IRIS Cascade — Stability update

Updated 29 October 2024

As a leading provider of mission-critical software, we understand that the performance, flexibility, and security of IRIS Cascade is vital to your business workflows, enabling your employees to experience seamless and trustworthy functionality – anytime, anywhere.

Over the last three months, we've carefully gathered and analysed your feedback to identify opportunities to improve the speed, responsiveness, and resilience of IRIS Cascade.

We’re pleased to share an update on our progress, forthcoming plans, and future investments to take IRIS Cascade to the next stage of its evolution.

Background

The Product Development team is constantly working to enrich and extend IRIS Cascade’s features, providing best-in-class functionality to support your growing organisational needs.

Delivering on our roadmap has enabled you and your colleagues to benefit throughout 2022 and 2023, particularly with scale and performance. We’ve seen your requirements become more complex and we've focused our attention on our applications and underlying infrastructure. Areas with high transactional, analytical, and batch workloads, such as custom query generation, reporting, and imports/exports have been prioritised.

Customers with large numbers of employees and complex, resource-intensive workloads may have experienced reduced speed and performance of some features and functionality at peak times. To resolve this issue, we've undertaken an extensive evaluation of IRIS Cascade during these periods and have made changes to the infrastructure and the product to improve the overall performance.

Recent improvements

February 2023

  • We upgraded our database engine so you benefit from better performance optimisation features, as well as enhanced diagnostic tools to investigate issues

March 2023

  • We refactored and optimised a large range of queries, indexes, and triggers, which improved the speed of processing and persisting data

  • We improved index and statistic maintenance coverage and their schedules to speed up data processing

April 2023

  • We released a performance-enhanced Expenses module, which has reduced query execution and page loading time

  • We tuned the Hierarchy table (one of the most queried database tables in IRIS Cascade), enabling many features to operate faster

May 2023

  • We implemented improvements to optimise highly-used stored procedures, functions, views, tables, indexes, and relationships

  • We added performance and resilience enhancements to system-wide processes that orchestrate workloads behind the scenes, such as scheduling and running tasks, verifying data integrity, and integrating data with other systems

June 2023

  • We added enhancements to reduce time for user pages and screens to load, to generate HR and Payroll reports, and faster log in to the system

  • We changed our system-wide processes for Payroll Task Runner and Overnight House Keeping / Scheduler to improve their scale, speed and resilience

July 2023

We've been tuning background jobs to free up the resource for our database servers to process the things you want to do.

  • Email queue: We've tuned queries that relate to the processing of IRIS Cascade's email queue. Our recently improved monitoring and analysis highlighted that the queries running in the background every 2-3 minutes to manage this processing were using high amounts of resource on the server. We've tuned these queries now so they run much faster and use a lot less resource to do the same processing

  • Errors in automated jobs: We've tuned queries that run whenever the system detects an error in any automated background jobs, these background queries were using an excessive amount of server resource which has now been reduced by up to 80% on some of our larger customer databases.

August 2023

  • Hierarchy area

    Changes to the hierarchy area of IRIS Cascade, improving the performance of both overnight jobs and Hierarchy administration:

    • Overnight jobs will complete in a shorter time frame, reducing timeout issues.

    • The administration area is now more responsive, both when loading the page, and when making any changes to your hierarchy structure.

  • Absence and holiday records

    Ongoing improvements to the background processes for entering and updating absence and holiday records. We are initially looking at:

    • The process to determine a request authoriser.

    • The emails sent when records are requested and approved.

    • Reducing the time the system takes to determine an employee's working pattern.

September 2023

  • Resolved issue: Hierarchy Designer and Hierarchy Selector Timeout

Where there was a high number of hierarchy nodes, we were seeing a negative impact on the performance of Hierarchy Designer (Admin > Hierarchy), and Hierarchy Selector (Wizards > Enter a New Starter and Job & Salary > Update Record) resulting in a timeout. This has now been resolved.

October 2023

  • Resolved issue: Payroll - Gender Pay Gap Report

When running the Gender Pay Gap Report against large organisations, we were seeing instances where this would timeout and not complete. This has now been resolved.

November 2023

  • Auto Enrolment load time

Page load time for both At A Glance and Process Auto Enrolment has been significantly reduced, allowing the employee status to be available much quicker.

More improvements are coming soon - with a focus on running assessments and completing enrollments.

February 2024

  • Payroll > PENSIONS: Improvements to the way data is loaded in Details > PENSIONS to be more efficient and reduce loading times.

  • Admin > Roles: When saving changes to a role, only permissions that have been edited are now refreshed, enabling the changes to be saved quicker.

March 2024

  • Housekeeping: An overnight housekeeping job to rebuild a 12 month cache of employee working patterns, has been performance tuned to improve speed and reliability.

April 2024

  • Log in: Improvements to the resilience of the IRIS Cascade log in process.

May 2024

  • Global Element Update: Improvements to the way Global Element Update loads and saves data for the update process, improving the overall performance.

June 2024

July 2024

Payroll integration:

  • Timesheet integration has been tuned to load the list of pending items quickly and more efficiently, allowing a larger volume of data to be handled.

  • Average Holiday Pay integration has been tuned to load the list of pending items quickly and more efficiently, allowing a larger volume of data to be handled.

August 2024

  • Request Console: Tuned Request Console in HR to reduce the contention between viewing and authorising/rejecting outstanding requests, allowing tasks to be completed quicker.

  • Query Builder: Improvements to ABSENCE (CALCULATED) in Query Builder for faster performance when dealing with large volumes of data.

September 2024

  • We've improved the way Expenses Claims loads and saves data, improving the overall performance.

October 2024

  • We have improved the Admin > Hierarchy page to load and display information more efficiently.

November 2024

  • Implement Server-side Pagination to Integrate Hierarchy > Configuration screen: server-side pagination has been added to the Integrate Hierarchy > Configuration to significantly reduce the loading time of the screen.

  • Slow running - Editing Average Weekly Earnings in Integrate Sick Pay for Payroll: improvements made to reduce wait times when amending Average Weekly Earnings.

What's next?

Our work doesn't stop here, we are continuing to improve IRIS Cascade by working on further refinements to system-wide processes that will improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Your involvement & feedback

Making sure IRIS Cascade meets, and indeed exceeds, your performance and processing expectations is a continuous journey. Your feedback is instrumental to help us decide on initiatives that will make a difference for you and your organisation. We welcome your feedback on what’s working well in IRIS Cascade and where we can make a difference.

Experiencing performance issues?

If you regularly experience slow performance, please raise a support ticket. It's important to provide as much detail as possible, including:

  • Which users are impacted

  • The date and time you experienced the issue

  • What the users were doing, or trying to do, and in what order

  • What areas or features were running slowly

  • Examples or test cases to demonstrate the problem

Recommendations

If you're experiencing performance issues, we suggest you:

  • Regularly review your reports and stop any that are no longer needed

  • Run complex queries and reports out of hours

  • Archive unwanted file and document attachments

  • Perform regular data cleansing to adhere to GDPR and increase the performance of your database by removing unwanted or duplicated data. Our Data Destruction feature can help with this - see Data Destruction overview.

We'll continue to provide updates with more information as it becomes available.

Please be assured that work will continue to meet your needs of highly demanding and data-intensive business workloads, at scale, with data privacy and security engineering at the heart of all product development.

Thank you your continued custom, patience, and understanding. We are committed to ensuring IRIS Cascade performs at its very best to enable your business success.

Thanks,
The IRIS Cascade Product Team.