RUP4 minor enhancements to Global Payroll
This is a brief summary on a couple of items of interest to Payroll users that are out in the latest RUP4 for EBS 11i. This information was presented at this year’s OHUG in Las Vegas. I have also posted this (as my first post) on the Oracle Contractors Network Blog
Generate Run Balance and Retro-Notification Report Performance
The first item is on the performance of the “Generate Run Balance” and “Retro-notification Report” processes, both of which have had their fair share of bad press on the performance front, especially with large payroll customers. The change is quite subtle: There is the addition of range PERSON_ID functionality which is designed to improve the performance of the cursor that generates the assignment actions. By enabling filter-at-source there is a reduction in the processing overhead in downstream processing.
This option is only activated via a parameter in PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS. The parameter is RANGE_PERSON_ID which needs to be set to Y to enable the option. This makes its implementation quite neat, as it allows users to experiment to see whether performance gains are made. It also allows customers with multiple payrolls, of varying sizes, to target only their larger payrolls by use of Action Parameter Groups.
Balance Feed Purge
A couple of enhancements to the “Balance Feed Purge” concurrent program have been made. Firstly the purging operation run through the concurrent program has been made multi-threaded.
Secondly, a new parameter has been added to the program. The parameter is “Assignment Batch Size” – The default value is 1000. It has been provided to allow customers to specify the batch deletion commit unit size.
Retro Notification Report
An additional parameter has been added to the “Retro Notifications Report (Enhanced) – PDF”. The parameter is “Generate Report”. It provides a ’switch’ to prevent generation of the actual report!
This has been introduced to improve overall performance of the retropay activity when only the processing of the retro elements is required and that there is no requirement to analyze or review the data to be processed (by the report).
I did say it was a brief summary 
I would like to thank and Acknowledge Brian Bellamy, Senior Director EBS Payroll and Localizations in Oracle, for providing the information in the first instance