The Prism Analytics Journey, an Introduction

In this sequence of blogs about Prism Analytics, I will share with you some of my journey, and help you along yours. This first blog is an introduction to this powerful tool. My first encounter with Prism Analytics was on a very complex compliance project. We needed to combine and analyze data from different sources outside of Workday. For more on this story, please refer to my LinkedIn post (see bottom for more)

Working with different clients within your or outside organizations, the need for different reports for all reasons is always high. Sometimes it can be very challenging to accomplish these different needs between HR, Finance and IT. Business Objects are not always related as you might expect. If you can get to the desired data, it could take several calculated fields, which adds to a potentially intense maintenance issue.

Prism Analytics can change how you manage your business data in Workday. The possibilities are endless, and it can get you much further than reporting without Prism Analytics.

But to start this conversation, what is Prism Analytics?

Prism Analytics is a resourceful tool that lets you combine, edit and transform Workday data from anywhere in Workday no matter where they are stored in your tenant. You can also combine non-Workday data, uploaded files, direct connections from an SFTP site for example and even API.

After your data is combined and transformed, the outcome will be deployed to a secured Workday custom report that can be run by people you select in your organization.

Now that we know what Prism Analytics is and what it can do, let’s break it down into 3 different main sessions:

1. One stop shop: Because Prism Analytics is fully integrated within Workday, the process of using and deploying data is seamless and it can be fully automated. This makes life for data management teams so much easier, bringing data all together from different places and creating analytics and insights that will help leadership make better, more accurate and faster decisions on a daily basis.
   

2. Security is important: It becomes difficult to manage security on different reports, and people might complain they don’t have access to information. Prism Analytics lets you set flexible security, defining a domain security for an entire dataset or as granular as specific security for each derived field.
   

3. Transforming data to your needs: Prism Analytics gives you so many possibilities when transforming data. It gives you different pipelines that you can edit, filter, and group the data, perform many calculations, even nested ones and more. All the data has different visualizations to understand and audit the transformation, which helps you make sure no data was left behind.

Once you start using and understanding what Workday Prism Analytics can do, there is no way back. So much time can be given back to your internal team and easier, faster insight to the HR, Finance and IT teams to better decision making.

I’m very excited to help you take your first step on your Prism Analytics journey. In this blog series, I will cover how to start using Prism Analytics, making it available, creating tables, your first derived dataset, deploying a transformed report and some interesting things you can do with it. Soon, you will be able to start using it and create interesting reporting tools for your organization.

More from my LinkedIn Post:

Several people commented on [my LinkedIn post], requesting more information and details about this project. Our organization needed to reach and audit compliance on many different contracts, based on government directions with different rates per location, contract and position. Compliance needed to be reached within different modules such as HCM, Payroll, Compensation, Benefits and Absence.

Each contract and location had determinations for each position which derived complex payroll calculations. We couldn’t use Workday standard reporting due to unrelated business objects, different parameters as granular as time block entries in retro and part of the data coming from a non-Workday source.

With Prism Analytics, we were able to not just combine, edit and transform the data, but also deliver automated reports that are run by the payroll team while processing payroll, making sure any adjustments are made timely and compliance is reached. We were also able to create YTD reports that capture anyone that could be out of compliance for any reason such as retro entries or payroll inputs.

Author: Thales from Florida