The client’s HR team relied on cumbersome spreadsheets to track and analyse staff turnover. Here’s how Cloud Collective helped the vitamin maker unlock new insights to support staff retention.
Industry: Natural health
Challenges
- Compiling staff turnover information took 3+ days per month
- HR data was often inaccurate or out of date due to high manual workloads
- Difficult to gain meaningful insight into spreadsheet-based data
Solution
Power BI and Azure-based data warehouse
Benefits
- Reduced manual workload and risk of data inaccuracies
- Power BI dashboards ensure data is easy-to-read and action
- The client is now in optimal position to use predictive analytics
Background
The client is a leading natural health company that provides vitamins and nutritional supplements to 17 markets across the Asia Pacific. The ASX 200 company is headquartered in Sydney, with around 1400 employees worldwide. The client recently expanded its operations into China and Macau, which was the catalyst for substantial sales and revenue growth.
Challenge
While growth presents significant opportunities for companies, shareholders and customers, it can create challenges for HR departments responsible for recruiting, training and retaining staff. When companies undergo large-scale change and transformation, they need the right HR infrastructure in place to both anticipate and manage the downstream effects on employees.
In the midst of its growth journey, the client recognised inefficiencies in some of its employee management processes. The impact of staff turnover was a particular concern, with the company incurring high costs and loss of productivity each time they needed to identify, recruit, train and retain new staff. The cost of replacing an employee and getting their replacement to full productivity is around $50,000.
The client’s HR team relied on Excel spreadsheets to record information about new starters and those leaving the company. HR staff exported a data file from Oracle HCM each week and manually updated it to amend employee details (e.g. name, role, location, start and end dates and reason for leaving).
This manual process wasn’t keeping pace with the needs of a fast-growing company. Discrepancies due to the manual data entry process and a lack of insight were key concerns.
On top of this, the effort involved in generating weekly reports distracted highly-skilled staff from other valuable work. Due to the time taken to prepare the weekly reports, data was often out of date by the time it reached company executives. When weekly reports eventually reached management, they lacked robust analysis or insights to inform future action on employee attraction, retention and training.
The client needed a new technology solution to understand staff turnover and replace its outdated manual processes.
Solution
The client approached Microsoft to identify a technology partner that had had the expertise to take on this project, as well as the capability to support a range of Microsoft solutions across the business. Microsoft recommended Cloud Collective – a strategic alliance of three leading Microsoft Gold partners – for its breadth and depth of expertise.
After working closely with the client to understand its business needs, Cloud Collective designed a new technical solution to integrate with the existing Oracle HCM that comprised an Azure-based data warehouse and Power BI dashboards.
The solution automatically draws employee data from Oracle HCM and displays insights on a visually-engaging Power BI dashboard, without human input. The solution completely replaces the Excel-based manual reporting process that was previously used to track new employees and departures.
Results
The client is already benefiting from a new HR dashboard, which makes important employee information instantly accessible to HR staff and decision-makers.
As a highly automated and integrated solution, there has been a noticeable increase in data quality and accuracy. In addition, the client is saving approximately three days of manual effort every month that was previously spent generating reports.
Future plans
With a reliable and automated database and reporting process in place, the client is well positioned to take the next step towards predictive analytics for employee changes (such as identifying high performers and forecasting staff turnover).
In the immediate next phase of work, the client will explore advanced analytics for its HR data. It will then consider ways to enhance the employee data that it captures and analyses in Oracle HCM.
