Oracle Cloud HCM 25B Release: What's New?

Does your organization use Oracle HCM Cloud? If so, get ready Oracle’s 25B release is around the corner, with a planned go-live in April 2025. These quarterly updates are not just routine maintenance; they’re critical to keeping your systems secure, compliant, and high performing. And with the Oracle Cloud 25B release, we’re expecting critical Redwood enhancements, with a new user experience and powerful features for your HCM environment.  

In this post we’ll give you a high-level overview of the new features in the Oracle HCM 25B update. As new features come out, so do the challenges of keeping up, but that’s where Opkey comes in. Powered by agentic AI, Opkey makes Oracle updates easy. Our no-code platform takes the complexity out of the process by cutting down costs, reducing manual effort, and eliminating risk. With intelligent impact analysis, automated test creation, and self-healing scripts, Opkey lets your team stay ahead of every quarterly update.

Details of the Oracle HCM Cloud 25B Release Notes: What’s New?

Global Human Resources - Redwood Experience

• You can now define the minute work and break durations in your enterprise shifts and work patterns in any number of minutes, instead of 15-minute increments, such as 25 minutes or 7h 15m. And workforce schedules can use these shifts and patterns, regardless of break rounding validations.

• You can now record additional notes while making employment changes using Redwood Add Assignment and Local and Global Transfer processes.

Benefits - Redwood Enhancements

• You can now use new business rules designed to help streamline and optimize the experience across benefit pages, providing greater flexibility and improved functionality for you as a benefit administrator.

• You can now hide the post-enrollment region within the self-service enrollment pages.

• You can now choose which self-service groupings to display on the self-report a life event page.

Compensation - Redwood Enhancements

• You can now save the Redwood Salary and Individual Compensation compact guided flow pages.

• You can now exclude individual compensation plans and options using business rules. Previously, you could restrict access using plan access and eligibility settings.

Payroll - Redwood Enhancements

• Logging is set up to help you investigate problems with a process that aren't easily identified in other ways.

• You can extend the Payroll Activity Center pages using Oracle Visual Builder Studio (VB Studio). This feature lets you control which attributes and regions are displayed on the summary, milestone overview, and milestone details pages of the Payroll Activity Center.

Oracle Recruiting Cloud

• As an admin, you can now give users access to the Career Sites Configuration page without granting full access to Setup and Maintenance. When users have this access, they'll see a new Career Sites Configuration quick action.

• You can use the candidate's citizenship information in fast formulas as conditions in candidate selection processes.

Talent Management

• On a role guide detail page, you can now view the skills you need to be ready for a role and the skills you need to master the role.

• You can now explore AI-suggested roles based on positions and view their details on the Explore tab of the Opportunity Marketplace application.

Time and Labor

• You can now hide the Save and Save and Close actions using Visual Builder Studio. These changes apply to everyone working on Redwood Timecards.

• When you (as a time and labor manager) generate Redwood timecards based on schedule hours, or when workers generate timecard entries using their schedule, they can review read-only shift information on the timecards.

Absence Management

• The application has now been enhanced to accurately factor in break time when calculating duration. When a shift in a work pattern includes breaks, the break time is only considered in the duration calculation if the availability time range covers the entire shift.

• Time and Labor have introduced a new Absence Reason time attribute. You can now use it to capture reasons for absences entered on the timecard.

Technical Updates  

• Enhancements to Benefits - Enrollments Real Time Subject Area:

• New Attribute for Benefits Enrollments: Added Rate Overridden through Date under Participant Rate Value in Benefits - Enrollments Real Time for better reporting.

• Transactional Business Intelligence Enterprise for Compensation:

• Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) is a real-time, self-service reporting solution for Oracle Cloud users. It enables HR managers, executives, and line managers to analyze workforce costs, staffing, compensation, performance, talent management, succession planning, and employee benefits for informed decision-making.

• Transactional Business Intelligence for Recruiting

• Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) is a real-time, self-service reporting solution for Oracle Cloud users. It helps HR managers, executives, and line managers analyze workforce costs, staffing, compensation, performance, talent management, succession planning, and employee benefits for better decision-making.

We understand that Oracle HCM clients have a tight window of just two weeks to ensure these upcoming changes won’t disrupt critical business processes. It’s a daunting task, especially with so much at stake. But the good news? Test automation is already transforming how organizations manage this challenge, cutting quarterly update cycles from weeks down to just three days.

At Opkey, we assist Oracle customers in quickly upgrading their workforce systems while minimizing the risk of change. Opkey is part of the Oracle Partner Network. Our AI-powered solutions help our customers achieve robust business agility with speed and assurance.