Business Intelligence Reporting: Act now!

By Stephen Ryan

Initially, most users working within HCM often think of simple, ad-hoc & static reports. Don’t stop there! Act now! Business Intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process. BI prepares data for analysis and delivers actionable information for HR professionals to make informed business decisions. Business Intelligence reporting can run on a schedule to deliver an automated email to a static list of users. Information can be extracted in PDF, Excel, and HTML formats.

A primary goal for most users is to design custom reporting to manipulate and transition existing data to information. The information can provide insight to support tactical, operational, and strategic decision-making. HCM data applies to multiple HCM modules including, but not limited to:

Different HCM systems have deployed different versions of these analytic reporting tools. UKG integrated the IBM Cognos tool into their reporting and data analytics solution years ago. Delivering data in a way that is conducive to analysis & review is extremely powerful, especially for administrators and HCM leadership. Recently, UKG’s reporting tool has been repackaged as UKG Pro People Analytics. This product is still considered a leading-edge reporting tool with capabilities beyond static on-demand and scheduled reports.     

Workday uses an analytic tool called Prism. Also, point solutions/specialty analytical tools like SplashBI and Visier will take data from multiple sources and serve up HR and Payroll analytics. Ceridian has analytics built into its native HCM solution. Ceridian opted to build it’s own form of analytic reporting.

No matter which HCM you are currently using or looking at moving to, consider the list below. Read on to discover the many dynamic uses of business intelligence as a major improvement over simple reporting. 

Alerts/Events

Event reporting focuses on setting triggers to determine if reporting is warranted.   For example, we often see where clients may request daily or real-time reporting tied to employee separations. Employee separations happen under several circumstances, such as resignation, retirement, furlough, layoff, or dismissal. Announcements of employee separations require engagement across multiple departments and divisions, not just internally. Often, third-party notification is required to ensure the employee is no longer active within the organization from a functional and security viewpoint.

While separations are a common HR event, employee separations may not occur daily. Using event reporting, we can design an event to be triggered when an employee separation occurs. The user gets a report only when employee separation(s) have occurred. The information arrives, and the user takes the required action—no need to waste time with blank reports.

Milestones, such as employee anniversaries or upcoming retirements, are examples of where setting up triggers for BI reporting can build efficiencies. The trigger would execute reports or communications directly to an employee, manager, or administrator with notification or instruction based on the event. The milestone information can be customized within the body of an email, giving it the appearance of being sent by an administrator vs. an automated process. 

Burst Reports

Burst report configurations allow a report to be run once, with the results divided into various recipients, each receiving a subset of data. For example, combining payroll data with audit information or combining tax information and deductions (including benefits) can produce an informative deliverable. 

Data from multiple systems and customized configuration data are integrated to cross multiple HCM environments and delivered to the user in a subset or burst report. Data is delivered via a burst report only when certain conditions are met.    

Notifying a Performance Management Administrator if goals or reviews aren’t completed on time or alerting a Compensation Director or HR Executive when a salary exceeds a specific threshold are good examples of commonly used burst reports.   Burst Reports will be set up to send only the information each recipient needs to see.

Dashboards

The use of interactive dashboards can provide rich visualization in terms of graphs and charts with little to no development background.  Graphs, pie, bar & line charts can provide a decisive view of information and allow end-users to recognize patterns and trends.  Advanced dashboards enable users to slice data and information to offer an interactive data view to support decisions.  

Showing trends across employee and employer premiums for benefits would serve as a bargaining tool when considering changes.  Other examples of interactive dashboarding would show leaders trends based on hiring, reduction in workforce, extending new benefits, or reflection of overall payroll for bonuses.   

Summary

Using business intelligence tools for analysis and future performance can give your organization a strategic advantage.  Utilizing your HCM suite of products, including your BI tools, will provide insight to help HR & Finance personnel with information to help with better decision-making.  The tools can harvest the correct data and serve as a single source of truth. Using business intelligence will provide timely information to improve performance – from short-term decision-making to long-term planning.

HRchitect can help build events, triggers, and reports with critical workflows and communications to help your organization take full advantage of the business intelligence available in your HCM. We can provide expert assistance during implementation or as needs arise post-implementation.

Contact us here to learn how we can help your organization fully utilize its business intelligence tools. 

About the Author

Stephen Ryan brings over 14 years of experience in HRIS, Payroll, Time & Labor Management, and Project Management to the HRchitect team. Stephen has a track record of effectively meeting client deliverables during software implementations and a history of managing multiple projects at once and meeting multiple deliverables.

Learn more about Stephen on LinkedIn