Why We Use Reports as a Service over Rest APIs with UKG Pro
You need to decide how to get your data from UKG Pro. We recommend Reports as a Service (RAAS) even as we also support Rest APIs. Here’s the data.
- It provides the most data
We’ve found all the data we need in People Analytics. While the API list is long, it’s not FULLY comprehensive. For example, the Employee Pay Statement shows everything the employee sees on their check. It doesn’t show Org Level Job allocations. If you do a lot of payroll analysis, this doesn’t work. If you’re like all my customers, you have at least SOME people that work in multiple departments and even in multiple jobs. If someone has found an API that provides this detail, please, please, please let me know I’m wrong. - RAAS leverages user knowledge.
There are plenty of folks who know how to use people Analytics. We want to leverage that knowledge. Consulting time is expensive. You should pay for what you need, not for what you can already do. Of course, if you don’t have People Analytics expertise, we are happy to help - RAAS is one thing to learn.
There are lots of APIs. And they all work. But they all work differently. Which means every new piece of data means something new to learn. We’ve learned most of them. But it wasn’t fun.
UKG Pro Rest APIs have their place. If you want to build your own user application, APIs can be the way to go. But for analytics, we think RAAS is the way to go.
Two other options before we leave.
UKG Pro also supports Informatica. Informatica is a complex tool and resources are expensive and not easy to come by. We prefer widely known tools like PowerShell. When you choose an approach, you want to make sure that you’re not dependent on a particular resource.
If you already have a cloud data warehouse like Snowflake or RedShift, you have another option to consider. Portable.io has created a pipeline to take data from UKG Pro directly into several cloud data warehouse like Snowflake and RedShift based on the APIs. We’ve been working with Snowflake for other purposes and as we learn more, we’ll be sure to post.
What have you been using to get your data from UKG Pro?