As part of Quest Forum Digital Event: Cloud Week, Veenayah Kunniah, Senior Business Analyst at ATCO, spoke about ATCO’s Taleo integrations with Oracle HCM Cloud. Kunniah dove into ATCO requirements, hybrid integration versus OOTB integration, overall architecture, process maps, challenges and pain points, and the future state.

About ATCO

ATCO was originally founded in 1947 in Alberta when father and son, S.D. and R.D. Southern, started Alberta Trailer Hire to provide housing accommodations to workers in Canada’s first oil boom. ATCO has provided products and services in over 100 countries around the world for more than 70 years. ATCO provides customers with innovative solutions in sectors that are fundamental to global prosperity—housing, real estate, energy, water, transportation, and agriculture. Fueled by the imagination of nearly 6,000 people and with assets of $24 billion, ATCO is a diversified global holding company with investments in Structure and Logistics, Energy Infrastructure, Ports and Transportation, and Commercial Real Estate.

ATCO’s Requirements

There are numerous ATCO requirements. ATCO’s objective was to create a seamless integration with minimal intervention. New hires will be sent as Pending Workers and converted to employees by the Employee Resource Center (ERC). ATCO has the ability to process a new hire, rehire, global transfer, and internal transfer. ATCO can also load candidate documents and import the person and employment information.  Additionally, ATCO has the ability to create a requisition based on Positions but the position is not a foundation data structure. Once a new position is created in Oracle HCM, a corresponding Requisition Template will be populated in Taleo.

There are several pros and cons to OOTB Integration. OOTB Integration is easy for maintenance and support and easy to upgrade when Oracle upgrades are being released. Due to the complexity of the requisition creation, there was a risk of offer letters being populated incorrectly. A high amount of manual effort was required by the recruiters to verify the information multiple times. The manual effort was equivalent to the total time required currently for the manual process.

There are also several pros and cons to Hybrid Integration, which is 80 percent OOTB and 20 percent custom. It significantly reduced manual work for Recruiters and helped ERC in the processing time. Another benefit is increased effectiveness and productivity. It also addresses the business requirement. One con to Hybrid Integration is maintenance and support.

There are several important things to know about Overall Architecture. The extracts are built using a BI Publisher and the composite to transform the data is on Oracle PAAS layer. ESS is used to schedule the job in Oracle HCM and TCC is used to load the data into Taleo. Oracle MFT is used for file transfer and HDL loader to load the data in Oracle HCM. Web services are used to create the new hire extract in Taleo.

Integration Challenges

There are many challenges with the integration. There are complex integrations and data integrity issues. There is also difficulty troubleshooting issues, logs are not user friendly, and the HDL log is too technical for end users.

OOTB integration is not very flexible and you don’t have the options for selection criteria and the Export All process takes almost half a day to complete. It is also necessary to use Manual Intervention by ERC on the hire, new hire, and global transfer.

In regard to future dated transactions, you cannot limit the integration to send only current date information. There is also no option to make a manager with no direct reporting as a recruiter. This is being maintained manually and gets overridden every four hours. KPY and dashboards are inconsistent and you cannot integrate with Office 365. Flash is going away and they need to upgrade to Fluid Recruiting.

In regard to releases and upgrades, they need to test all the integrations. ATCO’s employee onboarding experience is not very smooth. Additionally, there is a lot of manual work for recruiters and ERC.

The future state of ATCO is Oracle Recruiting Cloud and one integrated system.

To learn more, check out the additional resources attached below.