It’s time to move your HR department away from Excel

The modern HR department continues to evolve, requiring ever-more-advanced data analytics capability to enable effective decision-making. Better management of payroll information, cost centres, divisional splits, performance management, staff scheduling, demand forecasting and more necessitates technology that can deliver key insights.

Cubewise, enabled by IBM Planning Analytics / TM1, is well positioned to take your HR department to the next level. It’s time to move away from traditional spreadsheets towards a dynamic database environment that eliminates guesswork and delivers trusted results, every time.

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Common challenges

Salary planning
Optimising your salary planning across different divisions, cost centres and currencies can make for complex and intricate HR processes.
- A lack of flexibility
  When you’re running salary planning workflows using spreadsheets, you quickly run into constraints in terms of agility and flexibility. Shifting personnel across units, cost centres, countries and divisions is difficult and leaves processes prone to human error and version control issues. Traditional spreadsheets are simply not set up for dynamic planning and forecasting purposes.
- Calculation errors
  A poor planning workflow can result in duplicated costs, inaccurate salary mappings and other errors that result in misstated salary numbers. This has knock-on effects in terms of personnel development, performance measurement, ROI calculations and staff planning capabilities. This can place further pressure on already constrained resources.
- Dynamic salary planning
  Cubewise and IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 offer a powerful technology solution that offers dynamic planning across a wide range of different contexts. Instead of relying on a spreadsheet, our tools plug directly into all your data sources and allow for infinite configurability and drill-down transparency to offer the flexibility you need for sophisticated planning. With this data at your fingertips, you can make better decisions aligned with your strategy.
Staff scheduling
- Understanding staff capacity
  When you have a dynamic staff complement stretched across multiple projects, it can be challenging to obtain a true picture of how much capacity is being utilised at any one time. Understanding context is essential for future planning, as well managing staff morale and creating an enjoyable work culture. Add to this considerations of churn and new hires, and staff capacity becomes highly complex to manage.
- Poor recruitment decisions
  If you don’t get your staff capacity management right, you risk over or under hiring relative to your projects’ needs. This can inflate salary costs unnecessarily or limit your company’s ability to operate efficiently. Strategic hiring decisions must be made with the right information at hand if they are to be successful – and that only comes with advanced capacity calculations and transparency about staff deployments.
- Improved operational management
  Cubewise and IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 provide highly specialised operational management tools that can assist with nuanced staff management aligned directly to specific revenue and costs centres in your organisation. By surfacing data and making it accurate and reliable, you can hire strategically while still maintaining the working culture and ethos that encourage people to want to work for you.
Gap analysis
- Higher reporting demands
  With more and more requests coming from within the organisation, about personel, salaries, schedules, headcount, skills and seniority, the need for a solid reporting basis has increased. But looking at the additional requirements coming from both inside and outside to track and disclose insights around age, diversity, gender, background, etc., it is no longer a sustainable choice to keep running everything from Excel sheets.
- Drowning in numbers
  As more advanced technology makes its way into the workplace, certain jobs will be eliminated and others will be created. Don’t take the risk of being drowned in numbers and reports, taking away your potential to add value in so many other domains, besides number crunching. HR and financial controllers are, above all else, business partners who steer the direction of the organisation.
- Powerful forecasting capabilities
  Cubewise and IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 offer powerful forecasting capabilities that can bring financial and operational imperatives into one place, taking into account all relevant data. A changing operational plan and demand forecast should get easily translated into staffing and personel costs. It’s not a crystal ball but it does provide key insights for better long-term decision making, which can make a world of difference.

A lack of flexibility
When you’re running salary planning workflows using spreadsheets, you quickly run into constraints in terms of agility and flexibility. Shifting personnel across units, cost centres, countries and divisions is difficult and leaves processes prone to human error and version control issues. Traditional spreadsheets are simply not set up for dynamic planning and forecasting purposes.
Calculation errors
A poor planning workflow can result in duplicated costs, inaccurate salary mappings and other errors that result in misstated salary numbers. This has knock-on effects in terms of personnel development, performance measurement, ROI calculations and staff planning capabilities. This can place further pressure on already constrained resources.
Dynamic salary planning
Cubewise and IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 offer a powerful technology solution that offers dynamic planning across a wide range of different contexts. Instead of relying on a spreadsheet, our tools plug directly into all your data sources and allow for infinite configurability and drill-down transparency to offer the flexibility you need for sophisticated planning. With this data at your fingertips, you can make better decisions aligned with your strategy.

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Amazon Web Services case study

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