Actions| WFM QuickRefresh |
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| Product Manager | Rob Leonard |
| Product Demo | |
| Product Description |
Keep your WFM instances - and your project team - in sync
The IssueIt’s a problem that every technical manager faces after go-live: how can you make sure your production environment matches your test environments so that features and fixes for the next release can be tested in the proper context? What about the test data the team spent so long building for the last release? How much time and hardware are needed to create and deploy copies of the production database?Often the answers are not simple, the solutions can keep your test environments down and your top technical talent busy for weeks after each release, and your regression test data gets wiped out in the process. That’s why Sability has created a better, easier way: WFM QuickRefresh. The Cost of Manual Backfills
Sability has nearly 100 years of combined WFM experience on staff - more than enough to recognize patterns in how WFM customers handle production deployments and the backfill process. We have learned how to recognize and control the costs, risks, and challenges inherent to this task.
Hardware
Production databases hold many gigabytes of data, most of it timesheets, schedules and other transactional data. A typical large project could have 6 or more WFM development and test instances. Finding room for that many copies of every timesheet and schedule on hardware sized for development purposes is not easy, practical, or costeffective.
Downtime
Customers who do decide to copy their entire production database to their test environments are faced with three major challenges, besides finding enough hardware to handle it: It takes a long time to extract the data from production. It takes a long time to copy and load the data into the test environment, during which time the environment is unavailable for use by the project team. Because the data was extracted from a live production database over a period of many hours, the resulting dumpfile is sure to contain referential integrity problems that will need to be manually resolved by a WFM expert before the environment can be brought back online
Human Error Applying configuration changes manually to test environments instead of copying the entire production database poses a challenge: with typical data entry error rates around 3-5% for the simplest of tasks, how can you guarantee that the complex configurations applied manually to a test environment are equivalent to production? Every error poses an increased risk of future production defects, especially regressions. This isn’t just theory; it happens all the time, and it is an unavoidable consequence of using a fully manual approach. Manpower
Making copies of the production database requires you to engage your DBA, one or more systems analysts, a WFM expert, and testers to validate the health of the resulting system. If your production environment is hosted by a third party, there will be additional direct costs to your project. Since the environment’s test data will have been destroyed in the process, your testers will need to recreate their data during the testing phase of the next release. All of this effort adds significantly to the cost of each release.Impact to TimelinesThe typical delay between a major production release and the start of unit testing for the next release is about 4 weeks, due in large part to the time it takes to backfill to a test environment. This has a direct impact on the project timeline. Reducing the time between production deployment and the start of unit testing for the next release is a straightforward way to compress your project’s timelines by 2-3 weeks per release.Sability WFM QuickRefresh
QuickRefresh is designed to make it faster, easier, and safer to copy your production configurations to test and development environments. By isolating configuration data from transactional data, QuickRefresh allows you to copy a much smaller volume of data between WFM instances without overwriting transactional data. Because QuickRefresh comes preconfigured for all core Workbrain / Infor WFM versions, implementing your new backfill process is straightforward.
It is often useful to copy a manageable subset of “real-world” schedules, employee profiles and timesheets from production to development and test environments to allow testing to be performed against the most realistic dataset possible. QuickRefresh can be combined with Sability WFM TimeCapture to also copy transactional data, with masking to protect sensitive employee information, as part of your production backfill. http://www.sability.com/products/wfm-quick-refresh |
| Marquee Clients | |
| Features |
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| Client Feedback | |
| When I think about this product I love |
Good people management system. Eliminated effort required to keep test configuration in sync with production. Shortened our test cycles and enables us to provide better services to our users. |
| When I think about this product I wish they would improve |
the product is good and is able to live up to the expectations. . |
| WFM Time Capture |
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| Product Manager | Rob Leonard |
| Product Demo | |
| Product Description |
Transport your WFM data.The WFM data in your Production database has the potential to be very valuable to your WFM project team. It is the best kind of test data: real-world scenarios that you would never have thought to test for beforehand. It also contains all of the details needed to recreate production issues in a test environment, or to escalate particularly tough issues to your WFM vendor for resolution.
But there’s a problem.
The data is stuck in your Production database. You don’t want to experiment with potential solutions in Production, and it is not practical to copy the entire database to a test environment every time you need to investigate an issue. That’s where Sability WFM TimeCapture comes in. TimeCapture allows you to selectively copy employee profiles, timesheets, schedules, and related data between WFM environments quickly and easily. It even lets you mask sensitive employee information so that fields like SSN and birth date can remain private - a must for SOX compliance. All of this translates into fewer production issues and faster resolution times. This can help the savvy WFM IT manager to reduce maintenance and support costs and realize their WFM project’s ROI more quickly. A typical WFM release contains dozens of bug fixes and feature enhancements, each of which needs to be tested by a Quality Assurance team to ensure correct behavior. In addition, most WFM customers have implemented a regression test suite to reduce the likelihood of introducing new issues. Both forms of testing pose data-related challenges. Reproducing and Resolving Issues
To resolve an issue, a developer first needs to reproduce it in another environment, one where it is safe to experiment with potential fixes. Without TimeCapture, the only practical way to do this is to manually recreate the scenario as accurately as possible, clicking through the UI and entering edits exactly as the user did in the Production environment. The major drawback of this approach is actually not the time it takes to enter all that data, but rather the difficulty of accurately recreating the production scenario.
Remember that this is a brand new issue, not one the developer understands yet. They may not realize that certain data is relevant to the issue and as a result fail to migrate it. Other times, the data simply cannot be entered manually because there is no suitable screen for entering it. This is the most common reason that fixes can work well in a test environment but fail to resolve the same issues in production. Every time this happens, it costs you and your team valuable time, money, and credibility with your users. Regression Testing: Trial by Fire
The best possible data to use for regression testing is Production data. This data depicts exactly how your users use the system - there is no better way to anticipate the challenges your WFM system will be faced with after the next release.
A major problem with production data is the sheer size of it. Even well-managed production databases can easily reach over 1TB in size - too much to copy to your development and test environments. It may also contain sensitive employee information that will need to be removed before your testers see it.. Without TimeCapture, there are two common approaches to this problem: * Option 1. Find enough space for the entire production database on development or testing hardware, or * Option 2. Make a best effort to simulate production data Option 1 can be expensive, time-consuming and impractical, and can result in a very slow test server that is overloaded with data. Eventually this approach will cease to be feasible. This forces customers to stick with a very old copy of Production in the test environment, and over time the old data no longer fulfils its intended purpose: to provide an accurate reflection of the activity that takes place in Production. Option 2 enjoys none of the benefits of testing using Production data, potentially resulting in unexpected behavior with each Production release. The effort required to create enough test data for a full regression test can be enormous, and provides a dangerously powerful incentive to not perform regression testing at all. Sability WFM TimeCapture
[/color]TimeCapture allows you to specify a range of employee ID’s and dates to copy from one Workbrain / Infor WFM database to another. This is doneusing a SQL “where” clause, giving you great flexibility to migrate as few or as many timesheets as necessary for your purposes. By taking advantage of the integrated report and data browsing features, you can double-check that you are migrating the correct data before loading it into the target database.
http://www.sability.com/products/wfm-time-capture |
| Marquee Clients | |
| Features |
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| Client Feedback | |
| When I think about this product I love |
Very little, hard to argue they deliver much value Helps us easily replicate issues form Production to Test |
| When I think about this product I wish they would improve |
Start at the drawing board hmmm...nothing I can think of at the moment |
| WFM Data Management |
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| Product Manager | Rob Leonard |
| Product Demo | |
| Product Description |
Every day your WFM database accumulates valuable data, keeping your organization at the cutting edge of workforce efficiency. But over time the volume of data can become overwhelming, forcing difficult tradeoffs between application functionality, cost, compliance, and performance.
The complete WFM Data Management solutionA well implemented data management strategy proactively avoids performance issues and tradeoffs by ensuring that any data growth is sustainable in the long term.Sability’s experts have nearly 100 years of combined WFM project experience and understand the pitfalls of other database archiving approaches. That’s why we developed Sability WFM Data Management: the industry’s only complete, long term archiving solution for Infor WFM and Workbrain databases. Put your organization ahead of the curve by planning the full lifecycle of your WFM data, from the moment it is created until the moment it is taken offline. Forming a Data Management Strategy
At a minimum, a WFM data management strategy should cover how data will be stored and for how long, how it will be moved, and how it will be accessed when it is needed. These decisions are constrained by available hardware, your organization’s data retention policies, and operational considerations.
An Online Archive database is the usual first step. This allows older WFM data to be moved out of your Production database in a way that still allows the end users to access it through existing online reports. But too often, this is where the strategy ends. Eventually the Online Archive database will reach its capacity too, and this point can arrive before your organization’s data retention policies allow you to purge the data permanently. An Offline Archive database is a place to store data that no longer fits in the Online Archive database but can’t yet be purged. Typically the data in this database is several years old and is not often needed, making it practical to access it using report like database queries when it is needed. Sability has a library of Offline Archive database queries that can help; please contact your account representative for details. Eventually, it is no longer necessary to retain the data in any database. At this point it can either be purged, or stored on magnetic or optical backup media. Putting your Data Management Strategy to Work Implementing your data management strategy is a straightforward process given the right software package and expertise. Common tasks include: * configuring the server and network, * defining the data to be archived or purged * defining the Aging Date(s) controlling when data is archived or purged, * installing and configuring Sability WFM Database Archiving, and * scheduling Sability WFM Database Archiving to run during off-peak times. Custom built solutions are also possible, although for all but the simplest data management strategies they are too limiting and not cost effective in the long run. When choosing your technology platform, be sure to consider: * How does the solution guarantee referential integrity? * Can the purge and archive operations be undone if needed? * What is the effort to integrate with the Production database schema? * Can the solution move data from an Online Archive database to an Offline Archive database? * What checks and balances are in place to ensure that the expected data was purged or archived? Sability WFM Database ArchivingSability’s WFM Database Archiving software comes preconfigured to purge or archive core Time and Attendance tables for all versions of the Workbrain and Infor WFM products, from 3.1S through the latest 5.0 schemas. For lightly customized Infor WFM installations, a working solution can be up and running in just a few hours.Purge and Archive reports are automatically generated after each operation, allowing you to validate the number of records archived. If there is a problem, you can also inspect every row of data to be archived before it is actually applied to the archive database or purged from production. WFM Database Archiving can also be configured to keep a copy of all purged and archived data in a format that allows the operation to be quickly and easily undone should the need arise. http://www.sability.com/products/wfm-data-management |
| Marquee Clients | |
| Features |
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| Client Feedback | |
| When I think about this product I love |
maybe it was him indeed Much easier to implement and execute than the vendor's solution. |
| When I think about this product I wish they would improve |
how could she hve . |
| WFM Schedule Spreadsheet |
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| Product Manager | Scott Brown |
| Product Demo | Web Guided Tour |
| Product Description |
Import Schedules from Supervisor DesktopsIn many organizations, spreadsheets are an integral part of managing employee schedules. Even companies with advanced Workforce Management systems like Workbrain rely heavily on time-tested, supervisor approved, spreadsheet management tools. Unfortunately, most companies rely on supervisors to manually input these schedules into their WFM system. The Sability Spreadsheet Schedule Import/Export app for Workbrain automates this process.With a simple click and upload, supervisors can now import their schedules into Workbrain. Supervisors simply select the import file on the local PC and the app does the rest; validating the input values and creating Schedule Time Overrides on the employee's timesheet. Secure
The Spreadsheet Schedule app is fully integrated with Workbrain security. Security Groups are used to grant users access and the Workbrain Team Hierarchy continues to restrict which employees a user can modify. As a result, the solution can be configured and deployed in a matter of hours.Export Schedules for PrintingExport too!To complete the end-to-end user experience, the Spreadsheet Schedule app also delivers a Schedule Export feature. Similar to the Import functions, a configurable template defines a company's desired format of the output.The schedule export is useful for ongoing edits to the employee schedules as well as making it easy to format and print schedules for posting on break-room walls or employee bulletin boards. Schedule ReportsThree schedule reports are included which are suitable for posting or emailing. These reports are great to post or email out to employees when schedules have been generated..Configurable Spreadsheet TemplatesNo two companies use the same spreadsheet format for tracking and posting employee schedules. The Spreadsheet Schedule app allows for the configuration of an unlimited number of spreadsheet templates. Through a simple XML definition, administrators can define the location of schedule fields by their row and column coordinates.Web Guided TourClick here to watch a web guided tour hosted by our own Jeremy Finney. Jeremy will show you how easy it is to build a process to manage Schedule Spreadsheets withing the Infor Workbrain WFM system.http://www.sability.com/products/spreadsheet-schedule-import-export |
| Marquee Clients | |
| Features |
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| Client Feedback | |
| When I think about this product I love |
wanted it on the end Simplified schedule management |
| When I think about this product I wish they would improve |
what ever could one Nothing |
