If you have local records for the same person in different country business groups, then you can set up Oracle HRMS to synchronize those fields that are considered to be global for that person. For example, if a person notifies a change of name in one country, the application automatically changes the names in all other countries and on the global or corporate record. The fields included in this synchronization are:
Full Name
Last Name
Date of Birth
First Name
Known As
Marital Status
Middle Names
Nationality
Gender
Title
Blood Type
Correspondence Language
Honors
Pre Name Adjunct
Rehire Authorizer
Rehire Recommendation
Resume Exists
Resume Last Updated
Second Passport Exists
Student Status
Suffix
Date of Death
Uses Tobacco Flag
Town of Birth
Country of Birth
Fast Path Employee
Email Address
FTE Capacity
To control the synchronization of your person records you use the HR: Propagate Data Changes profile option.
If you want changes to your person records to be propagated throughout all business groups, then set this profile option to Yes at the site level. The default setting is No.
Providing the profile option is set to yes, then any changes you make are propagated automatically throughout all the records for that person when you save the record you are updating.
Note: You can only propagate changes to business groups in which your security profile allows you to make updates. When you terminate an employee using Oracle HRMS and the person type changes to Ex-employee, the employee's record in the HZ_PARTIES table remains at the Active status.
When you are entering a new person record for a person who already exists in another business group, the new record is considered to be the most up to date record for a person. Therefore, if you have synchronization enabled, then the application copies the global personal information entered in the new record to all existing records.
Fields that are blank in the new record are not copied to any other business groups. If an existing record for the person in another business group has a value for one of the fields left blank in the new record, then the existing value is added to the new record once you save.
For example, suppose you have an existing person record for John Brown in the US business group with the following values in the table below:
Person Record Table
| Field | US Business Group |
|---|---|
| First Name | John |
| Middle Name | Robert |
| Last Name | Brown |
| Date of Birth | 01-MAR-1972 |
| Marital Status | Married |
| Blood Type | A |
| Uses Tobacco? |
Then, you create a new record for John Brown in the UK business group with the following values:
| Field | UK Business Group |
|---|---|
| First Name | John |
| Middle Name | |
| Last Name | Brown |
| Date of Birth | 01-MAR-1972 |
| Marital Status | Divorced |
| Blood Type | A |
| Uses Tobacco? | Y |
If you link this new record to the existing one in the US business group, then you will end up with the following values:
| Field | US Business Group | UK Business Group |
|---|---|---|
| First Name | John | John |
| Middle Name | Robert | Robert |
| Last Name | Brown | Brown |
| Date of Birth | 01-MAR-1972 | 01-MAR-1972 |
| Marital Status | Divorced | Divorced |
| Blood Type | A | A |
| Uses Tobacco? | Y | Y |
The process of synchronizing data across business groups is dependent on the following factors:
The application only propagates personal information across business groups for values selected from lookups if the lookup code exists in the target business group. For example, supposing a marital status is changed within a German business group for a person that also exists in a UK business group. If the value chosen in the German business group is not applicable to the UK, then the UK marital status is not changed.
The application only copies personal information across business groups if the character sets for the business groups are compatible. If an entry in one character set can not be converted to the character set of the destination business group, then the information is not updated. For example, an update to a person's name in Japanese cannot be copied to an English representation of that name.
If there are future dated changes to the personal details for the record to which you are copying information, then these are all overwritten when the application propagates changes. For example, suppose we have the following scenario:
A record for John Smith was created on 1st January 2001. At creation he was given the marital status of Single.
During the creation of the record, a future dated change is made to the record to change his marital status to Married on 1st March 2001. So the marital status record looks like:
01/JAN/2001-28/FEB/2001: Single
01/MAR/2001-End of Time: Married
On 1st February 2001, a new record for John Smith is created in a different business group and is linked to the first record. In the new record a marital status of Divorced is selected. If synchronization is enabled, then the marital status of the original record will be changed to Divorced from 1st February and also the future dated change will be overwritten with the status of Divorced. So after the synchronization the original record is:
01/JAN/2001-31/JAN/2001: Single
01/FEB/2001-28/FEB/2001: Divorced
01/MAR/2001-End of Time: Divorced
To check that all of your person records have been updated as you expect, you should run the Person Synchronization report.
The report shows details of any person in your current business group who also has a record in another business group, on the date specified. Any piece of information that is different between the two business groups is indicated with an asterisk in the Different column of the report.
If you use the Global Deployments function to transfer employees automatically between business groups, then you are recommended to set HR: Propagate Data Changes to Yes at the site level. Otherwise, HRMS cannot synchronize data held for a single employee in multiple business groups during a secondment.
Note: Synchronizing values across business groups has implications from a legislative and legal perspective. It can also impact your benefits eligibility and enrollments set up. If you prefer not to enable automatic synchronization, use the Person Synchronization report to identify differences between records, and update records manually.