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Better Performance
Management
With Cognos software and solutions,
answer the fundamental business
questions of
performance management:
How
are we doing? Why? and What should we be
doing?
Cognos 8 Workforce
Performance
Overview
With a graying workforce, an impending skills gap, and
increased competition for employees, it is imperative
that HR be able to effectively and accurately answer
questions like:
- Who are our top performers?
- Are we offering high performing employees the
right incentives and opportunities to keep them
motivated and loyal?
- What impact will the impending skills gap have
on our organization's ability to serve our
stakeholders?
- How well does the workforce align with corporate
objectives?
Cognos 8 Workforce Performance is an analytical
application that offers over 100 measures and 1,000
workforce-related attributes to support
cross-organization reporting and analysis. It includes
analysis across:
- Employee demographics, positions, departments,
business units, locations, and job codes.
- Staff turnover, terminations, voluntary and
involuntary separations, and transfers.
- Paycheck data, earnings, and deductions.
- Employee benefit expenses, employer benefit
expenses, and taxation.
- Employee reviews and performance.
- Sick leave, family leave, and vacation status.
It provides a complete platform for:
- Workforce analytics.
- Turnover and attrition analysis.
- Compensation analysis.
- Human capital optimization and alignment.
- HR performance management.
Cognos 8 Workforce Performance is a configurable
application that snaps into your existing technology
environment, simplifying the delivery of relevant and
reliable information on HR issues. It transforms
operational data from your Human Resource Management
System (HRMS) into actionable information. As the
application transforms the data, it adds business value
by calculating additional business information (for
example, end dates) and key performance indicators that
don't exist natively in your HRMS.
Value for IT
Cognos 8 Workforce Performance integrates and simplifies
deployment, maintenance, and day-to-day operations. For
example, there is no need to write ETL code to extract
the data: that code is generated for you after you
identify the data that you need in the data warehouse.
There is no need for conventional report writing
either—the IT department can just configure and generate
reports. This delivers a huge time and cost-saving for
your organization, while making you more responsive to
changing business needs.
Value for the Business
Cognos 8 Workforce Performance offers a quick, simple,
yet powerful approach for report generation. While most
HRMS systems can provide basic list reports, Workforce
Performance allows users to easily navigate through the
data interactively to provide deeper insight and
understanding. Analyzing data in this way makes it much
easier to compare and contrast different groups of
employees—by location, by role, by manager, by salary,
by age, by performance review rating, and more. Starting
from these reports, pre-defined paths guide managers to
navigate the rich pool of employee data to find the
information they need to support decisions about the
workforce.
The Cognos Difference
With Workforce Performance, Cognos is introducing an
entirely new class of analytic application—applications
that are simply configured, not laboriously customized
at great cost and delay. All configuration
changes—during initial deployment and subsequently—are
automatically retained in a software model. This ensures
that the solution is upgradeable, with your unique
changes preserved across both HRMS and analytic
application updates.
Analytic applications that are configurable are quick
to deploy and can easily evolve to meet changing
business needs. That means you earn a return on your
investment sooner and significantly reduce the total
cost of ownership.
Cognos delivers the software and services that help
HR become a stronger strategic asset within your
organization. With Cognos 8 Workforce Performance you
can align staffing needs with strategic goals, identify
and retain the right people, align compensation and
headcount plans with corporate priorities, and better
face the workforce challenges of the next decade.
Cognos 8 Workforce Performance
White Papers
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your human capital
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employee, compensation and benefits, and training and
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A Seat at the Table: How Smart HR Departments Win
with Business Intelligence.
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INTRODUCTION
HOW SMART HR DEPARTMENTS WIN
WITH BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
For HR to effectively facilitate the development of a high performance
workforce, it must break
down its functional silos, support end-to-end processes, and have an
integrated set of technologies that leverages a common set of competency
data, as well as a consistent user
experience for managers.”
James Holincheck, Talent Management Application Suites Emerge to Support
Strategic HR Capabilities, Gartner Inc. June 14, 2005
It’s not easy being in human resources. Globalization, a challenging
economy, advances in technology, a competitive labor market, and a more
fluid workforce have all had a significant impact on the way that HR
executives do their jobs. In addition, the field has become more complex
due to increasing competitive pressures, mergers and acquisitions, and
new business channels. These factors have changed the way HR needs to
collect data and report on its activities.
But the challenge doesn’t end there. Over the next few years companies
across the globe will have to deal with the impact of a graying
workforce and a skills gap that will make attaining and attracting
talent a top priority. According to the The US Bureau of Labor
Statistics, there will be a shortfall of 10 million workers by 2010.
This problem is only exacerbated by the pressures happening within the
HR departments. “The human-resources department is in survival mode,”
writes Carl Schneider in the February 15, 2006 issue of CFO Magazine.
“As outsourcing the function becomes a more-prevalent option for
companies, HR managers know that if they are going to endure, they have
to deliver strategic value, and that value has to be measurable.
Unfortunately, most companies are not prepared. A recent poll by the
International Public Management Association for Human Resources found
that only one-third of their members had a formal workplace planning
process in place. In addition, a recent Conference Board survey of
more than 100 HR executives found that only 12 percent make use of
people measures to meet their strategic targets or key performance
indicators (KPIs). Although remarkably low, the tides are turning. The
survey found that over the next three years, 84 percent of the executive
polled
expect to increase the application of workforce measures2.
That’s why more and more organizations are relying on business
intelligence (BI) to monitor, analyze, and report on their performance.
Organizations are turning to BI to streamline internal processes and to
create new efficiencies. Business intelligence can help HR
departments become a strategic asset within their respective
organizations in two ways: by generating efficiencies within the
department itself; and by using the insight that BI delivers to help
their organizations make strategic decisions around staffing, planning,
and budgeting to support company goals— whether they are growing
through acquisitions, maximizing global markets, achieving operational
excellence, or promoting product innovation.
The time is right for HR to be using BI. A growing number of analysts
and management experts have illustrated how non-financial assets such as
human capital and employee satisfaction can be important value drivers.
HR managers are keenly aware of the value they bring to their
organization. Historically, though, they have had difficulty expressing
this value to their senior executives. Or, that value has not been seen
as having a measurable impact on their organization’s performance. Many
CEOs
will state publicly that their employees are their greatest resource,
however, HR is often viewed as a cost centre and is not often invited to
the table when senior executives discuss budgeting, planning, and
strategic goals. As a result, HR departments are often frustrated by
budgets
that don’t reflect their goals or IT needs.
To gain a seat at that executive table—to make a transition from being
perceived as a cost centre to a value-driver— and to protect itself from
being outsourced, HR departments
need to communicate the value they create in a way that their CEOs can
understand. This means moving away from using soft measurements such as
“improvements” and move toward hard, numerical measurements that
executives use to monitor the progress of business strategy—metrics such
as recruitment costs by geography, employee retention rates, and
employee satisfaction rates.
WHAT EXACTLY ARE METRICS?
Metrics are numbers that indicate how well an organization is performing
in a specific area and
provide the context around which that performance should be analyzed.
Metrics are often expressed as percentages (for example, percentage
return on an investment), or sums (for example, total quarterly
revenue). They can be either prime or aggregate. For example, an
aggregate metric such as recruitment effectiveness could combine
recruitment costs, time to
recruit, and employee quality, and could be tracked over a specific
period of time.
Metrics provide the context for decisions around corporate performance
in many ways. They have specific definitions, performance targets,
thresholds, data sources, historical performance and include supporting
documentation. Metrics have an owner who is responsible for meeting
performance targets. Ownership for one or more metrics can fall to an
individual employee, a team, a line of business, or an entire
organization.
WHERE HR IS NOW
In many organizations there is a significant gap between an HR
department’s stated objectives and the methods it has used to measure
its effectiveness. HR departments are tasked with building a committed,
dedicated, highly skilled team that gives the organization a competitive
advantage. Yet few of the measures they have historically used—the
number of job fairs attended, resumes received, interviews scheduled, or
references checked—can be linked to these results. Furthermore, some HR
departments have limited reporting capabilities and struggle to collect
even simple data; others have no visibility into their data and need to
rely on their IT departments to provide it.
Very few HR departments have a comprehensive view of their data and the
tools to analyze this information so they can align their activities
with corporate strategy. Without business intelligence, which provides
the ability to track both the “what” and the “why” of a situation,
organizations are put in a reactive situation—waiting for a crisis to
force change.
WHERE HR NEEDS TO BE
Human resources management can be a competitive advantage. To achieve
this, HR managers need the vision and tools to operate efficiently and
to optimize the investment their organization makes in its employees. In
a knowledge and skills-based economy, the most competitive and effective
organizations are those with employees who are dedicated, well-trained,
and highly skilled. As HR is directly responsible for training and
skills development, hiring and retention, and other factors related to
employee morale, it is uniquely situated to optimize those advantages
and increase the organization’s overall value.
HR can also provide insight into questions that have a direct bearing on
their organization’s strategy. These can include:
• Do our recruitment programs attract our future managers?
• Which employees are ready for management positions?
• What will our staffing needs be five years down the road?
• Who are the most productive employees across the company?
• Which employees are at risk of leaving? What can we do to keep them?
• Do we have the right skills mix to achieve our goals? Where are the
gaps?
HR departments need the ability to answer these questions confidently,
in ways that can be understood and leveraged by senior executives and
aligned with the organization’s overall strategic goals. This can be
done by consolidating HR’s data assets, quantifying HR concerns such as
headcount, training, budgets, skills, recruiting—even employee
morale—and then analyzing how they interact to impact overall
performance.
From there, HR managers can identify trends in their workforce that lead
to a better understanding of how to maximize human capital. Positive
trends can be leveraged for greater value; negative trends can serve as
an early warning system to spur corrective action before problems become
acute. To do this, HR needs to collect the right kinds of data and be
able to analyze it from different perspectives.
BARRIERS HR IS
FACING Making the transition from soft benefits to hard
performance metrics is easier said than done. The first challenge is
knowing what types of data to collect, where it comes from, and then
having the ability to aggregate, view, and report on it easily. Many HR
departments find it difficult
to produce a consolidated view of their data because it is locked in
many different applications and unconnected spreadsheets. HR departments
use data from an assortment of internal and external sources (see
sidebar). Each source contains important information about an employee’s
performance and role within the company, but each one provides only part
of the overall picture.
But even if an HR department has good visibility into its data and
flexible reporting capabilities, it still may encounter several
different barriers in getting to the next step: an inability to
prioritize metrics; decentralized or uncoordinated measurement, a
failure to match the appropriate metrics with each line of business, an
absence of accountability for metrics, and metrics that are applied in
an uncoordinated and ineffective manner.
In addition, many HR departments are limited in the kinds of analysis
they can perform. Some report basic input numbers. Some may be able to
calculate basic ratios such as cost per hire, but are unable to
correlate that cost with the quality of each hire. Some have more
sophisticated
analysis (such as cost per hire per geography over time), but are unable
to align them with the corporate strategy. Only a few companies have
successfully aligned their HR metrics with overall corporate goals.
COMMON SOURCES OF HR DATA
INTERNAL
• Payroll applications
• Legacy systems
• Employee surveys
• ERP systems
• Spreadsheets
• Financial systems
EXTERNAL
• Industry benchmarks
• Labor market trends
• Labor regulations
• Collective agreements
• Outsourced information “The impact of Cognos on the HR department
has
been significant. For the first time the effect that
employees have on the organization is clearly
measurable. Cognos’ solutions will continue to
play a key part in moving BUPA HR forward technologically.”
Amanda Deacon,
HR Project Manager at BUPA GETTING THERE WITH BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE Business intelligence is software that enables HR
professionals to monitor, analyze, and report on their business
performance. BI provides visibility, clarity, and insight into an
organization’s data assets to help users understand how the business is
performing. It can aggregate and consolidate disparate internal and
external (third-party) data from different sources and applications into
a central framework. This creates a common, shared context that enables
effective and collaborative decision-making within a department or
across an entire organization.
BI can be used within a specific department or across an entire
organization. It can be used to measure the performance of a particular
initiative, or to measure the performance of the entire company.
Organizations can also use BI to align tactics with strategy and to
measure performance against strategic goals. Business intelligence
enables HR managers to view their data in many ways.
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence is the first single BI product to deliver
the complete range of BI functionality— including comparative analysis,
dimensional reporting, active dashboards and scorecards, event
management, and data integration—on a proven, single architecture.
Cognos 8 BI’s services-oriented architecture (SOA) enables organizations
to easily integrate BI capabilities into existing IT assets and
infrastructures. Its extended open data access capabilities, including a
unique single query engine and single metadata layer, allow the complete
range of BI functionality to be performed against any organizational
data, whether relational or OLAP. This access to all data sources
provides customers with a single, trusted place for all relevant data
and a complete and consistent view of any business issue or driver.
Cognos performance management capabilities include:
• Reporting and Dashboards: Users can create, modify, and
distribute any report the company requires— invoices, statements, weekly
sales and inventory reports, from any data source for
consistent fact-based decision-making. With dashboards can view and
analyze complex data in intuitive graphical formats, including dashboard
layouts, geographical maps, pie or bar graphs, or 3D graphs.
• Analysis and ad-hoc query: Online analytical processing (OLAP)
means users can explore large volumes of summarized data in a variety of
formats with industry-leading response times,
drilling through to the details they need.
• Scorecarding: Scorecards deliver measurable metrics that let
users know immediately where they stand, enabling them to manage their
performance.
• Event management: Time-critical business intelligence is
automatically delivered to decision-makers through e-mail and wireless
technologies, allowing them to focus quickly on what needs immediate
attention. • Data Integration: Cognos data integration is an
enterprise- wide ETL solution designed for high performance business
intelligence. It optimizes data merging, extraction, transformation, and
dimensional management to deliver data warehouses ready for business
reporting and analysis.
• Cognos 8 Workforce Performance: Cognos 8 Workforce Performance
is an analytic application that offers over 100 measures and 1,000
workforce- related attributes to facilitate cross-organization reporting
and analysis. Cognos 8 Workforce Performance is a pre-packaged
application that snaps into your existing technology environment,
simplifying the delivery of relevant and reliable information on HR
issues. It transforms operational data from HRMS systems into actionable
information.
These functionalities enable end-users to go beyond simple spreadsheets
to analyze their data from any angle, or to combine data in new ways and
use the resulting insight to make better business decisions. Using a
simple Web browser, users can explore trends in their business
performance and then present them graphically for maximum impact. BI
enables users to explore a particular issue from a high-level summary
down through increasing levels of detail to understand the contributing
factors. BI reports can be created once and automatically
distributed to users throughout the organization, or conducted on an ad
hoc basis for specific
requests.
With BI, HR managers can be more proactive in presenting their ideas for
improved performance. By analyzing critical HR data in greater detail,
exploring relationships between different metrics, and then presenting
metrics graphically and in terms of tangible business results, they will
be able to streamline their own operations and strengthen their role
within the
company.
BI enables HR managers to predict future staffing issues and trends, the
impact these issues will have on payroll, and their effect on overall
business performance. And at a time when more HR departments are
adopting new service delivery models, BI also enables HR to share
information
easily with other managers, empowering them to make more informed
decisions about employee performance and promotions in a more
self-sufficient way.
When applied strategically across an organization, BI provides a
performance management framework that helps smart HR departments get the
seat at the executive table they deserve.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN ACTION—
COGNOS-POWERED HR SYSTEM SAVES £1.5 MILLION AT RAC Founded in
1897, RAC has been consistently at the forefront in developing motoring
services. From introducing uniformed patrols in 1901 and roadside
emergency telephone boxes in 1912, RAC even now has the world’s most
advanced computer systems to deal with calls for roadside assistance.
Seven million RAC members enjoy access to a huge range of motoring
products and services, ranging from the familiar roadside assistance to
continually updated legal and technical advice and up-to-the-minute
travel information.
A couple of years following the acquisition of RAC Motoring Services by
Lex Service PLC, the group renamed itself RAC plc. The RAC Group of
companies also includes BSM, Lex Vehicle Leasing and Auto Windscreens.
Acquired in May 2005 by leading insurance conglomerate Aviva, RAC Group
is part of the Norwich Union Insurance division.
The History
RAC had long-running issues with visibility into its Human Capital.
Following the Lex Group acquisition of RAC Motoring Services in 1999,
the newly-combined company found itself running a number of different
payroll and HR systems. Anecdotal evidence existed that absenteeism &
turnover were both high, but with little by way of intelligent reporting
data to substantiate
that view.
In response to this, the company introduced what it called the ‘People
P&L’. A human capital management strategy, the People P&L outlined a
number of key performance indicators that could be applied to staff
across RAC. For the next couple of years, HR data was manually
collated across the disparate HR systems.
In 2002, the HR and payroll systems were merged, at which point,
according to RAC data warehouse manager Graham Pritchard, the People P&L
strategy really developed. “With the ability to access one data source
we were able to report on the key performance indicators that we had
created—absenteeism, sickness, turnover, stability and internal
colleague satisfaction,”
said Pritchard. “We were able to produce this information from areas
deep within the organisation. However, the information was still
two-dimensional, giving us figures that weren’t being analysed. During
2003 that we started to get enthusiastic buy-in and began to investigate
the possibilities of streamlining the process.”
By the end of 2003, in excess of 3,000 reports were being run on a
monthly basis. While the reports were able to provide the slices of data
that were fundamental to the People P&L, RAC needed a greater depth of
analysis. The HR board asked the data team to find a way to both
automate the process and to take the workload away from the HR
administrators.
“We were really looking for an analytical application that could deliver
not only these high-level trends, but also one that would enable us to
really see what was happening behind the information,” commented
Pritchard. “In early 2004, we started looking at what was available on
the market.”
The Solution
RAC looked at Strata HR Analyser—an offering from Strata Systems based
on Cognos ReportNet, PowerPlay, and Metrics Manager applications.
“We needed a tool that we could implement quickly and produce valuable
data for all our People KPIs. The reason we chose the Strata/Cognos
solution was because it met and exceeded all our human capital and
system requirements. We wanted something that would
give us the flexibility to look at data exactly how we wanted, was cost
effective and quick to implement.”
Flexibility is key to RAC taking its HR strategy forward. With the
ability to add in data from areas of company information such as sales,
operation, time and attendance, training and recruitment, the system
provides the data warehouse team with the power to begin analysing the
information gleaned from its People metrics.
In addition to freeing RAC from the constraints of a high-budget,
bespoke system with ongoing consultancy fees, Strata also provided a
system that was supports the Government’s Accounting for People task
force human capital management initiative.
The Benefits
Staff satisfaction has increased from 68 per cent to 73 per cent. RAC is
looking to develop its People strategy to continue to make significant
savings across the business by making HR and line management more
effective.
“In 2002, absenteeism was running at around 10 sick days per person per
year. The goal to reduce that number to 8.5”, says Pritchard. Across
11,500 staff, saving 1.5 days actually equates to a £1.5 million saving
on the bottom-line,” he adds. “The Cognos system gives us the ability to
look at our HR data and focus in on where the problems are. We don’t
need to become involved in expensive group-wide approaches to deal with
an issue, which might only be local. We can be far more focused and
aggressive in how we address HR issues because we have accurate
intelligent data at our fingertips.”
“People KPI plays a vital role in our company. It has helped transform
our business, significantly improving our understanding of people-based
issues & values,” said Debbie Hewitt, Director, RAC Rescue Services.
“The use of Cognos BI products helps ensure that we will continue to
meet all people management challenges with confidence and
understanding.”
The Future
Pritchard believes that the ability to analyze HR information will push
the cost savings well beyond the original targets set by his team. “When
we put together the business case for the CEO we said that we would get
absenteeism down by one day per person per year,” he says. But our
actual longer-term target for sickness is to get it down to 6 days per
person per year.”
In addition to the cost-cutting, RAC is using the powerful reporting
capabilities of the Cognos/Strata system to change the dynamic between
HR and line management staff and bringing about changes to operational
procedures within the business. With HR spearheading a tool that enables
them to raise issues quickly and effectively with the board, operational
management is beginning to think of HR as a strategic business unit and
not just a centre for administration.
“Through the implementation of business intelligence, HR is adding real
value to the company, and helping to make RAC a more efficient
enterprise,” Pritchard comments. “HR is now seen as a profit centre—it
really gives HR the authority and opportunity to influence the strategic
process.”
SIX REPORTS EVERY HR EXECUTIVE NEEDS Just as every
company is unique, so too is its BI solution. Before implementing a BI
solution, an organization needs to consider the complexity of its data
assets, the number and needs of its end-users, and the metrics that the
organization will use to measure performance. If the organization is
already using a management methodology such as Six Sigma or Balanced
Scorecard, HR needs to understand how its metrics will integrate into
the bigger picture.
The six reports described below provide a good illustration of the types
of analysis that HR managers can do with BI and the benefits they can
realize. They are not the only seven reports that HR can use, but they
serve as a starting point. Each report provides a strategic value when
consulted at a specific point in time. Each one also provides a
strategic value when analyzed regularly over a period of time. This lets
HR managers identify trends and measure their performance against
strategic goals.
HR SCORECARD
A scorecard is part of a performance management system that provides
executives and other people in an organization with critical information
about their performance in an easy-to-use format. Scorecarding software
creates, manages, presents, and delivers an organization’s key
performance metrics (for example: quarterly revenue, ROI, customer
satisfaction) and presents them using such intuitive symbols as traffic
lights or directional arrows. From this summary information, the end
user can drill down through a particular metric to increasingly detailed
layers of information to analyze the factors that drive its performance.
Scorecards can also be used to measure the performance of a specific
department. For HR, key metrics could include progress against
recruitment targets, overall headcount, skills gaps, training expenses
and effectiveness, employee performance ratings, turnover rates, and
more. An HR scorecard enables HR managers to achieve two goals at once:
it identifies opportunities for HR to improve its own performance
through more effective strategies, whether they focus on recruitment,
training, retention, or other areas. It can also be integrated into an
executive-level scorecard that illustrates the impact of HR in context
to the organization’s strategic goals and success. RECRUITING
ANALYSIS
Companies use many recruitment methods to attract top talent. These
include newspaper ads, agencies, job fairs, and employee referrals.
Recruitment costs account for a considerable percentage of HR’s overall
budget, and HR mangers need to know that the money that’s being spent is
attracting the right people. Many HR departments calculate their average
cost per hire.
However, this tells only part of the story. With BI, a HR manager can
measure recruitment efforts in terms of the time required to recruit.
From there, the manager could combine the time, money, and recruitment
method required to recruit a specific employee, then correlate these
metrics to the employee’s performance. This could reveal that one method
attracts more people in a shorter time or at a lower cost, but that the
people are not as highly qualified as those attracted by another method
that either costs more or takes a longer time. In this way, the manager
can see which methods bring in the highest quality employees and design
highly targeted, highly effective recruitment campaigns that attract
highly qualified people. RETENTION ANALYSIS “Instead of
spending days collecting information for reports from Excel spreadsheets
that are immediately out of date, our team can now obtain a snapshot
view of every month’s key data about people and generate reports about,
for example, turnover, absenteeism, performance, equal opportunities and
salary costs within two hours. And it’s not simply a time saving, we are
able to include far more detailed information in these reports or
present it in many different ways for different audiences. This just
wasn’t possible previously.”
Ann-Louise Hancock, Head of People Division at Skandia.
A challenging economy and a fluid job market have made employee turnover
a growing concern among HR executives. Turnover costs can range from the
equivalent of six months to three years’ worth of salary and benefits
depending on the level and expertise of the employees
who need to be replaced. To reduce hiring and employee placement costs,
HR executives need the ability to proactively identify the factors that
lead an employee to leave, thereby increasing the company’s overall
retention rate.
Both of these goals can be accomplished using BI. An HR executive can
consolidate and monitor the various facets of each employee’s situation
(seniority, salary, position, promotions, job class, skill set, and
more) and analyze the impact of each facet—whether on its own or
combined with others—on the company’s turnover rate.
In this way, HR executives can create a profile of the employees who are
at the greatest risk of leaving, identify the employees that match that
profile, and then devote resources to the factors that will prevent them
from leaving. This helps the company lower its turnover rate, thereby
reducing recruitment, new hire, and employee placement costs.
WORKFORCE ANALYSIS A company’s ability to deliver on its strategic
goals depends not only on its staffing levels, but also on the skills of
its employees. Departments that are continually understaffed, or
employees that are lacking specific skills, can impair the company’s
effectiveness. As such, HR managers need the ability to map the goals of
each department to the staffing levels and skills mix they will
need to achieve them, and then measure progress against these targets.
This lets the HR manager align employee performance with the company’s
strategic goals.
HR managers can also use BI to report on basic employee information such
as age, gender, and even ethnic origin. Accessing this information lets
HR managers see whether their company is complying with labor
regulations such as Employment Equity or Affirmative Action. The
resulting insight can spur changes in staffing policies that could spare
the company from potentially serious consequences. HR managers can also
be notified of shortfalls through an automatic email. In this way, HR
managers can prevent staffing problems before they develop.
If a company plans aggressive growth through acquisitions, BI can be
used to consolidate the various legacy systems that will become part of
the company’s HR database. At the same time, HR managers can use BI to
forecast future staffing needs and inform executive decisions
regarding budgeting and planning.
SUCCESSION PLANNING ANALYSIS
Many companies fill their managerial ranks with a mix of internal
employees who have worked their way up and people from outside the
company. Newcomers inject new ideas and energies; veterans provide
continuity and a deep understanding of the corporate culture. The
challenge for HR managers is to identify future leaders from within the
company and to ensure that recruitment
programs are attracting suitable managers from without.
Using BI, HR managers can adopt a long-range view that enables them to
assess what is sometimes referred to as their company’s “readiness
rate.” They can use BI to create a profile of current managers (their
skills, salary, seniority, related experience, and so on) and correlate
that information to the company’s current workforce.
This “bench strength analysis” lets them identify employees who are
ready to assume management roles now (those who match the profile), and
those who will be ready down the road. From here, directors can identify
the skills that future management candidates require to become fully
qualified and then design the appropriate development or training
programs. This
helps ensure that departing managers do not leave holes in the corporate
memory—holes that are very expensive to fill.
COMPENSATION ANALYSIS
Performance-based compensation packages are an effective way for a
company to recruit and keep top talent. Performance-driven organizations
reward the most effective employees. HR managers need to know that their
compensation plans are effective and competitive for their industry and
for the skills that they require.
BI can help HR managers design effective compensation benefits and
policies by correlating compensation to performance targets, skill sets,
seniority, and other factors. For example, a sales manager could use BI
to analyze the split between revenue generated by new and
existing customers, identify those sales reps who bring in a higher
percentage of new business, and structure their compensation
accordingly.
This encourages employees to continually improve their performance and
skills. For the HR manager, the end result is a reduction in turnover
rates and the associated recruitment costs. It also ensures that payroll
spending has a demonstrable impact on overall performance.
COGNOS
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE—
PROVIDING STRATEGIC VALUE TO HR Cognos 8 BI and Workforce
Performance analytical applications help organizations better develop
and communicate their strategy, and align employee performance with
strategic goals. With BI, HR can deliver the strategic business metrics
that they need to gain a seat at the executive table.
Complete View of Employee, Compensation, Training,
Workforce Planning Data
Every day, HR departments struggle to make sense of disparate and
overlapping data sources: ERP systems, spreadsheets, payroll and
benefits data, employee surveys, industry benchmarks, and others. Cognos
BI can consolidate this data into a central store to give
everyone in your organization a single version of the truth. We take
different metrics from different sources and put them into a consumable
format that provides human resources executives with a complete view of
employees, compensation and benefits, demographics,
and training. This unified view can easily be built with our tools and
then delivered to entire HR departments.
Most Comprehensive Solution
Cognos offers the most comprehensive BI available to ensure that the
right people get the right information, how and when they need it. The
breadth, depth, and flexibility of our BI solutions mean that they can
be deployed to meet the widest array of reporting and analysis needs.
For example, a VP of Human Resources can access a quick snapshot of the
percentage change in employee turnover, while an HR manager can conduct
an in-depth analysis of the turnover by job function, by length of
service for each department and geography.
Global Information Access
Cognos delivers a fully interactive and secure browser based Web
interface that makes it easy to share appropriate HR information with
everyone who needs it, whether employees located around the world,
outside contractors, or agency personnel. Not only can you interact with
employee information through a simple Web interface, you can also be
notified of important events taking place so that you can take immediate
action. This gives you a fully personalized BI solution that helps you
make effective decisions that drive improved performance.
“We can now conduct analysis we could not do
before—and see things we had not considered
before. Cognos Performance Applications was a
very good match between what we wanted and
what it did. All that and cash neutral in year
zero.”
Keith Lewis,
Vice-President of Business Development at Advantis
ABOUT COGNOS
Cognos is the world leader in business intelligence and enterprise
planning software. Our solutions for corporate performance management
let organizations drive performance with planning, budgeting and
consolidation, monitor it with alerts and scorecarding, and understand
it with business intelligence reporting and analysis. Cognos is the only
vendor to support all of
these key management activities in a complete, integrated solution.
Founded in 1969, Cognos now serves more than 23,000 customers in over
135 countries. |
DoubleStar, Inc. - based
in West Chester, PA - is a two-time Inc. 500 consulting firm comprised of three
distinct business units. DoubleStar's Data Warehousing (DW) & Business
Intelligence (BI) practice provides consulting services and solutions to support
our clients' Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) objectives. For over a
decade, clients from a wide variety of industries have relied on DoubleStar
technology consulting experts to solve their performance measurement challenges
and deliver innovative solutions that provide analytic insight. For more
information, visit 
Hitachi Consulting
is the global business and IT consulting company of Hitachi Ltd. We are
recognized as a leader in delivering practical business strategies and
technology solutions . For more information, visit
