UKG

UKG’ Cognos BI Automation

Headquarters

United States

Technologies Used

Java, Selenium, Teamcity CI, JFrog, Maven, Terraform, Ansible, Openstack

Domain

Business Intelligence

Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) is an American multinational technology company with dual headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Weston, Florida. It provides workforce management and human resource management services. As a leading global provider of HCM, payroll, HR service delivery, and workforce management solutions, UKG’s award-winning Pro, Dimensions, and Ready solutions help tens of thousands of organizations across geographies and in every industry drive better business outcomes, improve HR effectiveness, streamline the payroll process, and help make work a better and more connected experience for everyone.

Challenges

Unable to release new BI capabilities quicker, fix long standing upgrade issues/defects for our customers or remediate long standing security vulnerabilities timely by upgrading to newer versions of Cognos at a regular cadence

Solutions

Automated the complete Infrastructure deployment using Terraform. Configured using Ansible.

Results

Delivered an automated highly scalable, available, resilient application and its infrastructure.

Challenges

Challenge 1

UKG were unable to release new BI capabilities quicker, ﬁx long-standing upgrade issues/defects for their customers, or remediate long-standing security vulnerabilities timely by upgrading to newer versions of Cognos at a regular cadence. For example, the last Cognos upgrade to C11.1.7 was done in 2020, and the Previous one, C11.0.9 was done in 2017. It will take 2 to 3 years to upgrade every Cognos which was cost-heavy as well as time-taking.

Challenge 2

Consistency between how we deploy things to Dev vs. PROD

Why?

Almost everything is manual, it takes engineers roughly 7-9 months to plan and execute a Cognos upgrade. Dev validation takes ~3-4 weeks for 4 engineers and ~3 months for 2 app owners to roll it out to PROD.

Solution

Knoldus’ team started working on automating the complete Infrastructure deployment and validation using java, Cognos SDK, echo, Aeon, ansible, terraform, etc. And create new UI and automation tests for presetup and post-upgrade and integrate them to the existing CI pipeline, with a Scorecard that shows how compatible a release is!

Cuts Dev validation time from ~3-4 weeks for 4 engineers TO 1 week for 1 engineer.