Discover the potential of PeopleSoft Insights and visualizations with Analytic Dashboards for PeopleSoft HCM with Product Management Director, Tammy Boyles. Her 8 years of Oracle experience helps her empower users to create powerful visualizations. In her BLUEPRINT 4D presentation in May 2023, Boyles shared her expertise and explored PeopleSoft Insights (formerly called Kibana). She also showed how to tailor visualizations for audiences and answered key questions to help attendees unleash the power of visualizations for data interpretation and informed decision-making. She emphasized that design is important, but equally important is an understanding of visualizations. 

Within PeopleSoft Insights, there are: 

• 45+ delivered indexes 
• nearly 40 delivered dashboards 
• 375 delivered visualizations 
• 20+ delivered roles (Payroll Admin, Benefits Manager, Remote Worker, etc.) 

Although PeopleSoft might never be able to deliver exactly what you want, Boyles demonstrated what is possible so that you can make it your own. 

The Importance of Visualizations 

There are five main reasons why visualizations are important. 

1. Interactive: Visualizations allow users to dive into data for deeper and richer context, create transparency and less guess work, and provide insights to improve processes. 
2. Rich Visualizations: These can link to analytics to clear business outcomes, which you can’t get in pivot grids. 
3. Speed: Visualizations process large volumes of data quickly using open search indexes and don’t run on database.
4. Patterns and Trends: Visualizations allow users to see everything at once, including identifying patterns and trends more quickly.  They also provide absolute numbers.
5. Low Cost and Deployment: Deployment of visualizations are easy; PeopleTools provides a seamless user experience at no additional cost. 

Functional Design is Critical  

In the presentation Boyles encouraged users to think about the following: 

• Who do you want a visualization for? Is it for an executive? An executive doesn’t have time to wade through an excel worksheet. They want to quickly see the number and see what it looks like. This will influence what visualization you want depending on who needs it and what they need it for. Take the numbers and build visualizations for them. 

• What questions are you trying to answer? What queries do you have to run 2-3 together, take to excel, and emerge together? What is it going to produce? How is it going to look? 

• The actual visualizations come last. First, tell your developer what you want. Do you want a pie chart? Donut chart? Bar chart?

She also encouraged users and developers to be open to change their minds once they see different visualizations.  She suggested that it is a give and take relationship.

What Others are Doing with PeopleSoft Insights and Visualizations  

You can also learn more about PeopleSoft Insights from what other organizations are doing as well.  Some examples are listed below: 

• University of North Dakota uses Recruiting Visualizations. It has been helpful for recruiters to have all their data on one page. 
• Lee County School System took a Workforce Diversity Index and coupled it with JPM data. They made a visualization for their executives, in this case, their superintendents. 
• University of California, Berkeley is using Financials. This helped them to visualize their business. They learned that once you learn how to build one, it is easy to build others.
• Omaha Public Power District is going live soon. They took PeopleSoft Insights straight out of the box. They are hoping it will help them use it for Benefits, Recruiting and Absence Management. 
• Anderson Corporation delivered dashboards and created some custom ones. They said it was surprisingly easy. There is no substitute for pictures and interactive pieces have been a game changer. They have also used real time indexing. 
• State of North Dakota used PeopleSoft Insights to provide a periscope into their recruiting practices. They were able to find errors, discover where recruiters weren’t doing their job, and find where they could impact the process. 
• State of Montana did remote worker and analytics for remote worker as well. 

Insights and Visualizations Options 

When visualizations became first available in January 2021, HR and Recruiting had the very first ones in image 37. These first ones were simple (pie chart, gauge, donut), but then they progressed, and HR came out with Workforce Equity, which had grids and filters added. Then Recruiting Solutions added application details and 3-4 visualizations. They realized that a recruiter needs information at their fingertips, so they added filters, which can be removed, or you can add in your own. 

The filters include how many jobs are open, how many applied, interview candidates, how many offers are out to candidates and how many are ready to hire. 

More statuses are also available to you. You can add and subtract status according to your needs. They give the ability to go straight to the application. It navigates for you and then takes you back. 

Another helpful feature is the slider bar visualization. For example, you can use this to show how many applications you have or even what applications you don’t have. 

Analytics and visualizations can help you answer questions you have about how you’ve been operating, what’s working, what’s going on, making query much easier.

PeopleSoft Insights and Visualizations Quick Tips 

1. You can move the tiles around as you prefer. 
2. If it’s too overwhelming, you can start with simple things.  
3. Sometimes people don’t know what they want until they see what they don’t have. Start slow. You will build momentum as you decide/discover what you want. 
4. Show people the demos and VFO’s. Ask them, “What do you think? You’ve never had this information before.” You have to sell them on it. 

Key Takeaways: 

Using Analytics is a way to see the information you have in a way you have never been able to see it before. Visualizations are useful and it is important to understand what it is. It’s about getting the numbers in a visual and showing people in your organization data they might not have known they had. This will help answer questions your organization has about how it functions and can improve.  

Walk through the process of understanding visualizations and see helpful demonstrations to equip you to start using them right away in the full BLUEPRINT 4D presentation here: Analytic Dashboards for the PeopleSoft HCM Functional User. The demo of some of analytics and visualizations that you can use with PeopleSoft, begins at 18:53.