.
Elevate Your HCM Strategy with Kovaion
Navigating Oracle Cloud HCM requires more than just managing quarterly updates—it demands a strategic partner who understands your business goals and can help you unlock the full potential of your HCM investment.
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- Ongoing optimization and innovation consulting
As a recognized Oracle Partner, Kovaion delivers solutions that are agile, scalable, and aligned with your workforce priorities—whether you’re optimizing core HR processes, enhancing talent experiences, or planning for long-term digital transformation.
Looking to modernize your HR landscape?
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