A great way to save yourself time every day is to automate the process of adding new starters, moving people around your organisation and updating any personal details; and setting people as leavers.
If you’re working with Fourth Hospitality to co-ordinate this information at source, then integrating this into your Upskill People learning platform is very straightforward.
Please note that this is not a free integration and we have a standard rate of £800 plus VAT to set up this integration for you. This includes everything that we need to do to technically to interface directly with the Fourth API; and all of the configuration and checking that we must do afterwards to ensure the continued smooth operation of your learning platform.
Phase 1 - What to do first.
- Check with your Fourth Customer Care/Account Manager to confirm that everything is set up correctly on their side to enable us to connect to them using the API. Don’t worry if you don’t know what an API is (it’s just a way for us to connect with their data), the important thing is that they do, and so do we! (and we’ve done it many times before with lots of our customers)
- You’ll need to authorise them to share with Upskill People, your customer login credentials. This is so that we can go and get your people’s data, and don’t worry, we only take the minimum that we need to get the job done.
How long does this take?
In our experience, it generally takes a week or two to get to a point where we have the details that we need to be able to access your data. It may be quicker or take longer, and invariably this is down to the sales process between you and Fourth and agreeing the required commercials for Standard API integration to take place. Note this is not a free integration with Fourth either.
Once we get the API connection details it’s usually an hour or so to get it all set up on our side and tested.
What might help speed this up?
Depending on who your account manager is, they may well have never heard of Upskill People before.
Just tell them “Upskill People have integrated many of their shared customers and that we are confident that Upskill People can set up the integration with just the SOAP API credentials from Fourth Hospitality. We do not require a Solution Consultant to work alongside Upskill People to complete the integration.”
This should do the job nicely!
Phase 2 – Integrating with Fourth API
The Fourth API is a standard interface that will give us the exact data that we need in the same way, every day. We are used to mapping to it and making it work with an Upskill People learning platform.
Of course, just because the data format is standard doesn’t necessarily mean that all of our customers have set up the Fourth side of things in exactly the same way – because they don’t.
Phase 2 is all about looking at your existing learning platform configuration and then looking at the Fourth data that we can “see”; and joining the two together.
As soon as we can connect to the API, we can then understand what changes might be required to the following areas that we’ll take care of for you:
Your people’s login details
If they’re different in the Upskill People learning platform than they are within Fourth (i.e. in Fourth it will be a unique payroll number) then we’ll align them for you.
Your job types
When integrating with Fourth, if you decide to housekeep the jobs that people do then we’ll make sure that it is all linked correctly in the learning platform too. There’s more information about job types and how they link to dashboards and learning profiles here.
Your current assignment of learning profiles
These are the courses that people complete based on the job that they do so we need to link them to the Job Types that will now be taken from the Fourth data. There’s more information about learning profiles here.
Your organisation structure
This is where people work so it’s important that we get the location right and that we put the people that we know about in the right place. There’s more information about managing your company structure here. The key thing to be aware of is that we use the data from Fourth to put people in an “Org1” which might be a location, store or department for you.
How long does this take?
Ordinarily, this takes about 5-7 hours and we might do this over a couple of elapsed days depending on what questions we may need to ask of you.
Phase 3 – Go Live day
When we’re all set up and ready to go, we’ll explain to you what we’ve done to make it all work seamlessly and then we’re good to go live for our first live import. Don’t worry, nothing gets imported that hasn’t been rigorously checked beforehand!
Once we’ve imported the first live file, we’ll check for any errors and warnings picked up by the import process. This is entirely normal as today’s data in Fourth will be different from yesterday’s as your people data changes.
We’ll fix any warnings and errors and reimport the file – this is typically what you’ll be doing once we hand over to you and there’s a great guide on checking your error logs here: [link to View error logs for learning imports guide].
When we get to zero warnings or errors we’ll let you know that we’ve now finished integrating with the Fourth API and we‘ll hand your learning platform back to you to carry on maintaining yourself.
We’ll also keep an eye on the imports for a day or two just to make sure you’re doing okay.
How long does this take?
Ordinarily, this takes about 2-3 hours depending on what we find, the good news is that it’s not normally very much! … perhaps the odd new job type that’s created or maybe a new org1 (location/store/department).