by Jerod Johnson | September 06, 2023

Workday Wednesday: Combining Sales and HR Data in Workday and AWS

Welcome to the third installment of our Workday Wednesday blog series! In this post, we’re walking through how an organization can use CData Connect Cloud to ensure its staffing growth matches profitability.

Recent economic trends have shifted many organizations from a growth-at-all-costs mentality to one prioritizing profitability. With that in mind, many organizations are turning to platforms like AWS (Amazon Web Services) to visualize and report on business trends, including sales projections and hiring practices. With real-time data connectivity, organizations can analyze their sales numbers against HR data to ensure that their staffing plan is in line with their profit goals (e.g., only hiring sales staff when sales are climbing).

While AWS provides comprehensive analytics solutions, combining data across separate systems (e.g., CRMs like Salesforce and HCMs like Workday) can present unique challenges. The CData Connectivity platform provides options for working with all your data in AWS analytics solutions, whether you want to leave that data in place and query it in real time or use pipelines to combine the data in a comprehensive data store.

In this article, we'll show how an organization can easily view its Workday data in AWS QuickSight alongside its sales projections to continues to meet profitability goals.

Sales data in AWS

For this scenario, our organization regularly replicates its sales data in Amazon Redshift for analytics and projections. Using current and historical sales data and the machine learning capabilities of AWS, the organization is predicting an upswing in sales for the next quarter:

Figure 1: Sales Projections

With this in mind, the organization wants to be sure its hiring plan is in line with projected profits. Fortunately, CData Connect Cloud provides real-time connectivity between Workday and AWS, so data experts don't have to wait for IT to create pipelines to pull an ad-hoc report.

Workday data in AWS

Connect Cloud provides real-time, cloud-based connectivity between cloud platforms (like AWS) and cloud data (like that stored in Workday). To start, a Workday user logs into Connect Cloud and configures a connection to Workday in Connect Cloud using using their Workday credentials and permissions:

Figure 2: Connecting to Workday

The Workday experts in our organization can create a customized (derived) view of the Workday data available to QuickSight. The SQL (structured query language) query below shows how users can drill into their data and expose only the data they need.

SELECT
    dateOfBirth, JSON_EXTRACT(assignedOrganization,'$[0].descriptor') AS department, [gender.descriptor] AS gender, hireDate, workdayID, jobTitle, [locationAddress_StateUnitedStates.descriptor] AS location_state, [raceEthnicity.descriptor] AS race
FROM
    [Workday1].[REST].[allActiveEmployees]

With the derived view created, the next step is to create the dataset. Connect Cloud looks and behaves like a SQL Server instance in the cloud, so QuickSight users can take advantage of the SQL Server connection in QuickSight to create a dataset from their Workday data. The configuration properties are available from the Clients page in Connect Cloud:

Figure 3: Connecting Amazon QuickSight to Connect Cloud

After making note of the properties, users can log in to QuickSight, create the connection, and then create their dataset(s) from Workday data:

Figure 4: A Workday dataset in QuickSight

Combined sales and hiring data

With all the datasets built in QuickSight, our organization can view the hiring data from Workday in QuickSight, along with their warehoused sales data and predictions:

Figure 5: Sales vs hiring data

We can see in Figure 5 that the hiring plan is keeping up with the predicted sales numbers, so our organization will be able to meet the demands of new opportunities and customers, but won’t overstep on staffing and reduce its profitability.

Proud sponsor of Workday Rising

CData is excited to be a sponsor of Workday Rising, September 26-29, 2023. Don’t forget to register and stop by the CData booth—we’d love to see you!

If you'd like to learn more about how CData empowers you to integrate all your "other" data with AWS, check out our free, on-demand webinar with AWS Solutions Architect Muz Syed.

Get started on your data journey today by joining our CData Community. Check out our Workday solutions and sign up for a free trial of Connect Cloud to start analyzing Workday data alongside the rest of your enterprise data today.