Overview
As the work from home model transitions from a COVID-19 response to a permanent solution for up to 40% of the workforce (ref: Josh Bersin’s article), organizations are starting to implement remote work programs that address tools, expectations, and policies that should be followed. As a result, HR departments are looking for solutions and services to effectively manage teleworkers by using insights into location, availability, contracts, reasons, and distribution data by geography, by work status, by the department, by job code and more.
PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) 9.2 has all the capabilities that HR departments need to effectively track and manage teleworkers or remote workers. This includes features such as capturing start and end dates of remote work, tracking part-time remote work, employee remote work location, reasons for remote work such as temporary or permanent disability, and to define specific job codes, positions, and/or locations that qualify for remote working.
Using Kibana Analytics in PeopleTools 8.58, with PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 Image 33, here's a demonstaration of Kibana capabilities that deliver insights on teleworker data.
Kibana Analytics for PeopleSoft
In Kibana, a dashboard is a collection of visualizations and searches. A visualization is based on Elasticsearch queries on the Elasticsearch data. These visualizations are in the forms of charts, maps, tables, and other diagrams. PeopleSoft Search Framework delivers three dashboards, and each displays two or more visualizations. You may build dashboards based on your business requirements.
In PeopleTools 8.58, the Search Framework enables you to create your own visualizations for PeopleSoft application data. Kibana offers intuitive charts and reports that you can use to interactively navigate through large amounts of data. Dashboards in Kibana are extremely dynamic and versatile — data can be filtered on the fly, and dashboards can easily be edited and opened in full-page format. In PT 8.58 now you can easily set up dashboards and reports and share them with other team members. Kibana dashboards can easily be imported to PeopleSoft with zero impact on PeopleSoft performance. It is also easy to provide or revoke access for any imported dashboards.
Kibana is an open-source front end application that sits on top of the Elastic Stack, providing search and data visualization capabilities for data indexed in Elasticsearch. Commonly known as the charting tool for the Elastic Stack (previously referred to as the ELK Stack after Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana), Kibana also acts as the user interface for monitoring, managing, and securing an Elastic Stack cluster — as well as the centralized hub for built-in solutions developed on the Elastic Stack.
Kibana for PeopleSoft provides rich analytics and visualization with performance enhancements, enabling better decision making and improved understanding of your data. Kibana Analytics doesn’t affect transaction processing, as the analytics are run against Elastic indexes, not against the transactional PeopleSoft database. In Kibana, a dashboard is a collection of visualizations and searches. The visualization is based on Elasticsearch queries on the Elasticsearch data. These visualizations are in the forms of charts, maps, tables and other diagrams.
Using Kibana Analytics for Remote Workers Insights
PeopleTools 8.57 introduced Kibana by Elastic and in PeopleTools 8.58, PeopleSoft further enhanced the use of Kibana by integrating Kibana Dashboards into the PeopleSoft portal itself. Astute Business Solutions decided to put Kibana Analytics to work to develop insights on remote workers. Here are the results:
The image below is from PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 PUM 33 running on PeopleTools 8.58 on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. As you can see, we started by adding a tile in the delivered HCM 9.2 Managed Self Service Fluid Home Page to bring in a Kibana Dashboard created for remote worker insights.
By clicking on the Teleworker Dashboard Tile, you can load the Kibana Dashboard into PeopleSoft. We will go into the technical details of setting up this Dashboard in Kibana and integrating that with PeopleSoft HCM using PeopleTools 8.58 in our next post. For now, let’s take this Teleworker Dashboard (see image below) for a spin and see how it works. As you see, there is a lot of rich information here for the HR department to view and process.
Here are some important things to know about this Dashboard:
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This Teleworker Dashboard was created using the version of Kibana delivered by Oracle PeopleSoft in PeopleTools 8.58.
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The Dashboard contains a number of Kibana visualizations that are based on index data from the PeopleSoft HCM 9.2.33 application instance that this Kibana is connected to.
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The user experience is seamless because of the Kibana Dashboard link is presented on a Fluid Tile within the Manager Self-Service Homepage and the Dashboard is also presented within the PeopleSoft portal in HCM 9.2. This in an improvement over PeopleTools 8.57 wherein the Dashboard would have to be viewed in the Kibana Portal as opposed to the PeopleSoft Application Portal.
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Each visualization within the dashboard gives the user the ability to view, expand, and filter the data set. The visualizations in a dashboard are correlated which means that when any one of them is filtered that filter is applied globally to the other visualizations on the dashboard.
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Users can modify the dashboard to add or remove visualizations depending on the security privileges in PeopleSoft and Kibana.
Now, let’s take a closer look at each of these visualizations and see how they can be useful.
Teleworkers by Department
Here we are visualizing how many teleworker employees there are in each department .
As the data shows, there are a total of 19 teleworker employee for ‘KUTLWC Department’ and 1 teleworker employee for 'The Netherlands Dept INF01'.
This data can be further drilled-down based on the names of all the 20 employees shown on the right side of the graph.
Teleworkers Count and Location
The 1st visualization shows the total count of the teleworker employees in this organization.
The 2nd visualization shows the number of teleworker employees and the location they are currently working in. The inner circle represents the name of each employee. The outer circle represents the city they are currently working in.
Teleworkers Average Working Days and by Location
In the 1st graph, it shows the average day of (total working days by all the employees in a week in one department/total number of employees in that department).
In the 2nd graph, the US teleworker locations' average workday is shown by the total number of working days in a week/total number of employees in that state.
Teleworkers Average Working Days and by Location
The 1st table is a data table that includes all the necessary info about all the teleworkers employees present.
The 2nd visualization is based on Disability applied by employee/number of employees.
Technical Requirements
To develop this solution the following was needed:
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PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 Image 33 instance on PeopleTools 8.58.02 deployed using Oracle Cloud Manager on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) on Astute's OCI tenance
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Elk instance, Kibana configured and integrated with PeopleSoft HCM 9.2.33
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Some configurations in PeopleSoft HCM 9.2.33 to create data sets for teleworkers
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A search index PeopleTools HCM 9.2.33 to create data sets for teleworkers
Conclusion
Kibana Analytics for PeopleSoft with PeopleTools 8.58 is easy, secure and visually rich. Kibana for PeopleSoft provides rich analytics and visualization with performance enhancements, enabling better decision-making and improved understanding of your data. Kibana is easy to install, configure, and maintain. And it provides superior performance in rendering visualizations. Kibana analytics does not affect the transactional process because analytics are ran against Elastic indexes, not the transactional database.
Astute has developed the following Kibana Dashboards for PeopleSoft:
1. HCM 9.2 - PeopleSoft Teleworker Dashboard
2. HCM 9.2 - PeopleSoft Employee Performance Dashboard
3. HCM 9.2 - PeopleSoft Recruiting Dashboard
4. FSCM 9.2 - PeopleSoft Procurement Dashboard
Would you like a personalized Kibana demo? Please contact us us at info@beastute.com to schedule your Kibana demo and leverage Astute for an accelerated implementation.
