Defining Geographies.

In this session, we're going to take a look at what basic

geography reference data is, we'll define geography import resources, and we'll
talk about address validation.

Geography Overview. So a geography is a physical space on Earth, such as a location

or region, that's defined by a boundary. Some examples could also be country,
state, province, city.

A geography type is a divisional grouping of geographies, and they're either

geopolitical or physical.

A geography structure defines how geography types relate to one another for a given
geography. So it defines the hierarchy of the geography type or levels. So, for
example, a city is within a state that is within a country.

And master reference geography use is data that's classified as being the source of
the truth, used as a reference for creating user-defined geography uses, and as
the source when working with geographical data, such as validating address or
importing data.

So when you're looking at any place you add an address within HCM Cloud or across
Fusion applications, you can format the address that you see.

Now, steps to define a country. You'll create a geography structure in which

geography types, such as a state, city, are part of the country structure, and then
define how the geography types are hierarchically related. For example, rank the
state geography type as the highest level within the country and then specify the
geography validations for country after defining the geography hierarchy.

Now, in the application, when we're entering values that differ by country, we
either select the country or, in some cases, the country is auto-selected based on
various criteria. Then, how many address lines do you see? And then do you see a
field for state or province, city, county, postal code?

You can format. Do you see multiple address lines or just one address line? In what
order? Maybe you want postal code above state, for example. You can format the
address. But this is about how are you selecting those values. So you free-form
type in the street address, but are you selecting the state or the province, the
city, the postal code from a drop-down, or you are free-form typing those in as
well?

Oracle Cloud applications deliver at least the country level. So every country that
exists in the world is delivered. And if a new country is created, that would be
delivered. Beyond that, it's going to depend on which country you're implementing
HCM Cloud in or other Fusion products and what products you're using. So, for
example, if you're implementing Global Payroll US, Global Payroll Canada, the
geographies are provided for you by our tax vendor, which is Loqate.

So load it to a staging area by Cloud Services, you run a process, and they're
populated. So how are you getting those values populated? Maybe in certain
countries in which you operate, it's a small country -- only has a few counties, a
few cities, a few postal codes-- so you may create that manually. In other cases,
you may get them from a third party provider and use some of the import features to
get them in. We call this geography structure. And the geography structure is what
are the levels from top, which is always country, and then what's below that.

So if I go into the system-- and the first thing I'm simply going to do is I'm
going to be in My Client Groups, and then I'm going to go to New Person. And I'm
not going to process an entire new hire. I just want you to see some of the address
fields. So I'm going to click on Hire an Employee. And what's loading right now
will be the classic Hire pages. I'm not showing you the responsive at this point.
This is just going to be a real quick demo.

So what happens when you start to add someone into the system is you select a legal
employer. So I'm going to select US1 Legal Entity. Well, a legal employer is
associated with what's called a legislative data group, and that legislative data
group is associated with a country. So when I select US1 Legal Entity and then I
tab out, I'm first going to see the name fields change. And later on in this
series of sessions, we'll talk about the name format.

So I'm just going to enter my name real quick, and then I'm going to click on Next.
And once it loads the next page, you're going to see that it's going to be asking
me for home address. So you can absolutely configure what the labels are for the
address fields, how many you see, and the order of them. That we'll look at doing
a little later on. But when we're talking about geographies, we're talking about
the drop-downs that you're seeing here.

So where are those values coming from? Or are they free-form? So, for example, if I
go into the Postal Code field-- in this case, Zip Code-- and I enter 07470-- it's a
place that I used to live-- and I tab out, you're going to get this pop-up in this
case because the postal code might be associated with multiple cities or different
areas of the same city. In this case, it's multiple geographies within the same
city. So I would need to select the correct one and then click OK, and then you'll
see that it populates the State, the City, and the County.

So we can decide to put postal code up at the top, so I'm not actually typing in
Wayne and then Passaic County and then the state of New Jersey. When I type in the
postal code, it would have validated that anyway. This is what we mean when we're
talking about geography, so any place you're entering an address.

So let's break this down a little bit more. There are really two different things
going on. We have the structure. The geography structure is a hierarchical grouping
of geography types for a country. We deliver country. In some circumstances, we
deliver below that as well. If you have to define it, you define it. You would
search for the country, and then you would decide the structure.

Once you've defined the structure, you're going to load the hierarchy, which are
the actual values. So, you know, hey, I've got Country, State, County, City. Well,
now I'm going to load all the states. Once I've loaded the states, I'm going to
load the counties. Once I've loaded the counties, I'm going to load the cities.

And you really need to make sure that if you're manually defining your structures,
you are firm with what the structure is going to be because you cannot modify it
once you've loaded your individual geography data. So, for example, if you left
out County and you did City and then Postal Code. So you have the state of
California, the city of Redwood or Woodside, and then the postal codes. And then
you go, oh, well, wait a minute, we need County. You can't do that because you've
already loaded geographies. Y ou really have to make sure your definite with the
structure. So talk about it with your system integrator before you load the
geography data or create it manually.

And to provide a little bit more information, we said geography is a physical space
with boundaries that define an instance of geography type. So geography type are
those different descriptors. Geography usage-- geography usage initiates how a
geography type or geography is used in the application.

And then geography data, during implementation, you're going to include all
possible geography types for your application. I just gave you an example of
County. Include geography reference information for all other applications since
this is shared. If you're implementing multiple Fusion applications-- so ERP,
Project, Supply Chain, CX-- you need to make sure that you're all on board, all
have discussions on what your geography should be because they're used throughout
Fusion applications.

So review and modify the pre-defined address styles. So that is, do I see address
line 1, 2, and 3 for the United States, or just 1 and 2? What do I see for another
country? Verify the source and the reliability of your geography data. So if you're
going to use third party data, certainly verify that information.

All right, so here we can see this information about examine the Manage Geographies
page. So I'm going to go back into the system, and I'm going to go to Settings and
Actions, and Setup and Maintenance. And then I'm going to select Workforce
Deployment. And up here, I'm just going to go and type in "Manage Geo."

When I'm using the Search in this part of the page, it's searching within the
context of Workforce Deployment. It's telling me Managed Geographies are in
Enterprise profile. So we can see that here. All right, so if you're not sure where
it is, this Search is within this context. If you need to do a search everywhere
within Functional Setup Manager, you would do that through the overall Search, and
that's found under the task pane or panel.

Now, let's say that I was going to enter something here that was part of Workforce
Compensation. So I type it in. Well, that's not a part of Workforce Deployment, so
I wouldn't get a hit on it. But if I searched under Compensation, so if I changed
my setup to Compensation, then it would say, oh, OK, yeah, this is part of
Compensation, and then I would get a hit.

So we're going to go to Manage Geographies. Now, this is going to show us the

geographies that have been loaded, or you can also create them manually. If you're
going to be loading them through a third party, there is important information
listed on the slide about reference information. But you can also go to the Product
Papers in My Oracle Support. You want to make sure that you're getting information.

So now that I've selected geographies, up here I'm going to put in "US," and then
I'm going to click Search. And what you're going to see are the different items
that you can access from here. So what we're seeing is different columns that have
a check mark. And if there's a check mark, it means that it's been completed.

So just to give you a definition, we have something called Address Cleansing

Defined. And that column is where you can enable the Verify Address button for
real-time address verification. To use the address cleansing functionality, though,
you need to have a license for the customer data quality application because the
feature is delivered using data quality integrity.

That's not typically used if you're just looking at an HCM Cloud implementation.

You might be familiar with the functionality from e-commerce. So when I type in my
address-- if I would type in 1351 Paint Horse Court, Mount Pleasant, South
Carolina, 29429-- maybe it might suggest a change and say, instead of Mount
Pleasant, use Awendaw because I'm on the border of those cities, something like
that. Or I did enter-- or I didn't enter Avenue or Street. So you've seen that in
e-commerce. That does not come with HCM.

The next thing is the Structure Defined. So you've either gone in manually and
created it. It's been delivered for you, or you've loaded it. So, in this case, in
the United States-- I'm going to go ahead and click on Structure Defined-- and this
is where we would see what's been defined. So underneath Country, we have our
states, our counties, our cities, and our postal codes.

And you'll notice that if I try to highlight here, I'm not allowed-- I can't
actually add another structure here because it's not going to allow me to insert
anything in between. You'll also notice that I'm unable to delete any of these
geography types. Now, if I wanted to, could I potentially create an Add Geography
type underneath Postal Code? That wouldn't make sense since there's nothing under
Postal Code.

But you can only add things to the lowest level. So once you have the geography
structure defined, you then again manually create, load or they've been loaded for
you, or you run a process. The actual values for each of these items need to be
loaded.

So if I go ahead and come out of here-- and now I'm going to go to Hierarchy
Defined. Now I'm going to come down to New Jersey, and I'm going to expand New
Jersey. And then once that's expanded, I'm going to come to the County of Passaic.

Now, it's going to show me the cities, and I'm going to scroll down until I find
the city of Wayne. And then you can see there are multiple postal codes if I
expand. And this is what we were seeing. So when I was entering my address, there
were actually multiple iterations-- Wayne, New Jersey. Wayne Township also has
07470. So that's why it was displaying multiple times.

Now, once you've loaded those, verified them, you've got them all defined, the last
thing that we have to talk about is validation. So if I cancel out of here and then
we go to Validation Defined, so this is going to open the page where you can
specify the geography types you will use and how they'll be validated.

So here we see these different geography types. Do you want the label to be
something that's listed here? Do you want it to be something different? So you
could have a different label if you wanted to. If I put in, let's say, 07470 but I
chose the city and state of New Jersey, Passaic, Wayne, well, that's not valid if I
put in, let's say, 07055 in the Zip Code field in Passaic. So should I get an error
if it doesn't validate against the table? Or do you not want validation?

The other thing is, am I actually selecting those values from a drop-down? So an
instructor friend of mine got a question from a CLS student not too long ago that
said, hey, I'm trying to enter an address and it's not giving me any drop-downs.
Well, that's because we share this environment between CLS students. And somebody
went in and was playing around with this, and they turned off all of the
checkboxes.

So even though the geographies were loaded, they weren't able to validate against
it because someone had turned all that off. So enable list of values and do the
validation. So you'd want that defined and turned on as well.

So once you have your geographies loaded-- so I'm going to go ahead and get out of
here, and I'm going to click on Done. And I want to explain to you one additional
task, which is, hey, it's great that we have these, but where do you actually see
address format? So if I come up here and I do Manage Address, you're going to say,
see, hey, no task is available.

So this is an example of where the task doesn't fall within the context of
Workforce Deployment. It's used across product. So I'm going to use the Overall
Search. I'm going to go to my task pane. I'm going to click on Search, then I'm
going to enter "Manage Address." Now I'm going to select Manage Address Format. I'm
going to select the country of the United States, and then I'm going to click on
Search.

And you could see I have a Postal Address as well as a Tax Address. So if I select
the Postal Address, you're going to see Address Lines 1 and 2, City, State, Postal
Code, County, Country. So do you want to make anything required? If you need to go
ahead and modify that, you certainly can do that. So that's where that information
is coming from, that detail.

Some information about how you import geographies. So one option is using Oracle-
licensed Geography Reference Data. So you can import Oracle-licensed data from
Loqate for those countries where the data is available. And then for more
information, you want to see the list of available countries with Loqate, Geography
Reference Data topic, and using the HCM Common Features Guide.

And then you could use Import Management to create geography records. You can also
add alternate name or code to existing geographies with Import. To access Import
Management functionality, you're going to go to Navigator Tools and then Import
Management.

And then here, for data integrity reasons, you cannot add new geography structures
or modify existing ones after you import your geography hierarchy. I demonstrated
that and talked about that with you. And then setting up geography validation, I
just demoed this as well. So this is where, if you wanted to validate it, error or
no validation as well as are you selecting the values from a drop-down.

So just as a reminder, geography validation is going to determine geography mapping

and validation for our country's address style. When I demoed this, I was showing
you the postal style. I could have highlighted the Tax Address, and you could have
seen that as well. I said we could have looked at the Tax Address, but I'm going to
go Done.

And then I'm going to go back to Manage Geographies, and then I'm going to go back
to the US. And we said Validation Defined. And then this one is the postal address
format. Here is-- you'll see that it changes to the tax address format. So we're
seeing these values from the table that I just showed you. And then below that, for
the geography type is where you've got whether you're using list of values.

So once geography type is mapped to an attribute, then you can specify whether the
geography type will appear in the list of values during address entry in the user
interface.

It's important to review carefully if you want to enable list of values.

Tax validation, you can also specify whether geography type will be included in tax
validation.

And then geography validation, you must set up geography validation for those
geography elements that you plan to use in your sales territory.

So it's talking a little bit about bringing everything together.

And that's going to take us to the end of this session. Summary So we took a look
at geographies
-- where is your organization going to get that structure, the actual values
of each of the pieces in that structure, and how are you going to do validation
-- talked about clearly determining what your structure is going to be before
you load your values,
 -- talked about the resources where you can get more information on this from
various locations.