If you use SumTotal for learning and ADP Workforce Now or Vantage HCM, you must import employee, organization, and job data from ADP to SumTotal to keep the relationships in SumTotal up to date.
The simplest way to do that is to export a flat-file (CSV) from ADP and import it into SumTotal, but we recommend that you automate the process with an API. Automation has several advantages:
- Automation avoids the errors inherent in manual data manipulation. Validating the data manually in a spreadsheet is difficult and tedious. It is repetitive work that is most prone to error.
- You can eliminate the administrative overhead. The development cost of an API can be as little as a third of the annual cost of manual data transfers, and it never needs time off.
- You can manage the API with a user-friendly interface when the data structure changes.
- Notifications alert your admin to missing or invalid data.
- Bank-level encryption protocols protect data transmission.
Automation doesn’t mean that the data exchange is maintenance-free. There are a few things to know:
- Organizations, jobs, and reporting relationships change frequently, but maintaining the structure in SumTotal requires only a process to upload an Organization and Jobs file before sending the employee file.
- When job codes change, you will need to update the mapping in the data transformation.
- The ADP schema has both a file number and an employee number for each employee. They are sometimes different. Use employee numbers to avoid creating duplicate records in SumTotal.
- Some organizations process termination of employment and a rehire when an employee moves from one organizational unit to another. Build rules into the transformation, so it rejects the termination record and only accepts the active record.
- Build additional business rules and custom fields into the transformation.
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