Saving hours of manual work with a control center for all of PeopleInsight's data processes

HR SaaS software PeopleInsight, part of HireRoad’s cloud-based talent management and insights platform, has created a centralized, automated control center for all their data processes with CloverDX.

CloverDX customers since 2014, they’re now spending less time and manual effort on their core task of consolidating and uploading customer data into PeopleInsight – the process is now more accurate, and can be run on autopilot.

PeopleInsight continually receives and seamlessly unifies data from customers’ disparate HR technologies. For the HireRoad team, this requires taking in data from a variety of different sources – file uploads, APIs, STFP sites and more – and in a variety of different formats.

The data is ingested automatically by CloverDX workflows, and automatically combined into the format the software needs in order to be able to display consolidated insights back to customers.

Before CloverDX...

The company’s data processes were largely ad-hoc. Andrew Peralta, Director of Platform and Development at HireRoad, recalls: 

With CloverDX now handling the automated data workflows, that previous manual work is now removed. Anywhere between 45 and 60 minutes of manual effort, per client, per day, is now down to zero manual work required, as the jobs are just scheduled and run automatically.

And this automation has also had a huge impact on the company's ability to scale. Andrew Peralta explains that they "...were easily able to triple our customer base without a need to add resources."

The Main Goal

To move away from ad-hoc management to a consolidated control center

The HireRoad team wanted to be able to manage and control all their data workflows and tasks from one place – whether monitoring folder locations for file uploads, data processing, error reporting, or initiating emails.

Performing all those tasks manually was not only taking a huge amount of engineering time, but the process wasn’t scalable. Andrew Peralta explains:

With end-to-end data workflows in CloverDX, Andrew and the team were able to create a control center from where they could drive all their day to day processing.

One of HireRoad's main challenges

Centralizing complex data processing

CloverDX’s visual interface means that the organization is able to bring all their often complex processing logic into one place, and to visually see what’s happening to the data at each step as it flows through the process.

Having the entire process running automatically in CloverDX - from calling an API, to pulling data, pushing it through processing steps, initiating testing, and (assuming the data passes the tests), publishing automatically to the BI layer - eliminates many previously-manual steps, and saves a huge amount of time.

The ability to schedule data workflows with CloverDX has also revolutionized how the HireRoad team works.

Andrew remembers:

He explains how CloverDX enables everyone across the organization to get an instant view of what’s happening with their customers and their data processes:

CloverDX's ability to flexibly handle variations in input has also brought benefits - for example: "We have some customers whose automated APIs use JSON, and I don't know how easily we would have been able to do that without CloverDX - the flexibility of the different inputs we're able to handle now makes it a lot easier."

Results

• Automation and scheduling means end-to-end data processes run on autopilot, saving hours of time and eliminating errors
• The company has been able to triple their customer base without needing to add resource.
• Data is automatically integrated from multiple sources, and processes can adapt to a variety of formats
• CloverDX’s visual format enables the team to easily see what’s happening to data as it flows through the process
• The team now has a bird’s eye view of what’s succeeded or failed with all of their customers

What else changed?

The team know when things fail

The team get instantly alerted – both by email and in the CloverDX Server interface – when any of the data jobs fail. Easy to understand error messages that pinpoint exactly what and where the failure was make it simpler to re-run.

“If a job fails I can log in and quickly look at it and perhaps reinitiate it myself rather than waiting for a more highly technical resource to do it”, says Andrew.

The customizable error reporting further streamlines their workflow, making it fast and easy to identify problems:

“We could be talking millions of rows of data, but maybe there’s just a couple of cases where there’s some unmapped data points.” Having those errors transparently highlighted enables the team to investigate, or go back to the customer to ask them to fix the data.

The technical team isn’t the only one to get these insights into any problems. Everyone involved with customers also has access to this information, so they too can see what’s happened with their specific clients – so they can know whether or not their customers have any problems that need resolving. 

This improved visibility of data workflows, plus predictable, repeatable processes all controlled through one central location, not only enables HireRoad to save time and effort internally, but also to provide better service to their customers.