Duncan Davies of Succeed discusses the implementation of PeopleSoft in Pret A Manger, a food retailer, highlighting the rapid deployment of various HR modules in a growing company. He compares cloud services, emphasizing the advantages of AWS in cost, flexibility, and security, particularly for large organizations. Overall, the presentation showcases how cloud infrastructure can facilitate efficient software deployment and management in a fast-paced environment.

1. PeopleSoft Conference 2011Case Study: How using 'The Cloud' accelerated Pret's PeopleSoft projectDuncan DaviesCTO - SucceedPage 1

2. IntroductionWho am I?My name is Duncan Davies, I’m a long-time PeopleSoft techie with a passion for sharing information and building a knowledgeable community.I blog at www.PeopleSoftTipster.com.Who are Succeed?Succeed are an established specialist PeopleSoft consultancy that specialises in full project lifecycle implementations of large HCM, CRM, Time and Attendance, Payroll, and Financials applications for large blue chip companies.Over the last 11 years we’ve grown to around 60 people, two thirds of whom are permanent staff, and mostly having more than 5 years experience with PeopleSoft. Our teams are currently working across 10 different client sites.

3. IntroductionWho are Pret?Pret a Manger are a privately owned British food retailer. Their unique selling point is:“proper sandwiches avoiding the obscure chemicals, additives and preservatives common to so much of the 'prepared' and 'fast' food on the market today.”They have just under 300 stores and aregrowing by about 10%/year.They are incredibly focused on staff wellbeing and happiness.

4. The ChallengeA green-field PeopleSoft implementation of:Core HR

5. Profile Management

6. Career Planning

7. Succession Planning

8. Recruitment

9. Health & Safety

10. Global Payroll

11. Absence Management

12. Disciplinary & Grievance

13. Training

14. BenefitsAgainst a backdrop of a company busily growing in lots of directions, and with an aggressive timeline. In summary, a lot of modules, quickly.We had to get up and running fast!

15. The Cloud – TerminologyThere is a lot of confusing terminology thrown around when trying to find a infrastructure provider:HostingPrivate CloudSaaSPublic CloudMulti-TenancyOnDemand

16. The Cloud – A PrimerIn ‘The Cloud’ just means “outside of the customer’s datacentre.”The ‘Private Cloud’ is outsourcing management of your virtualised infrastructure to someone else, either on your premises or hosted in their proprietary data centre.Vendors in this area are Rackspace, IBM’s Hosting, Oracle OnDemand.

17. The Private CloudIt’s a good start, as:You’re taking advantage of your provider’s lower hardware costs

18. You no longer have to worry about data-centre security, backups, redundancy etc.

19. Virtualising gives some flexibilityBut:This isn’t too different from the old Application Service Provider (ASP) model from the 90’s

20. You’ll still be paying fixed amounts (monthly, or annually) for fixed serversThe Public CloudThe ‘Public Cloud’ is an open network using standard templates (eg. Amazon has 11 hardware templates).‘Multi-tenancy’ is where several customers share a single instance of the application (examples are SAP ByDesign, NetSuite, Workday and maybe Fusion). This is difficult and/or not delivered with PeopleSoft and is not applicable for larger customers!Full SaaS or Pure SaaS is a multi-tenant application running in a public cloud with accelerated feature delivery.

21. AWS - Public CloudAmazon Web Services (AWS)A bigger step forward, as:Much lower hardware costs (not just at server level, but data centre level too)

22. Far more flexibility (servers charged by the hour) Military grade security

23. Higher performance

24. Super fast provisioning

25. Global availabilityJust how big are the clouds?Amazon AWS has 5 regions:US East (Northern Virginia),