Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG): Accelerating time to market leveraging data agility to deliver an innovative customer experience

Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) is an American multinational technology company with dual headquarters in Massachusetts and Florida that provides workforce management and human resource management services. UKG’s purpose is their people and the customers they serve, which has led them to combining both the strength and innovation for all things Human Resources (HR) and workforce management.

Challenge

HR and workforce management organizations around the world face many challenges, such as hiring and retaining talent, delivering on an innovative experience, high data storage costs and IT productivity. It was critical for UKG to leverage a platform that would enable API-driven data automation while continually delivering innovative solutions to their customers.

The company had to overcome data friction issues across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to automate data delivery and versioning across its pipelines. It faced a number of hurdles in solving this issue— for instance, the availability of environments constrained developers, which caused project delays and missed deadlines. Additionally, inconsistent test data was impacting accurate transaction tests across systems. UKG needed to significantly reduce storage costs for non-production databases.

Solution

UKG integrated Delphix into its DevOps toolchain to solve these challenges. With a move towards data-ready, ephemeral test environments in their CI/CD pipeline had to rapidly spin up and spin down via API’s. The team was able to provision space-efficiently and virtual database copies for development tests, which helped them avoid lengthy data refreshes and manual efforts to generate datasets. The company also orchestrated the provisioning of multiple databases for integration testing. Furthermore, it was efficiently able to test against a consistent baseline of pristine data—bookmark, execute destructive tests, then rewind.

Results

UKG was able to leverage the flexibility of multi-cloud and accelerate mobile-first strategy, and move from running 100 to 10,000 test cycles a year, all in an automated fashion. For the company, they were able to significantly reduce storage costs for non-production databases by 90+ percent.

Partnering with Delphix allowed UKG to bring product enhancements and features to market faster, with increased development agility and innovation. This boosted developer productivity and reduced environment provisioning from 1 day down to just 10 minutes, and significantly shortened project timelines. The company now reacts much quicker to customer demands while also eliminating data-related defects and improving overall application quality.