Master Your Data in UKG Pro: 3 Essential People Analytics Tutorials

Data is only as powerful as your ability to understand and share it. Within UKG Pro, IBM Cognos Analytics operates as the embedded engine behind UKG Pro People Analytics, transforming mountains of HR, payroll, and workforce data into actionable insights. As the centralized reporting and analytics tool in UKG Pro, Cognos empowers organizations to extract critical business intelligence, uncover trends, and share clear narratives—all from within their HR platform. By mastering these analytics capabilities, you can drive smarter, data-informed decisions that make a real impact across your organization.

However, mastering a platform this powerful requires knowing where to start. Whether you need to simplify complex datasets, automate how reports reach your team, or build stunning visual dashboards, understanding the core features is essential for success.

We have curated three video tutorials that target critical skills within the Cognos environment. These guides will walk you through practical, step-by-step applications to help you work smarter and make better data-driven decisions.

1. Transform Complex Data with Crosstabs

Raw data often looks like an endless spreadsheet—overwhelming and difficult to interpret. Crosstab reports are the solution to this chaos. They allow you to arrange data in a structured matrix of rows and columns, making it significantly easier to spot trends, outliers, and summaries at a glance.

In this first tutorial, you’ll see how crosstabs within UKG Pro People Analytics allow you to organize and summarize HR, payroll, and workforce management data directly from UKG Pro.

Using Crosstabs in IBM Cognos Analytics

We’ll show you how to break down the process of building a crosstab report from the ground up. Using a practical payroll history example, the video demonstrates how to take multifaceted data and organize it for maximum impact.

Key Learning Points:

• Efficient Organization: Learn how to structure your rows, columns, and measures to immediately highlight the most important patterns.
• Advanced Formatting: Discover how to customize number formats and styles, and how to suppress empty cells to keep your report clean and professional.
• Dynamic Aggregation: See how to add subtotals and grand totals, giving you both granular details and big-picture summaries in one view.
• Targeted Filtering: Focus your analysis on specific segments without needing to rebuild your entire report structure.

2. Automate Delivery with Report Bursting

Creating a great report is only half the battle; getting it to the right people is the other. Manually filtering a master report for dozens of different managers and emailing them individually is a massive drain on productivity. It also introduces the risk of human error—sending sensitive data to the wrong person.

In our second tutorial, we explore how report bursting is leveraged within UKG Pro People Analytics to streamline personalized data distribution across your organization. Using IBM Cognos functionality embedded in UKG Pro, report bursting enables you to automatically generate and distribute tailored versions of a single report to individual managers or teams—ensuring each recipient only sees the data relevant to them. This integration reduces manual work, enhances data security, and makes it easy to deliver critical HR, payroll, or workforce insights right from UKG Pro.

Automating Personalized Report Distribution

This video introduces you to “Report Bursting.” This powerful feature allows you to take a single report and “burst” it into multiple, tailored outputs based on the recipient. You will see how to set this up using an employee headcount report, ensuring each manager sees only the data relevant to their specific team.

Key Learning Points:

• Streamlined Configuration: Walk through setting up burst configurations and defining your recipient groups accurately.
• Dynamic Logic: Use fields like supervisor names and email addresses to drive the distribution logic automatically.
• Secure Distribution: Learn how to automate delivery via email or the Cognos portal, ensuring data security and privacy.
• Background Processing: Run your reports as background tasks, freeing up your system resources and saving hours of manual work.

3. Visualize Insights with Interactive Dashboards

Static reports inform, but interactive dashboards empower. A well-designed dashboard invites users to explore the data themselves, asking their own questions and finding their own answers. This self-service approach is the gold standard for modern analytics.

The final tutorial in this series shows how you can harness interactive dashboards within UKG Pro People Analytics to turn your HR and workforce data into dynamic visual stories. By leveraging the embedded IBM Cognos tools in UKG Pro, you’ll learn to design dashboards that offer real-time insights and allow users to explore key HR metrics, payroll trends, and workforce analytics.

Creating Interactive Dashboards

This video focuses on user engagement. You will learn how to transform static data into a vibrant, interactive experience. The video guides you through building a dashboard that uses dynamic filtering and drill-down navigation to tell a compelling story.

Key Learning Points:

• Visual Construction: Build pie and bar charts with professional configurations and custom color schemes that align with your brand.
• Interactivity: Add dynamic filters that update every visualization on the screen simultaneously, providing immediate context.
• Deep Dives: Create drill-down navigation paths that allow users to click through high-level metrics to see the underlying data relationships.
• Professional Polish: Customize labels, percentages, and layouts to ensure your dashboard is as easy to read as it is informative.

Elevate Your Analytics Game

Mastering reporting and analytics in UKG Pro means leveraging the full power of IBM Cognos, seamlessly integrated to turn your HR, payroll, and workforce information into actionable insights. By focusing on crosstabs, report bursting, and interactive dashboards within UKG Pro People Analytics, you’re building a strong foundation for strategic decision-making across your organization. We encourage you to explore these tutorials and apply what you learn directly within UKG Pro, unlocking even greater value from your people data.

By implementing these techniques, you can move away from manual data drudgery and focus on what truly matters: analyzing the results and driving business growth. We encourage you to watch these tutorials and follow along in your own environment to fully grasp the power of these tools.