The client:
One of the nation’s top ten wireless service carriers, serving more than 6 million customers in multiple states. The company operates on a customer satisfaction strategy, meeting customer needs by providing a comprehensive range of wireless products and services, superior customer support and a high-quality network.

Whether it’s meeting the profitability expectations and demands of its shareholders, worrying about the product value, quality, and reliability for its customers; or managing the needs and wants of employees as it relates to human productivity; companies today must juggle many different aspects while efficiently maneuvering their global operations. At the center of all this in most companies is the human resources executive—a maestro of control, balancing the needs of the company with the needs of all the human capital the company has invested in. While most departments in an organization have clear set goals and objectives—sales sells things, manufacturing builds things etc.—HR departments stand alone in balancing the three top needs of any corporate enterprise.

Called the balanced triangle, HR departments are responsible for meeting the strategic goals of the company as it relates to three key areas:

• Customers
• Company
• Employees

To the layman, these three items of the balanced triangle might not seem to have all that in common, but to the HR professional finding the balance in meeting the needs of all three has a significant influence on the success of reaching its goals. Customers need to be happy in order for the company to be profitable, which if it is the shareholders are generally happy, and behind it are the employees throughout the organization who make it all happen—if they’re specific needs are met. A well functioning organization has strategic goals and objectives it is always trying to meet. The HR department’s main responsibility is meeting the needs of its human resources and meeting the needs of the company—almost a referee of sorts that tries to keep all the needs in balance without one having an advantage over the other.

The biggest challenge HR executives face in maintaining this balance is the difficulty in monitoring all of the details related to human resources, or even deciding what the relevant items to monitor would be. Items such as: corporate cultural, employee surveys, performance against corporate values, employee rewards, total head count, functional head count, head count within a given market, product category, industry segment, geographic distribution of human capital, productivity per employee, revenue or cost per employee, employee satisfaction, employee performance, salary budget distribution, attrition, patents per R&D staff, employees by region etc.

Each of these in-and-of-themselves pose challenges due to the large of amounts of data they create. Combined with the fact that as relationships and synergy between each of these areas becomes a key performance indicator as well, the mountain of data and information continues to grow and becomes a logistical nightmare for busy HR executives who need to make critical decisions that benefit the company in achieving goals and objectives. Not an easy task coming from hundreds of spreadsheets, database searches, etc.

Monitoring all of the statistics and information needed to functionally manage human resources for the achievement of organizational goals.

The solution:
One of the best solutions to increasing HR management efficiency is to be able to make instant critical decisions on any element of the HR process anywhere and at anytime. An LG Consulting BI enterprise dashboard allows HR professionals to not only monitor every aspect of the organizations HR needs and requirements, but will in fact validate their instincts when making company crucial decisions. With LG Consulting, executives were able determine what the most important key performance indicators (KPI) were that they wanted to monitor and to keep them completely in the know regarding HR. LG Consulting graphically displayed KPIs in real-time so executives could make critical decisions with confidence for their global operations. It centered HR information from all corporate sources into a single graphical view giving executives the power to ‘know’ anywhere and anytime the information they need.

Technologies:
The LG Consulting Business Intelligence team engaged in a full strategic assessment of the client’s needs and evaluated the tools and processes already in place within the organization. After several weeks of meetings with senior executives and department leaders, the LG Consulting BI team was able to identify business metrics and key performance indicators (KPI’s) for the new solution that would accomplish the client’s business objectives. LG Consulting ultimately recommended Microsoft SQL Server as the BI platform to replace the existing Excel and Access data reporting and analysis solution. In addition, LG Consulting recommended Microsoft Office SharePoint Server as a solid platform on which to build the new HR BI Enterprise portal. The client's solution primarily leveraged the Content Management, Document Management, and Enterprise Search capabilities of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server platform. In addition LG Consulting extended the capabilities of the Microsoft SharePoint platform through the creation of Custom Web Parts specific to the client needs.

The LG Consulting BI team developed a central data warehouse through an Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process to automate the data aggregation process. Microsoft SQL Server and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) serve as the foundation for the data warehouse providing centralized data storage and high-performance reporting, providing the distributed branches with easy access to the data. LG Consulting then implemented SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to serve the data warehouse information to the client’s key managers and decision makers. LG Consulting implemented Reporting Services Authentication to enable information security within the reports and leveraged the SQL Report Builder component of SSRS to provide the client with ad-hoc reporting capability.