e-KSF / ESR Link Data Cleansing
What your organisation needs to do, to cleanse e-KSF data?
Data cleansing simply means “making sure that the information held on e-KSF by your organisation is accurate”. For this project, we’re particularly concerned with making sure that your employee data is accurate, as we need to be able to match up information in e-KSF, with information in ESR, to avoid any duplicates or data errors.
This flow-chart shows what needs to happen, in what order. The flow-chart is laid out in “swim-lanes”, showing the work of the local e-KSF and ESR administrators in your organisation, in the left hand column.
In summary, you’ll need to complete the following steps in your organisation:
a) Cleanse e-KSF data Before we activate the e-KSF / ESR link for your organisation, you need to make sure that your
existing e-KSF data can be “matched up” with the ESR data. So, we need to match based on what we call “unique identifiers”. This is a
unique reference – often a payroll number – that identifies an employee in both e-KSF and ESR
systems.
To help you with cleansing your data we have developed some additional administrative support tools into e-KSF. These links will become active when you have returned your confirmation fax to us confirming that you wish to go ahead with the link.
Click here to download the detailed data cleansing guidance document.
You can start this as soon as you like, but the cleansing needs to be completed in line with the completion dates shown in the e-KSF / ESR rollout schedule.
b) Inform us that you’ve completed this data cleansing. We’ll do some simple checks of your data, too, at this stage, and let you know if we think any more work is required.
c) Wait for us to receive “pre-live” data from ESR and attempt to match it with your e-KSF data
d) Deal with any exception reports that we get when we try to match your e-KSF data with “pre-live” data from ESR. We have allowed 5 working days for this step, as we don’t expect you to have many errors at this stage because you have already completed the majority of the data cleansing.
e) Wait for us to receive “live” data from ESR and activate the link
f) Make sure that you have plans in place to manage the e-KSF/ESR link on an ongoing basis
Here’s what you’ll need to do in detail, to cleanse your e-KSF data.
STEP ONE. The e-KSF team will activate a link on the e-KSF administrators screen allowing you to download your organisations’ employee data in an Excel spreadsheet.
STEP TWO. You would then need to check and update any data in this spreadsheet, making sure in particular that unique identifiers for all employees are accurate. You have a choice to make about what data you would like us to use, to match your records between the systems. The options are as follows:
| Option |
Notes |
| Legacy payroll number |
This is the full payroll number for each employee, as held in your “old” (pre-ESR) payroll system. This data will work well for matching unless you have large numbers of staff with more than one job, or if you have large numbers of staff who joined after ESR was implemented (meaning they won’t have a legacy payroll number. If you have staff with more than one job, we recommend that you enter the payroll number that’s stored on ESR for their “primary” or master, job. |
| National Insurance number |
If you already have National Insurance numbers loaded into e-KSF, then we can use these to make sure that data is matched up accurately. Once we have a match, we’ll then delete the National Insurance number from the e-KSF system. If you don’t have National Insurance numbers loaded into e-KSF already, then we suggest you don’t add them now – use one of the other methods of data matching. |
| ESR employee number |
If you are already live on ESR, then you may find that the ESR employee number for each member of staff is the easiest thing to add to e-KSF |
| ESR assignment number |
If you are already live on ESR, and you have staff with more than 1 role, then adding the ESR assignment numbers to your e-KSF upload spreadsheet at this stage will allow us to manage multiple KSF post outlines and reviews in the future. However, this won’t affect the initial data link. |
| Name plus date of birth |
If you can’t provide any payroll or ESR reference data, then we can still attempt to match records using a combination of name and date of birth – so please add date of birth to e-KSF. This method is less accurate, though, so you may find that you have some duplicate records to deal with once the link is switched on. |
The e-KSF and ESR teams in your organisation will need to work together to make sure this data is accurate on e-KSF. You may find that you need to type data into the spreadsheet by hand, but there are also many “lookup” functions within programmes like Excel to make this matching process easier. So, if you find you’re spending lots of time manually copying and pasting data, we suggest you talk to an Excel expert in your organisation who may be able to recommend faster ways to do this!
This one-off effort ensures that the data exchange will work accurately first time. Once this is done, ESR and e-KSF will transfer employee data without any need for further manual matching.
STEP THREE. Once you’ve cleansed your data in the spreadsheet, we need to get it back into e-KSF:
Before mid Feb 2007, then you can do this by emailing it back to our support team. (password protect your file first, for security).
After mid Feb 2007, we’ll be adding a “upload unique identifiers” link on the e-KSF admin page, so that you can do this yourself.
The e-KSF system will then run some basic, automatic checks to make sure the data is compatible. For example, we’ll check that you have data in the unique identifier field, and that if you have national insurance numbers or email addresses then they correspond to a standard format. e-KSF will generate a report to confirm that the data is fit for purpose, or highlight any remaining anomalies within the data that need to be addressed.
You can repeat steps 1-3 multiple times if you need to, and you can also use the “edit user” function on the e-KSF admin page to correct small amounts of data. The more accurate you get the data at this stage, the fewer exception reports and duplicates you’ll have to deal with once the link is switched on.
STEP FOUR. Once all of your data is entered accurately, let us know by email so we can continue with the matching of e-KSF and ESR data.
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