Author: Anna Sargent, Payroll Consultant, Namos Solutions
Whether it’s about fixing a small issue or a complete showstopper, there are always game-changers and hidden gems for HCM in every Oracle Release, but sometimes it can be hard to see the wood for the trees! I’m going to be talking you through my Top 5 picks from Oracle’s 26A Release.
While the release was predictably AI-focused, shift management in HCM also emerged as a key theme, with updates across several modules. There is also the customary prevalence of items relating to Redwood-versions of pages (although we may see these tail off during 2026 as less of the system remains on Responsive or Classic page versions). Business Rules (that can be applied in Visual Builder Studio) featured a lot as they are extended increasingly in each release, with new validations and defaults made possible across various pages and transactions.
Number 5: ‘Approval History Action on Team Time Cards’
Kicking us off at number 5 is a simple but much-needed enhancement that will boost visibility of time card approvals. Sometimes the best release items are the ones that are so simple you marvel that they weren’t there already!
This is a useful feature that gives quick and easy transparency for time card approvals, directly from the ‘Team Time Cards’ page (so will be helpful for managers but also administrators). An Approval history ‘drawer’ will pop out to show who/date/time of approval, and if your layout covers both projects and payroll, these will be displayed separately where approval routings differ.
It should be noted that if you have archiving of your transactions on (enabled via Transaction Console setup- recommended to optimise system performance) the data for any approvals that have been archived or removed won’t show in the ‘drawer’ but a message will display to explain why this is. If an approval was overridden by a Time and Labor Manager this will also be shown.
Previously it was difficult to surface information on OTL approval history to managers and system admins alike, with most organisations resorting to a combination of reporting and Transaction Console to surface information on approval history.
Number 4: ‘Copy HR Help Desk Documents to Document Record’ & ‘Copy Case Documents to Document Record’
This item will be a game-changer for users of Helpdesk and Case Management. Currently where a Case Management Case or an HR Helpdesk Service Request has a document attached to it relating to the case or ticket, users must download copies of these documents locally and then upload them into the employee’s Document Record. This will save significant time for users and be a much more secure way of storing and consolidating employee documentation (as nothing needs to be taken out of the system).
There is now a Smart Action to ‘Copy to Document Record’, where you are then prompted to select which attachments to copy across, and to specify a document type and name, plus other supporting information.
You should note that the documents will be saved to the ‘Primary Contact’ of the Helpdesk request/Case Management Case, so organisations should check that this is the correct person for the documents to be stored against (depending on their business processes regarding who is listed as primary contact on cases and requests).
Number 3: ‘Business Rule Defaulting and Validation of Input Values Introduction’
In the last releases of 2025 (C & D) Oracle delivered functionality to allow Business Rules to be configured for input values for Individual Compensation plans. This item further extends those capabilities, allowing you to default input values (e.g. amount, periodicity), but also to detect whether the user adding the allowance is the initiator or the approver (and therefore vary the behaviour or conditions applied). Prior to the availability of such business rules, options to restrict or validate ICP input were limited to the validation controls that could be added to ICP element entry input values. This gives much greater flexibility, making many more use cases possible. Use cases might include defaulting an end date within 12 months if an allowance is non-pensionable or applying maximums variably depending on who is entering the allowance. For example, when a manager requests the allowance, the maximum value is £500 but when an HR Specialist request the allowance the maximum value is £1,000.
Number 2: ‘Display of Empty Fields in Redwood Employment Information and Employment Details Pages’ & ‘Enabled Fields Displayed by Default’ for Workforce Structures and Document Records
Narrowly missing the top spot (which says a lot…) is the fact that ‘empty’ fields are now displayed by default across a few pages, but most crucially on ‘Employment Information’ (applicable for sections: Assignment, Job details, Additional assignment info). Previously, any fields that weren’t populated were not shown on these pages even when they were set to be visible via business rules in Visual Builder Studio.
Something we have had a lot of feedback on is the fact that since the Redwood ‘Employment Information’ page (and other Redwood Pages as a broader principle) was introduced, it is hard to tell if a field is ‘missing’ (hasn’t been deployed) or whether it just isn’t populated for the worker. On a day to day basis for HR and System Admins, this presents a challenge as you need to remember all the fields that might be on a page when you are assessing whether the information for a worker (or a position etc.) is correct. In a similar vein to ‘Employment Info’, as of 26A you will be able to see all enabled fields (whether empty or not) for Workforce Structures (jobs, positions etc.) and Document Records.
Number 1: ‘Global Payroll Interface – Payroll Connect by Events’ & ‘Global Payroll Interface Enhanced With Output Value Transformation’
Technically two items but I am grouping them together here under the theme of HCM Extract-based integrations. On the face of it these release items might seem as though you don’t need to pay attention to them unless you’re interfacing your payroll to a third party, however I’m really interested to see whether the application of these features can be extended beyond payroll and into other integrations that leverage HCM extracts.
In HCM there are a few established ways to build event‑based (or ‘near‑real‑time’) integrations. The most common are HCM Atom feeds and (depending on the pillar and object) Fusion Business Events via Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC). For high‑volume or broad data sets, teams often complement those with HCM Extracts (changes‑only), which are batch extracts but can still feel ‘eventy’ when scheduled frequently enough.
Atom feeds are Oracle’s recommended approach for detecting key HCM changes without needing to query application tables (instead endpoints are published when a specified transaction happens e.g. new hire, a termination) and your integration polls these feeds and processes the changes). This is because (broadly speaking) the ‘Business Events’ available via OIC are powerful in ERP/SCM/CX, but the catalog of events that are available for HCM are not as exhaustive. Using ‘Business Events’ in OIC you ‘subscribe’ to an ‘event’ and OIC triggers your integration flow when the event is raised (i.e. when the ‘thing’ happens in the system). This is ‘cleaner’ than integrations that use Atom feeds because it doesn’t require polling (a near constant/very frequent assessment of whether the specified transaction or change has happened). However, for HCM the catalog of events is more limited than for other pillars, so Atom feeds tends to be the way to go.
With regards to mapping data in integrations (i.e. my source system holds Grades as 123, but my target system wants them represented as ABC) there are a number of ways to do this including using middleware, holding values in tables or lookups, or ‘baking’ mapping logic into the code of the extract itself. These methods work, but each comes with their own drawbacks and considerations, so it is encouraging to see that Oracle are recognising the need to be able to hold mappings for the purposes of integrations in a more end-user-friendly format.
If you are an HCM person who has survived that brief detour into integrations 101, then here is why these two release items could be significant for you. They will allow you to:
- Specify ‘events’ via the front-end of the system that will trigger your HCM extract integration. Available ‘Events’ include changes to employment data (job, position, grade, FTE, work schedule etc.), payment changes and changes to personal information. This provides an easily configurable mechanism to provide near real-time updates to payroll-critical information, which could reduce time spent on late or inconsistent data. This feature is currently on controlled release, so to enable this feature you need to log a Service Request.
- Add your own 121 mappings via the UI to provide downstream systems with mapped data where values in source and target system are different. This allows you to easily define and maintain mapping values via the front-end of the system, without needing to update lookups, code or hold mapping values in middleware where business end-users cannot maintain them. Mappings can be added for any objects within your extract, and when the value map is created you choose the ‘Consumer’, which is the Payroll provider that you interface with. However, you can also choose ‘Report’ which means the mapped data will be extracted and produced as a report, which means there could be use cases for this functionality beyond payroll (i.e. to provide a report output which maps data for you automatically). At the moment it appears that 121 mapping is possible, but that ‘Advanced Rules’ may be available in the future, so watch this space.
Both these things were possible to achieve previously, but in a way that necessitated a lot more technical effort and expertise. Now I should caveat this by stating that so far, these features are being billed as relating to Payroll Integrations only (associated with the Payroll Interface Source Templates which would be used when defining the extract). As such, there is a clear application for you if you are a payroll interface customer, particularly if you find your existing integration to be clunky, unreliable or consuming a lot of time in supporting each month. Can your existing payroll interface be re-worked and simplified? Could you rely less on technical expertise and manage some aspects of your integration via the ‘front-end’ of the UI? If you are managing 121 mappings via lookups, tables or in SQL logic that needs an implementor to update the mapping every time it changes, you might be able to manage these yourself via this functionality. This might seem like a scary proposition, but it is worth doing an assessment of the support your current integration needs every month and how well it meets your requirements. My hope would be that over time, this event-based functionality for HCM is extended across other template types, and that more complex mapping (not 121) is supported to allow end users to maintain their own mappings. We will certainly be experimenting with this to see what use cases we might meet!
Bonus Item: ‘Introducing Redwood Style Transaction Console with Embedded AI’
I’m nothing if not generous, so this is a bonus item that I couldn’t squeeze into the top five; 26A sees the Transaction Console being further revamped and extended. The Transaction Console is a crucial part of the system for system administrators and implementors. Day to day as a live system-user, your usage of the Transaction Console will likely be to troubleshoot or check the status of transactions and approvals, and Oracle are imbedding various AI tools to support users, including AI-based transaction analytics and (most excitingly) an AI Agent for Transaction Console assistance which will “help identify where to look for particular transactions, explain status meanings, suggest next steps for stuck approvals, or direct users to the right configuration page.”
This could potentially be a fantastic tool for system admins to leverage to reduce the amount of time spent investigating and resolving ‘stuck’ or misassigned transactions. Another useful feature is an AI agent that summarises, into ‘natural language’ how an approval rule is configured. Often the people maintaining the system are not the same people who implemented the approval rules, and for complex approval rules, it can be challenging for the uninitiated user to assess the configuration and understand, “what is going to who? And why? And under what conditions?”
For organisations with complex approval rule configurations, this AI feature could really help business users in being able to understand and summarise how an approval rule is configured, when they are presented with complex code or a web of boxes and lines that looks more like a mind-map than an approval route.
For system implementors, there are changes associated with approval configurations in 26A, with BPM task configuration now available directly in transaction console (making it much easier to configure approvals all in one area of the system) and there are AI features to generate approval rules using plain-text prompts.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this rundown of my favourite release items for 26A – drop us a line if there is anything you want to discuss in more detail, or if you’ve got a different take on what the best features in 26A are!
