Modern technology offers businesses essential tools to better interrogate data to improve decision making. SAIL is working with a number of BI Tools to improve the quality of data available to CFOs and HRDs in the workplace.
Consider these scenarios:
- You are sitting in an EXCO meeting having presented your HR Strategy and your CEO asks you for specific data on the impact of absenteeism on the business and why it isn’t a key part of your strategy. He/she then follows up with a question on whether your main operating facility workforce is more efficient this year than last. These are key question to your strategy, but you didn’t manage to get all the data before you came to EXCO. By not having the figures handy you undermine an otherwise strong presentation. A BI Tool gives you access to dashboards that you can easily change to interrogate data real time.
- Your CEO wants to understand how workforce efficiencies have improved over time, what the actual cost of different cost centers is and how variable pay elements (commissions/overtime) relate to actual company sales and performance. His/her hope is to quickly identify where cost creep has occurred and identify whether employment costs are aligned with actual company performance. Usually this analysis would take a few weeks and would include involving finance and operations with ongoing worries about leaking sensitive payroll data. A BI Tool allows you to interrogate more quickly the data from multiple systems to easily answer and stress test this type of analysis.
- You are tasked with running your employment equity reporting and have no idea how good your existing data in your payroll system is. Instead of re-creating the report or running into troubles at the last minute when you have to change for missing data, a BI Tool allows you to easily analyse and track missing or incomplete data making the filing considerably easier.
Having worked on these platforms for clients there is no doubt these tools are essential for top management as a way to easily get a response to critical questions, but also importantly to use actual data to make decisions as opposed to people’s viewpoints or speculation. Pooling data from different systems (finance, payroll, ERP) is relatively easy to do meaning more time gets spent on asking the right questions as opposed to gathering data.