Description
Get a significant business intelligence advantage when you tap into your workforce management data.
Gregg Gordon
Sr. Director, Big Data Practice
Position Paper
Is It Time to Evolve
from Spreadsheets to
Business Intelligence?
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
2
No matter how your organization delivers value to your market, customers are demanding improved service levels, perfect
quality, and innovative answers to new problems. Customers today have more choice than ever and if a company fails to
meet expectations, they will ?nd an answer from a competitor.
Of course, this isn’t a new story. Organizations are always searching for an edge to create better value for their customers —
for example, technology has automated many business processes, allowing organizations to reduce errors and waste, speed
delivery, and improve product and service quality.
One result of process automation is the rapidly increasing volume of data that is generated from software and equipment
that provides signi?cant information about the inputs and outputs and how that process performed. Automation has not
only sped up processes, it has led to reductions in labor, creating a situation in which fewer employees must make decisions
in a shorter period of time. This has created a challenge and an opportunity in organizations because the workforce can no
longer observe how a process is running and react to that. Instead, it must depend on data to understand what is occurring.
Organizations that improve their use of this increased amount of data to make better, faster decisions will have a competi-
tive advantage over those that don’t.
When you should assess your labor analysis strategy
Based on the experience of helping thousands of customers improve their use of software- and hardware-generated data,
Kronos has identi?ed the activities that typically indicate an organization needs to move to a more formalized business
intelligence strategy. Whether a company is facing a speci?c business condition or wants to ?nd new methods of improve-
ment, business intelligence provides insights to data that unlock the answer. If any of the following conditions apply to your
organization, it may be time to consider a labor business intelligence strategy.
• How are frontline supervisors using information to make daily decisions? Do several different reports need to be pulled
together? Do supervisors have to return to their of?ce to access information? Is the available information different based
on the location or department where they work?
• What’s the latency from the time data is generated to when reports and analysis is available? One example of a common
report that is challenging to create manually is a labor costing report, since it requires reconciliation of labor and
production data.
• Are valuable reports that are critical to decision-making used only sporadically or even ignored?
• How large is the backlog of requests for custom reports? Do midlevel and lower level employees have to go through
layers of approval to obtain information or get into the queue?
• Are departments limited in their ability to communicate and collaborate because they have limited access to the data
generated outside their departments?
• When an executive calls into a department with a question, is it dif?cult to obtain the detailed information that was
used to generate the report?
These are all signs that an organization’s reporting and decision support strategy needs improvement and that a business
intelligence solution focused on labor may provide much-needed help.
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
3
For most companies, improving decision making is unlike anything they have done before. Automating production and
business processes has become relatively common, with well-described best practices as well as suppliers and consultants
providing solutions. When it comes to decision making however, everything changes. Using data to support business
decisions encompasses not only the simple day-to-day decision making of “if this, do that,” but also the more complex area
of planning, performing what-if scenarios, analysis, and problem solving.
Business intelligence tools and Big Data techniques may be hot buzzwords, but their tools and techniques have not been
widely adopted. Instead companies ?nd themselves mired in many different forms of custom reporting, including standard
reports delivered by software applications, spreadsheets, custom SQL extracts, and specialized reporting tools.
Complicating things further is the reality that decision making can vary signi?cantly from one department to another.
Different data may be required, analysis requirements differ, and the availability of support changes by the level of priority.
In this paper we will examine why business intelligence has not replaced the myriad approaches companies are using today.
We will then look at how Kronos has approached using business intelligence in a more effective way to improve a company’s
ability to utilize its labor data more effectively and achieve competitive advantage.
Why is building and maintaining custom reports so dif?cult?
At some point, the standard reporting delivered by a software application falls short — often when reporting requirements
mean pulling data from two or more sources. At this point, the journey into custom reporting begins.
Spreadsheets are undoubtedly the most common tool used in custom reporting and analysis today. Their ease of use and
?exibility has made them a go-to resource in almost every organization. Like any tool, spreadsheets are great at certain
jobs, but less effective as they are extended beyond their intended capabilities.
Spreadsheets struggle to handle large volumes of data without slowing performance. Their use of pivot tables to “slice and
dice” information is perfectly acceptable for an analyst who lives in the data, but notoriously dif?cult for a casual user.
Spreadsheets are prone to error, whether through accidently entering the wrong data or because of how the spreadsheet
creator decides to make assumptions and display results. As a result, users of the data are often subject to “multiple
versions of the truth.”
Spreadsheets are challenging to distribute and secure. Since they are primarily designed for individual use they have limited
functionality for distributing and securing data across an enterprise.
Finally, spreadsheets have no extraction, transformation, or loading (ETL) functionality to move data around from various
sources. Data extraction and transformation is often a company’s largest challenge. If there is any doubt about this at your
company, just ask the person responsible for creating reports or extracting data. They typically have a very large backlog.
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
4
Obtaining and transforming data is often considered to be 50–80 percent of any reporting or analysis project. There are
common causes for this and they are interdependent:
• Reports are often built from more than one data source and generated from transactional applications such as Enterprise
Resource & Planning (ERP), Timekeeping or Human Resources Management systems, or any of the other solutions that
automate business and manufacturing processes
• The organization of transactional data is optimized for highly ef?cient input and output in small quantities
• There is often signi?cant logic for interpreting data within the application that is not available to those trying to extract
the data for other purposes, such as reporting
• The data is not “clean.” By their nature, transactions are discrete, allowing them to not interfere with each other if
they’re not perfect. Reporting and analysis requires much cleaner and consistent data elements
• To improve the performance of the transaction system and minimize hardware requirements, the amount of data stored
within their own individual database is limited
This optimization of data by each transactional application and the increase in unstructured data is the root cause of the
reporting and analysis challenge. The custom report writer must:
• Translate business requirements into metrics and data requirements
• Understand the data model of the transactional database and the logic behind the values in the data
• Troubleshoot existing reports due to exceptions in the data that are introduced by users or logic in the application that
the report writer had not seen before in previous data sets
• Carefully craft the SQL calls so that they don’t impact the performance of the transactional system
• Maintain reports as the versions of the application change and the data model evolves
• Implement a security and distribution model to make sure the appropriate people see the appropriate data
• Begin storing data somewhere else in order to generate reports, including data over long periods of time
• If unstructured data is required, determine the patterns required to extract value from it
• Manage internal customer expectations about report development limitations and timeframes
What does Business Intelligence provide that custom reporting can’t?
The shortcomings of spreadsheets and the need for clean, ?exible data models gave birth to the Business Intelligence
market. Business Intelligence applications have been very successful because when they are fully functional they deliver
high levels of value. Here are some functional examples of what Business Intelligence can do that is dif?cult for a custom
report writer to accomplish:
• Provide many built-in SQL functions that allow the data to be manipulated in various ways: summing up, drilling down,
looking at ?exible time periods, projecting future values, calculating new metrics, and statistical analysis to identify
patterns and relationships
• Store and report on large quantities of data without impacting source systems
• Provide visualization capability that allows large amounts of data to be easily interpreted
• Incorporate ?exible dashboard design environments that allow the organization of many reports and graphs by role
• Provide a security model to limit who has access to what data
• Optimize the way data is organized and presented so that one set of data can be used by a broader set of users
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
5
• Deliver a highly interactive interface using features such as prompts, ?lters, drill downs, thresholds, and alerting
• Provide a simpli?ed report building interface that doesn’t require technical knowledge, reducing the load on technical
staff and speeding time to information
But even with all this power and ef?ciency in delivering information, business intelligence systems have not been widely
adopted. It’s not uncommon for a business intelligence system to be purchased by an organization to solve a speci?c
challenge, with an eye toward expanding its use throughout the organization over time. But for many companies, years go by
with little progress. Two challenges come into play: the ?rst is access to the data required to report and analyze on a given
topic. The second is the scarce human resources available to take a business problem and use the available data to solve it.
Ready-to-use data and a library of solutions
Kronos recognizes and addresses these challenges in two ways. First, we provide signi?cant amounts of data from our
transactional database in a ready-to-use format. Second, we have developed a library of ready to use Plug-ins that solve
common labor-related business problems.
Preparing data for use in a Business Intelligence application is the largest and most resource intensive part of making the
solution operational. ETL handles the major cleansing, organizing, and calculating operations, which are the same steps
that create stumbling blocks for custom report developers.
By making transactional data available in a business intelligence environment, Kronos can reduce or eliminate the individual
development efforts required to prepare data, thereby dramatically reducing the time and cost of getting a Business
Intelligence environment operational. In addition to the economy of scale that comes with a Business Intelligence provider
delivering the data, Kronos has additional advantages that customers can bene?t from:
• Understanding logic in the transactional application so data cleansing is primarily limited to those exceptions generated
by user input
• Access to a broad set of user requirements so that it can provide the pre-de?ned attributes and metrics used in
reporting and analysis that most customers want
• Visibility into the speci?c transactional data model changes ahead of application releases so it can adjust the ETL
process, ensuring reports continue to work as designed
• The ability to develop a sophisticated method of trickling incremental data out of the transactional database without
impacting performance
• The ability to pass the security model from the Kronos Workforce Timekeeper application to the Workforce Analytics
application so there is no incremental maintenance of security pro?les
• Metadata layer that provides business terminology to describe data rather than using the technical table and column
names, as is often found in do-it-yourself ETLs
With Kronos developing and maintaining the ETL, customers save 50–80 percent of the effort of their Business Intelligence
project, improving the ROI, and providing more data to end users than an internal project could ever hope to achieve.
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
6
This pre-built approach still leaves data work to be completed with each project. Often external data, such as production
results, must be merged with labor data to understand the impact of labor on the business. While this takes effort, in
terms of labor reporting, only a small slice of operational data needs to be sourced and reconciled with the cleansed and
organized Kronos data, keeping the project scope reasonable and still delivering signi?cant ROI.
With the data in place you can begin delivering high-value information to managers and employees faster, more consis-
tently, and less expensively.
The data is cleansed and available, do you have the resources to analyze it?
Business Intelligence solutions offer many development features, from plug-ins that support R (a popular language for
programming Big Data analysis), to simpli?ed report editing, and formatting tools that allow relatively non-technical users
to create reports and dashboards on their own.
If you visited an organization that has created a datamart full of cleansed and well-organized data and asked who is creating
reports and analyses you most likely would ?nd a Business Intelligence Analyst. Larger companies and those highly depen-
dent on data might also have a Data Scientist.
These employees are still required to take business requirements and map them to the data available to create solutions.
They typically have strong technical skills in order to understand the way data is organized and make changes or additions
to the datamart.Employees who have deep knowledge of data structures and the technical ability to edit schemas and data,
create ?lters, attributes, and metrics, and apply algorithms that solve business requirements are relatively rare and usually
command a high salary. A shortage of quali?ed candidates leads to another of the bottlenecks that prevent Business
Intelligence applications from being widely adopted.
This creates two challenges. First: companies are forced to prioritize their efforts, and often focus on creating dashboards
and sophisticated analysis for ?nancials and inventory. Middle management might only have access to status reports and
not the insight needed to make forward-looking decisions. Without guidance from the business intelligence application,
employees revert back to the technology they understand. Spreadsheets continue to proliferate and analysis is performed
on data that is easy to access rather than the best ?t.
Closing the last mile in business intelligence
To close the gap between a technology application and a solution that bene?ts your organization, Kronos has gone what is
commonly known as “the last mile.”
Because Kronos focuses solely on workforce management, it understands the business problems that HR, Payroll, Operations
and Finance face when it comes to labor. Our workforce management suite is the most complete source of labor data in an
enterprise. With these advantages in place, Kronos has added a number of complete solutions embedded in its product,
as well as extended solutions known as a Plug-ins, that leverage both the data and the business intelligence technology.
A Plug-in is a bundle of data, reports, and dashboards that solve a speci?c workforce-related challenge. It is a mini-
application that uses the functionality and data contained within the Kronos Workforce Analytics application. It’s what
a Business Intelligence Analyst or Data Scientist would create if they had the time and expertise to focus on workforce
management problems full time.
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
Kronos Incorporated 297 Billerica Road Chelmsford, MA 01824 +1 800 225 1561 +1 978 250 9800 www.kronos.com
© 2015, Kronos Incorporated. Kronos and the Kronos logo are registered trademarks and Workforce Innovation That Works is a trademark of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. For a full list of
Kronos trademarks, please visit the “trademarks” page at www.kronos.com. All other trademarks, if any, are property of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change. All rights reserved.
CV0456-USv2-EN
As an example of a complete solution included with Workforce Analytics, the Workforce Auditor analyzes what is known as
“dark data.” This is data that is typically not viewed by the user of a software application. In this case Workforce Auditor
is looking at the audit trails of timecards and schedules. Each entry represents any addition, deletion, or edit made to a
timecard or schedule — a small trade of time and money between an employee and the organization. But in aggregate,
these trades represent signi?cant amounts of time and money. Additionally, they are used as evidence of inappropriate
behaviors on the part of an employee or supervisor. The challenge for companies is that often these edits accumulate to
millions of entries a year. 99% of them are legitimate changes. But what about the ones that represent a policy compliance
issue, fraud, or abuse? Auditors often comb through these looking for these situations, but this is a dif?cult and laborious
project. More often, the aggrieved employee shows the company the way after they ?le a grievance or lawsuit. What if
there were a way to simplify the audit process so that potential issues could be identi?ed sooner? Workforce Auditor solves
this challenge. By using big data techniques, it identi?es clusters of activities that are different than others. By focusing
on these outliers, the challenge of digging into the details drops dramatically. Customers who use this today have found
examples of employees fraudulently changing their timecard to increase pay and supervisors modifying timecards to avoid
paying overtime to employees. In addition to abuse situations, companies have identi?ed situations where managers are
working around the system because the processes are not working for them. Understanding this allows the company to
improve processes and educate employees proactively rather than wait for costs to rise or performance to drop to a point
where traditional reporting catches it. Those that don’t take advantage of this data will have higher costs and an increased
risk of policy compliance issues.
Additional plug-ins are also available to analyze and provide guided decision making for other types of labor-related situa-
tions, including Workforce Planning, Labor Costing, Absence Analysis, Scheduling effectiveness, and Store Performance.
Each plug-in is an integrated solution that uses data to improve discovery and decision making around a speci?c set of
workforce challenges. Because they are delivered by Kronos Professional Services and Kronos Partners, they can also be
extended to provide individual tailoring based on an organization’s unique needs.
Kronos is using its access to data through its automation applications and understanding of workforce management to
provide a complete business intelligence solution. From data collection through process automation to data cleansing and
transformation, to reporting, analysis, and guided decision making, Kronos is able to provide customers with a signi?cant
business intelligence advantage when it comes to workforce management.
doc_218963263.pdf
Get a significant business intelligence advantage when you tap into your workforce management data.
Gregg Gordon
Sr. Director, Big Data Practice
Position Paper
Is It Time to Evolve
from Spreadsheets to
Business Intelligence?
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
2
No matter how your organization delivers value to your market, customers are demanding improved service levels, perfect
quality, and innovative answers to new problems. Customers today have more choice than ever and if a company fails to
meet expectations, they will ?nd an answer from a competitor.
Of course, this isn’t a new story. Organizations are always searching for an edge to create better value for their customers —
for example, technology has automated many business processes, allowing organizations to reduce errors and waste, speed
delivery, and improve product and service quality.
One result of process automation is the rapidly increasing volume of data that is generated from software and equipment
that provides signi?cant information about the inputs and outputs and how that process performed. Automation has not
only sped up processes, it has led to reductions in labor, creating a situation in which fewer employees must make decisions
in a shorter period of time. This has created a challenge and an opportunity in organizations because the workforce can no
longer observe how a process is running and react to that. Instead, it must depend on data to understand what is occurring.
Organizations that improve their use of this increased amount of data to make better, faster decisions will have a competi-
tive advantage over those that don’t.
When you should assess your labor analysis strategy
Based on the experience of helping thousands of customers improve their use of software- and hardware-generated data,
Kronos has identi?ed the activities that typically indicate an organization needs to move to a more formalized business
intelligence strategy. Whether a company is facing a speci?c business condition or wants to ?nd new methods of improve-
ment, business intelligence provides insights to data that unlock the answer. If any of the following conditions apply to your
organization, it may be time to consider a labor business intelligence strategy.
• How are frontline supervisors using information to make daily decisions? Do several different reports need to be pulled
together? Do supervisors have to return to their of?ce to access information? Is the available information different based
on the location or department where they work?
• What’s the latency from the time data is generated to when reports and analysis is available? One example of a common
report that is challenging to create manually is a labor costing report, since it requires reconciliation of labor and
production data.
• Are valuable reports that are critical to decision-making used only sporadically or even ignored?
• How large is the backlog of requests for custom reports? Do midlevel and lower level employees have to go through
layers of approval to obtain information or get into the queue?
• Are departments limited in their ability to communicate and collaborate because they have limited access to the data
generated outside their departments?
• When an executive calls into a department with a question, is it dif?cult to obtain the detailed information that was
used to generate the report?
These are all signs that an organization’s reporting and decision support strategy needs improvement and that a business
intelligence solution focused on labor may provide much-needed help.
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
3
For most companies, improving decision making is unlike anything they have done before. Automating production and
business processes has become relatively common, with well-described best practices as well as suppliers and consultants
providing solutions. When it comes to decision making however, everything changes. Using data to support business
decisions encompasses not only the simple day-to-day decision making of “if this, do that,” but also the more complex area
of planning, performing what-if scenarios, analysis, and problem solving.
Business intelligence tools and Big Data techniques may be hot buzzwords, but their tools and techniques have not been
widely adopted. Instead companies ?nd themselves mired in many different forms of custom reporting, including standard
reports delivered by software applications, spreadsheets, custom SQL extracts, and specialized reporting tools.
Complicating things further is the reality that decision making can vary signi?cantly from one department to another.
Different data may be required, analysis requirements differ, and the availability of support changes by the level of priority.
In this paper we will examine why business intelligence has not replaced the myriad approaches companies are using today.
We will then look at how Kronos has approached using business intelligence in a more effective way to improve a company’s
ability to utilize its labor data more effectively and achieve competitive advantage.
Why is building and maintaining custom reports so dif?cult?
At some point, the standard reporting delivered by a software application falls short — often when reporting requirements
mean pulling data from two or more sources. At this point, the journey into custom reporting begins.
Spreadsheets are undoubtedly the most common tool used in custom reporting and analysis today. Their ease of use and
?exibility has made them a go-to resource in almost every organization. Like any tool, spreadsheets are great at certain
jobs, but less effective as they are extended beyond their intended capabilities.
Spreadsheets struggle to handle large volumes of data without slowing performance. Their use of pivot tables to “slice and
dice” information is perfectly acceptable for an analyst who lives in the data, but notoriously dif?cult for a casual user.
Spreadsheets are prone to error, whether through accidently entering the wrong data or because of how the spreadsheet
creator decides to make assumptions and display results. As a result, users of the data are often subject to “multiple
versions of the truth.”
Spreadsheets are challenging to distribute and secure. Since they are primarily designed for individual use they have limited
functionality for distributing and securing data across an enterprise.
Finally, spreadsheets have no extraction, transformation, or loading (ETL) functionality to move data around from various
sources. Data extraction and transformation is often a company’s largest challenge. If there is any doubt about this at your
company, just ask the person responsible for creating reports or extracting data. They typically have a very large backlog.
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
4
Obtaining and transforming data is often considered to be 50–80 percent of any reporting or analysis project. There are
common causes for this and they are interdependent:
• Reports are often built from more than one data source and generated from transactional applications such as Enterprise
Resource & Planning (ERP), Timekeeping or Human Resources Management systems, or any of the other solutions that
automate business and manufacturing processes
• The organization of transactional data is optimized for highly ef?cient input and output in small quantities
• There is often signi?cant logic for interpreting data within the application that is not available to those trying to extract
the data for other purposes, such as reporting
• The data is not “clean.” By their nature, transactions are discrete, allowing them to not interfere with each other if
they’re not perfect. Reporting and analysis requires much cleaner and consistent data elements
• To improve the performance of the transaction system and minimize hardware requirements, the amount of data stored
within their own individual database is limited
This optimization of data by each transactional application and the increase in unstructured data is the root cause of the
reporting and analysis challenge. The custom report writer must:
• Translate business requirements into metrics and data requirements
• Understand the data model of the transactional database and the logic behind the values in the data
• Troubleshoot existing reports due to exceptions in the data that are introduced by users or logic in the application that
the report writer had not seen before in previous data sets
• Carefully craft the SQL calls so that they don’t impact the performance of the transactional system
• Maintain reports as the versions of the application change and the data model evolves
• Implement a security and distribution model to make sure the appropriate people see the appropriate data
• Begin storing data somewhere else in order to generate reports, including data over long periods of time
• If unstructured data is required, determine the patterns required to extract value from it
• Manage internal customer expectations about report development limitations and timeframes
What does Business Intelligence provide that custom reporting can’t?
The shortcomings of spreadsheets and the need for clean, ?exible data models gave birth to the Business Intelligence
market. Business Intelligence applications have been very successful because when they are fully functional they deliver
high levels of value. Here are some functional examples of what Business Intelligence can do that is dif?cult for a custom
report writer to accomplish:
• Provide many built-in SQL functions that allow the data to be manipulated in various ways: summing up, drilling down,
looking at ?exible time periods, projecting future values, calculating new metrics, and statistical analysis to identify
patterns and relationships
• Store and report on large quantities of data without impacting source systems
• Provide visualization capability that allows large amounts of data to be easily interpreted
• Incorporate ?exible dashboard design environments that allow the organization of many reports and graphs by role
• Provide a security model to limit who has access to what data
• Optimize the way data is organized and presented so that one set of data can be used by a broader set of users
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
5
• Deliver a highly interactive interface using features such as prompts, ?lters, drill downs, thresholds, and alerting
• Provide a simpli?ed report building interface that doesn’t require technical knowledge, reducing the load on technical
staff and speeding time to information
But even with all this power and ef?ciency in delivering information, business intelligence systems have not been widely
adopted. It’s not uncommon for a business intelligence system to be purchased by an organization to solve a speci?c
challenge, with an eye toward expanding its use throughout the organization over time. But for many companies, years go by
with little progress. Two challenges come into play: the ?rst is access to the data required to report and analyze on a given
topic. The second is the scarce human resources available to take a business problem and use the available data to solve it.
Ready-to-use data and a library of solutions
Kronos recognizes and addresses these challenges in two ways. First, we provide signi?cant amounts of data from our
transactional database in a ready-to-use format. Second, we have developed a library of ready to use Plug-ins that solve
common labor-related business problems.
Preparing data for use in a Business Intelligence application is the largest and most resource intensive part of making the
solution operational. ETL handles the major cleansing, organizing, and calculating operations, which are the same steps
that create stumbling blocks for custom report developers.
By making transactional data available in a business intelligence environment, Kronos can reduce or eliminate the individual
development efforts required to prepare data, thereby dramatically reducing the time and cost of getting a Business
Intelligence environment operational. In addition to the economy of scale that comes with a Business Intelligence provider
delivering the data, Kronos has additional advantages that customers can bene?t from:
• Understanding logic in the transactional application so data cleansing is primarily limited to those exceptions generated
by user input
• Access to a broad set of user requirements so that it can provide the pre-de?ned attributes and metrics used in
reporting and analysis that most customers want
• Visibility into the speci?c transactional data model changes ahead of application releases so it can adjust the ETL
process, ensuring reports continue to work as designed
• The ability to develop a sophisticated method of trickling incremental data out of the transactional database without
impacting performance
• The ability to pass the security model from the Kronos Workforce Timekeeper application to the Workforce Analytics
application so there is no incremental maintenance of security pro?les
• Metadata layer that provides business terminology to describe data rather than using the technical table and column
names, as is often found in do-it-yourself ETLs
With Kronos developing and maintaining the ETL, customers save 50–80 percent of the effort of their Business Intelligence
project, improving the ROI, and providing more data to end users than an internal project could ever hope to achieve.
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
6
This pre-built approach still leaves data work to be completed with each project. Often external data, such as production
results, must be merged with labor data to understand the impact of labor on the business. While this takes effort, in
terms of labor reporting, only a small slice of operational data needs to be sourced and reconciled with the cleansed and
organized Kronos data, keeping the project scope reasonable and still delivering signi?cant ROI.
With the data in place you can begin delivering high-value information to managers and employees faster, more consis-
tently, and less expensively.
The data is cleansed and available, do you have the resources to analyze it?
Business Intelligence solutions offer many development features, from plug-ins that support R (a popular language for
programming Big Data analysis), to simpli?ed report editing, and formatting tools that allow relatively non-technical users
to create reports and dashboards on their own.
If you visited an organization that has created a datamart full of cleansed and well-organized data and asked who is creating
reports and analyses you most likely would ?nd a Business Intelligence Analyst. Larger companies and those highly depen-
dent on data might also have a Data Scientist.
These employees are still required to take business requirements and map them to the data available to create solutions.
They typically have strong technical skills in order to understand the way data is organized and make changes or additions
to the datamart.Employees who have deep knowledge of data structures and the technical ability to edit schemas and data,
create ?lters, attributes, and metrics, and apply algorithms that solve business requirements are relatively rare and usually
command a high salary. A shortage of quali?ed candidates leads to another of the bottlenecks that prevent Business
Intelligence applications from being widely adopted.
This creates two challenges. First: companies are forced to prioritize their efforts, and often focus on creating dashboards
and sophisticated analysis for ?nancials and inventory. Middle management might only have access to status reports and
not the insight needed to make forward-looking decisions. Without guidance from the business intelligence application,
employees revert back to the technology they understand. Spreadsheets continue to proliferate and analysis is performed
on data that is easy to access rather than the best ?t.
Closing the last mile in business intelligence
To close the gap between a technology application and a solution that bene?ts your organization, Kronos has gone what is
commonly known as “the last mile.”
Because Kronos focuses solely on workforce management, it understands the business problems that HR, Payroll, Operations
and Finance face when it comes to labor. Our workforce management suite is the most complete source of labor data in an
enterprise. With these advantages in place, Kronos has added a number of complete solutions embedded in its product,
as well as extended solutions known as a Plug-ins, that leverage both the data and the business intelligence technology.
A Plug-in is a bundle of data, reports, and dashboards that solve a speci?c workforce-related challenge. It is a mini-
application that uses the functionality and data contained within the Kronos Workforce Analytics application. It’s what
a Business Intelligence Analyst or Data Scientist would create if they had the time and expertise to focus on workforce
management problems full time.
Is It Time to Evolve from Spreadsheets to Business Intelligence?
Kronos Incorporated 297 Billerica Road Chelmsford, MA 01824 +1 800 225 1561 +1 978 250 9800 www.kronos.com
© 2015, Kronos Incorporated. Kronos and the Kronos logo are registered trademarks and Workforce Innovation That Works is a trademark of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. For a full list of
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As an example of a complete solution included with Workforce Analytics, the Workforce Auditor analyzes what is known as
“dark data.” This is data that is typically not viewed by the user of a software application. In this case Workforce Auditor
is looking at the audit trails of timecards and schedules. Each entry represents any addition, deletion, or edit made to a
timecard or schedule — a small trade of time and money between an employee and the organization. But in aggregate,
these trades represent signi?cant amounts of time and money. Additionally, they are used as evidence of inappropriate
behaviors on the part of an employee or supervisor. The challenge for companies is that often these edits accumulate to
millions of entries a year. 99% of them are legitimate changes. But what about the ones that represent a policy compliance
issue, fraud, or abuse? Auditors often comb through these looking for these situations, but this is a dif?cult and laborious
project. More often, the aggrieved employee shows the company the way after they ?le a grievance or lawsuit. What if
there were a way to simplify the audit process so that potential issues could be identi?ed sooner? Workforce Auditor solves
this challenge. By using big data techniques, it identi?es clusters of activities that are different than others. By focusing
on these outliers, the challenge of digging into the details drops dramatically. Customers who use this today have found
examples of employees fraudulently changing their timecard to increase pay and supervisors modifying timecards to avoid
paying overtime to employees. In addition to abuse situations, companies have identi?ed situations where managers are
working around the system because the processes are not working for them. Understanding this allows the company to
improve processes and educate employees proactively rather than wait for costs to rise or performance to drop to a point
where traditional reporting catches it. Those that don’t take advantage of this data will have higher costs and an increased
risk of policy compliance issues.
Additional plug-ins are also available to analyze and provide guided decision making for other types of labor-related situa-
tions, including Workforce Planning, Labor Costing, Absence Analysis, Scheduling effectiveness, and Store Performance.
Each plug-in is an integrated solution that uses data to improve discovery and decision making around a speci?c set of
workforce challenges. Because they are delivered by Kronos Professional Services and Kronos Partners, they can also be
extended to provide individual tailoring based on an organization’s unique needs.
Kronos is using its access to data through its automation applications and understanding of workforce management to
provide a complete business intelligence solution. From data collection through process automation to data cleansing and
transformation, to reporting, analysis, and guided decision making, Kronos is able to provide customers with a signi?cant
business intelligence advantage when it comes to workforce management.
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