The PeopleSoft Finance system will be unavailable on Saturday, March 16 from 12:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. for maintenance to convert the Employee ID field to store the USCID. This conversion is required as part of the upcoming Human Resources & Payroll PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) system. This article provides details about why this change is necessary, what the change is, and how the change impacts PeopleSoft users.

Why is the value stored in the Employee ID (EMPLID) field changing?

• Currently, the Employee ID field stores a value that is only used by the PeopleSoft Finance system. It is a number generated in a format consistent with how delivered PeopleSoft generates Employee IDs in the HR/Payroll system. The original decision to use a delivered PS value was made several years ago during a previous design of how the HR/Payroll system would be implemented.
• Last year, as part of the new HR/Payroll system implementation, the design changed to include USCID in the Employee ID field.
• This change supports a much easier user experience by using a value the University community is already familiar with (USCID) as the primary key to all records in PeopleSoft for employees, students and affiliates.
• This change eliminates one value (PS Employee ID) of what is already multiple values (USCID, NETID, VIPID, etc.) that identify who a person is at UofSC.

What is changing?

• The Employee ID field (i.e. “Empl ID”) is changing from a seven digit all-numeric value (e.g. 1999999) to the USCID value represented by one letter followed by eight numbers (e.g. X12345678). See examples below.
• The current field labeled “USC ID” in the PeopleSoft Finance system also stores UofSC’s USCID value; and this is not changing. This means any pages that show both “Empl ID” and “USC ID” labeled fields will show the same value in each field after this conversion is completed.

How does changing to using USCID for Employee ID impact PeopleSoft Finance users?

• This change will not be a significant impact on end users. There are not changes to how the system processes transactions or how data is retrieved. The only change is the value of the data in the Employee ID field.
• The area where most users will see this change is in the Travel & Expenses pages – specifically when searching for people. When Travel & Expenses was implemented, UofSC made several enhancements to allow searching by the “USC ID” field. This was achieved by adding the “USC ID” field to the search pages so that users could locate people by “Empl ID, Name, or USC ID”. After this conversion is complete, searching by “Empl ID” or “USC ID” will return the same results.
• Other PeopleSoft modules (e.g. Grants) use “Empl ID”. This change will take effect in those modules as well.