Tag: Big Data

Overview

• Sabya Mitra

Big data HR Analytics

Big data HR analytics plays a crucial role in decision-making.

Today’s HR transformation doesn’t just happen with the automation of HR processes and services. It happens when an organization goes beyond automation and starts focusing on business challenges, business drivers, and measures that impact business results.

Through digital transformation, HR addresses business challenges and helps spur organizational growth. Better business insights help realize better decisions and enable HR to act decisively. To achieve digital transformation, HR needs to do new things in new ways — and this is where fact-based insights, derived out of HR data, enterprise data, big data, IoT, and beyond, help. Historically, HR has very rarely used insights and facts as the basis for its decision-making process. This is even more prevalent in the small and medium business (SMB) than the large enterprise (LE).

Why is the use of HR analytics within SMB organizations lower than in large enterprises?

SMB organizations often have disjoint systems and multiple data sources. They rely on Excel as a common tool for tracking information and lack the funding and resources to develop a business case for HR analytics.

Although large enterprise companies face similar problems, in those organizations HR can mostly piggyback on their broader enterprise analytics strategy — utilizing common funding, systems, tools, and workforce to build HR-specific analytics. Ironically, HR needs analytics and insights to remove some of the very barriers it faces to get HR analytics in the first place.

What benefits can SMB organizations gain by using analytics?

With limited resources and funding, SMB organizations cannot afford to make business decisions based on “gut feel” instead of solid “data.” This becomes critical. For SMB organizations, it is essential that they can address the following questions:

• How timely, cost-effective, and efficient are your hiring practices?
• How can we retain our best and most valuable employees?
• How productive is our workforce in terms of overall revenue?
• Do we have the right competencies now and for the future?
• How competitive is our compensation strategy?
• How can we best invest in people to fulfil our future needs?

If you can address the above questions in an effective, efficient, and affordable manner, then you save time, minimize manual effort, and get insights based on hard data. The insights you get from answering these questions help you develop and execute your digital HR transformation strategies to advance the entire organization.

What tools are available for SMB customers?

Before we talk about technology and which HR analytics solution to consider and why, let us first identify the essential components that make an HR analytics package functional and effective for SMB organizations. Any HR analytics solution should have the following capabilities, divided into three categories by priority.

Must have:

• Features to build KPIs/measures to check the effectiveness of your HR function.
• Pre-built connectors not only for your HRIS solution but also for your ERP solution.
• Flexible data storage functionalities for your historical data.

Should have:

• Analytical capabilities to analyze market trends across key talent and core HR areas.
• Ability to build predictive scenarios based on available data for developing future strategies — e.g., employee flight risk, retention planning.

Nice to have:

• Ability to do business planning — e.g., salary planning, manpower planning.
• Ability to add open-source tools like R visualizations and others.
• Out-of-the-box analytics that can kick-start your HR analytics journey and act as a platform for analytics based on organizational challenges.

We at Renew HR have selected SAP Analytics Cloud as our go-to solution for all our customers’ HR analytics needs, primarily because: all SAP SuccessFactors reporting is gradually transitioning to better leverage SAP Analytics Cloud technology (future-proofing your solution); SAP HCM or SAP SuccessFactors customers get pre-built, out-of-the-box connectors free of cost; it can do business intelligence, predictive analysis, and business planning in one place; it is cloud-based and mobile; it allows integration with R; and it is highly affordable on a per-user, per-month basis rather than the total number of employees — you buy as many or as few user licenses as needed.

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC)

SAP Analytics Cloud can access data from across SAP’s cloud solutions, including HR (SAP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors), finance, and other applications and data repositories. It can be the single source of truth about a company’s most important business and people metrics — you can use it to monitor, simulate, and drive change in the digital economy, something standalone data discovery or HR analytics solutions cannot accomplish.

Meaningful insights, better decisions, and immediate action come together in SAP Analytics Cloud, which brings all types of data to life across people, places, and devices into a real-time enterprise experience for HR executives. With fully automated business intelligence capabilities that dramatically improve the quality and speed of reporting, as well as real-time collaboration, executives and leaders can instantly drill into key areas of the business — revenues, pipeline, margin, and people — and model business drivers on the fly to anticipate the future.

SAP App Center

SHARP HR Analytics packages are available on the SAP App Center. Clients visiting the SAP App Center can find:

• Package 1 — Transforming your existing reports: take advantage of existing reports and get visualization and insights into the decision-making process.
• Package 2 — Data archival, compliance, and historical data analysis: move out of legacy systems (SAP HR, Workday, PeopleSoft, ADP, Ceridian, UltiPro, etc.) without worrying about data archival, run analytics on legacy data, and stay compliant with state, federal, and international laws.
• Package 3 — Core HR and compliance: extract insights through KPIs/measures using transactional data covering payroll, HRIS, time and attendance, and compensation, with predictive analysis, planning, and modeling.
• Package 4 — Talent analytics: formulate the entire talent management strategy involving talent acquisition, performance management, succession and development, and learning.

The SAP App Center provides customers with real-time access to nearly 1,500 innovative partner solutions that complement and extend their SAP solutions, enabling digital transformation. App Center customers can buy solutions directly from partners and centrally manage purchases, billing, and vendor communications.