Fortune 500 company improves time-to-insight by 75% using centralized data

What We Did

Most HR leaders know that data can help them make more strategic business decisions. The problem? Volume. A Fortune 500 technology solutions provider came to us to help streamline its overburdened HR insights and analytics system. The West Monroe team built a centralized data model designed to empower the provider’s HR team with rapid insights and interactive visualizations.

The Challenge

The technology solutions provider already understood how necessary HR data was to understanding their employee population and individuals’ career journeys. But its human resources information management (HRIS) team struggled to efficiently engage available data acquisition tools. It took the team significant time and effort to define which metrics were most meaningful to the organization, manage data quality, and uncover usable insights.

So West Monroe put together a multidisciplinary team to:

• Define the highest-value data use cases
• Centralize siloed processes into one quality-controlled data visualization model
• Empower HRIS team members to easily support new use cases and reporting requests

An Undeniable Approach

Our team included experts spanning operations excellence, data engineering, organizational change management, and analytics. Together, we merged our industry knowledge, technical expertise, and process optimization experience to:

• Collaborate across HR and IT stakeholder groups to identify the highest value data use cases
• Develop 10 Power BI reports focused on the top three use cases using an iterative approach
• Design a centralized data model that supports interactive data exploration for all three use cases
• Train the HRIS team on data best practices, enabling them to pursue additional use cases as they execute on their road map

The Output

We drew from our experience in business analysis, data modeling and visualization, and HR solutions to help the client not only determine their unique business requirements, but also to execute the technical design and implementation in a short timeframe.

Our team:

1. Transformed the technology solutions provider’s flat, two-dimensional data into interactive three-dimensional visualizations with cross-highlighting and filtering features
2. Facilitated executive buy-in and technical advocacy to build momentum across teams and showcase the value of unified reporting and modern data visualization
3. Enabled nuanced data exploration and analysis that wasn’t previously possible under the provider’s disparate, ad-hoc operational processes, leading to new HR insights at faster pace
4. Provided HR with a foundational understanding of the data platform, empowering the team to further integrate employee journey data and adopt additional use cases across the organization

Returns You Can Measure

Our team sifted through mountains of HR information to help a Fortune 500 technology solutions provider uncover its greatest data peaks. The resulting data analytics and visualization model designed by West Monroe led to a 75% reduction in the amount of time it took the provider’s HR team to arrive at meaningful insights. Additionally, reporting is now a centralized, shared asset that allows departments across the organization to uncover new insights that inform strategic employee journey decisions.