Our client is a fast-growing Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) firm that primarily offers staffing for a range of administrative and financial services to insurance companies. So, their employees are the business’ life and blood. With a growing business expanse, they wanted an innovative and holistic solution that integrates staff data from various business dealings and delivers crucial business insights to nurture and support their staff every step of the way.
We organised discovery workshops with the business users and IT staff to succinctly capture their requirements. Our architects and technology consultants did the project scoping and held demonstrations of multiple data storage and analytics platforms. Post which, they opted for Snowflake as the cloud data warehouse and Microsoft Power BI as the business intelligence platform of choice.
A staff augmentation business faces a different set of challenges when it comes to keeping the workforce engaged and motivated while maintaining an objective view of their performance. With employees working across projects and teams of varied cultures, a one size fits all approach is not enough. With the growing size of the business, our client started facing difficulties in keeping an objective view of employees' performance.
Each team had different Service level agreements (SLAs), underlying practices (like holidays, office hours, attendance mechanisms) and location-specific costs. All of it was getting captured but required immense manuall efforts to collate it all together and make complete sense. Further, these practices were struggling to keep up with the pace of business and were proving unsustainable to the long-term business outlook.
Disconnected workforce data leading to difficulties in performance and talent assessment
Non-streamlined people management practices resulting in higher employee churn
Difficulties in mapping workforce skills to their KRAs and subsequent project assignment
Lacking transparency related to SLAs adherence and talent utilisation for their clients
Ambiguity in organisational structure and policies specific to workforce demography
The first step was identifying the stakeholders’ expectation from the project and the challenges they wanted to address. Our functional experts (HR) and technology consultants organised multiple huddles and consulting sessions with their talent team - comprising of HRs, project heads and administrative team. This exercise gave us an in-depth understanding of the existing processes, tools and difficulties faced by the respective team members.
Next, our technology architects and connected with their IT consultants to present a detailed HR analytics solution mockup that was based on Snowflake and Power BI. A data layer decoupled from the visualization layer ensured the reuse of the data warehouse for other initiatives like planning, data science and other business applications. The client liked the presented solution and gave a green flag for the project initiation.
The complete implementation can be broken down into the following steps:
Identification of source system for the different solutions required by the client, chalking down the plan for a comprehensive source to target mapping and documentation. Our data architects defined the mapping with a view on recurring as well as ad hoc querying and reporting needs.
The second step was setting up data models and the best practices for a well optimised Snowflake Data warehouse. Having Snowflake DW as part of the architecture ensured the data processing jobs can be automated and scheduled.
Microsoft Power BI delivered comprehensive & intuitive reporting along with the convenience of self-service for pulling up custom reports and dashboards
The jobs and reports were built in a reverse-engineered way to ensure a tight mapping of end-user requirements with the solution. The calculation and formulas were developed with the help of the in-house functional experts.
Activities like creating facts, dimension, data cubes and star schemas were developed by our Snowflake and Power BI architects to create some exhaustive, automated & templated dashboards and reports.
Embedding the solution with the client’s environment for increased adoption and readily available information for day-to-day decision making.
100% elimination of manual efforts and errors while creating the pre-defined HR Dashboards & Reports
97% reduction in Turnaround time (TAT) for weekly, monthly and annual reports
With the analytics solution embedded into their regular environment, the platform receives regular visits from the end-users
A differentiated value proposition for our client to foster trust and transparency, substantiated with data, with their customers
The value delivered is not just restricted to their talent management practice but stretches beyond and supports other processes
A decoupled data warehouse could now be used for applications outside of analytics too (like planning, data science and other business applications)
