Data Integration and Analytics Blog for UKG

In this post, we’re going to give you a step by step walk through of using a Rest API with UKG Pro. (We’re planning on dealing with the SOAP API in a different post).

For this example, we’re using the employee lookup API. As a UKG customer, you can find the API documentation here. We’re happy to send you all the sample code.

In today’s tip, we’re going to show you how to label data items and pages in UKG People Pro Analytics aka Cognos BI.

It’s easy to setup a simple business rule in UKG Pro.   And if you don’t have that many values to enter, it’s not a big deal to enter them by hand.

But if you have dozens of possible values, this isn’t so easy.  Especially if you are working in test and eventually want to move to production without repeating all your work.

Has this happened to you?  You’ve spent time developing a complex query and then fields go missing.   And you wonder why.

I made this mistake several times.  So, it’s worth a blog post.  At the least, it will help me remember not to make the mistake again.

As I’m sure is true for many of you, UKG People Analytics (formerly known as Cognos Business intelligence) is not my first reporting tool.

That’s good – because you understand data and reporting. 

That’s bad – because your learned behavior may mislead you.  And if you’re really like me, you have no hair left to pull out.

You have lots of HR software with lots of acronyms.

And you have ambitious visions of team members using cool visualizations to improve outcomes and efficiency.

HR Data security 101

Most of the time folks only care about data security when there’s a problem.  When PII (Personally Identifiable Information) was leaked.   Or someone had access to some payroll or other key data that they shouldn’t have seen.  Oops.

A client has both UKG Pro and UKG Kronos Dimensions.  They want to see punch back up for each pay check.

The challenge is figuring out the apply date.  Which is clearly on the screen but not to be found in the Data Hub Database.    Here is what we did to figure out this key piece of information.

Many, many HR data analytics projects don’t work because proper Master Data Management is not in place.

HR Master data management means that key data about every employee, every job code, and every department is consistent in all your systems.

Recently, UKG has started supporting Dimensions data in People analytics.   Our clients’ experience indicates that DataViews are cool for manager and employee self-service but don’t work well organization wide analysis.  As for the BIRT reporting tool – I’ll invoke the thumper rule.*