The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP

By Mick Collins, Principal Consultant, Workforce Analytics & Planning, SuccessFactors, an SAP company

A survey conducted by the MIT Sloan Management Review, Analytics – the New Path to Value, suggested that the biggest barriers to business leaders’ successful utilization of analytical data were the “lack of understanding of how to use analytics to improve the business” and the “lack of management bandwidth.”

These challenges apply even more readily to the field of workforce analytics, which is data rich but can be relatively immature when it comes to the proper use of data by human resources and front-line managers.

For example, it’s not enough to merely solve the data efficiency conundrum by storing, extracting, and integrating complex workforce datasets, you need to improve data effectiveness.  Your managers must have regular access to actionable analytics like data-driven insights on how their team is performing, what risks they face, and what interventions may yield the optimal outcome. Unfortunately, many managers today receive Excel-style reports of transactional workforce data with limited intelligence — they lack an analysis of key trends specific to their line of business.

Smart and Actionable Analytics

SuccessFactors, an SAP company, understands these data limitations and how little time managers have to review dashboards and reports. To help companies address this we developed SuccessFactors Headlines, a solution for workforce analytics. This solution continuously monitors data of relevance to each manager, pushing out insights and recommendations through a set of newspaper-style headlines. Instead of sorting through hundreds of cells to locate the metrics of interest to you, imagine having personalized top stories ̶  what’s happening to your team, why those trends are occurring, what you should do next– delivered right to your mobile device.

It’s more than just big data – it’s better data!