Metrics are important in human resources—something like turnover rate can indicate to an organization the overall health of its culture and employee satisfaction. Calculating turnover rate via traditional reporting is an intensive and error-prone endeavor, and that’s where analytics tools like SAP® SuccessFactors® Workforce Analytics can fill a need.
Using traditional reports, turnover rate is found via manual counts of employees and those that have left the company. That takes a lot of man hours and occurs without standardization, which means one region’s method of calculating turnover could be different than another.
Analytics tools bring in the ability to automate the calculation of metrics such as turnover rate, while also providing a single source of truth across a company’s divisions. Analytics provide visualizations beyond the spreadsheets of reports and allow for further exploration via a click of a button—rather than another report request.
“A good analytics tool will allow you to quickly dive deeper to whatever divisions or departments,” said Mike Hoekstra, SuccessFactors HR Analytics and Reporting Consultant at Rizing. “Ultimately, analytics allow you to take a look and gauge the overall health of an organization—looking at employee satisfaction survey trends and termination trends.”
The key word there is trends—something that analytics can easily reveal. To find trends in reporting takes diligence and extensive effort. Hoekstra calls that level of labor-heavy reporting “DIY analytics.”
How SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics Removes the “DIY”
Most companies have entry-level HR analysis—meaning only the ability to create reports. The reality is that leaders want to be able to do more strategic analysis with dashboards and trending metrics. SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics was created specifically to take that next step.
First—and perhaps most important—SuccessFactors takes transactional HR data and transforms it into standardized metrics and dimensions. This determines important factors such as which employees are counted—full-time, part-time, contingent, and contract labor, for example.
This matters because it defines those factors globally, removing confusion over how a metric is calculated. That means leadership looking at metrics in Europe and metrics in the United States can be confident that they are a single source of truth.
Once defined, those metrics are calculated automatically in Workforce Analytics. No need for “DIY.”
On top of that standardized data, Workforce Analytics provides the ability to build the dashboards and visualizations that will enable leaders to explore the data easily and effectively. Interactive charts and graphs allow for drilling down into the specifics—breaking things down by region, department and more.
The Future of Analytics in SuccessFactors
In the near future, SAP Analytics Cloud will be incorporated into the analytics and visualization tools for SuccessFactors, augmenting Workforce Analytics. However, that transactional data layer will not change.
“Only the analysis tools will be replaced. The core of the Workforce Analytics implementation—data transformation—will still be there,” said Hoekstra. “That’s an important part of allowing you to just grab metrics and analyze by slicing and dicing.”
He adds that customers deciding to move forward with Workforce Analytics today should not worry about wasted work. When the upgrade to the new analytics solution occurs, they will simply use a new tool. The underlying data will still be there.