Plenty of organizations look for ways to preserve funds by doing things themselves rather than outsourcing; however, the DIY route often sacrifices quality, and workforce analytics metrics are no exception. Whether to save money or avoid entering into a contract, many HR teams attempt to build their own workforce and people analytics solutions. Many figure that since they control or manage the people systems, they can collect, analyze, and present the necessary information themselves.
It might seem like a great idea at first, but what most don’t realize is how much work building a solution actually requires. If you’re thinking about building your own workforce analytics solution, continue reading to discover the challenges you’re bound to face along the way. All of our clients started here and ultimately found a better way.
Figuring it out yourself
Without a turnkey workforce and people analytics solution that comes with hundreds of built-in metrics and KPIs, you’re left to deal with the painstaking details of collecting and transforming data into meaningful workforce analytics metrics yourself. Even with the latest cloud visualization tools, you sacrifice quality by manually maneuvering Excel files and other formats as well as tediously merging and cleaning data. In addition to risking the quality of data, you’ll be spending significant amounts of time on details that otherwise would be painless with a proper solution.
Reporting will also become a frequent headache as you manually create presentations for leaders with PowerPoint; static views like these go out of date quickly and are only useful in the short term. Furthermore, scaling these efforts quickly becomes unsustainable. What appear to be relatively simple tasks become daunting when you opt to tackle workforce analytics yourself.
Relying on IT to build dashboards
Your IT department is just as busy as you are. Although they have business intelligence tools, relying on them to build dashboards will take more time as IT usually won’t prioritize the needs of HR. When IT does get back to you, the deliverables will be IT centered and difficult for HR and business leaders to use and discover. Dashboards built with IT-centric tools will only scratch the surface of the real workforce analytics metrics you’re after and won’t scale to the security and scope limitations that different user groups need.
Using your Human Capital Management System
Most Human Capital Management (HCM) systems such as Workday, Ultimate, and ADP have integrated reporting; however, they don’t tell the whole story if they’re not integrated with your talent management and application tracking systems. Your multiple people systems and vendors are spread across the cloud, which means that your data is separate and isolated. Your HCM is an island itself that doesn’t easily communicate with other systems such as Cornerstone, SumTotal, or Taleo.
Because of this, you’re left to export data and create mini data warehouses using other tools, costing you more time and energy than needed. If you’re already automating your HCM solution, why not automate the collection and analysis of your workforce and people analytics?
Choose ZeroedIn
It goes without saying that building a workforce and people analytics solution yourself is more trouble than it’s worth. Luckily, there’s a better way with ZeroedIn, a sustainable workforce and people analytics solution built to transform your people data into powerful insights.
ZeroedIn’s advanced analytics technology consistently does more with your workforce and business data, giving you insights about every layer of your workforce. Our solution can be tailored to your needs, helping you save money through a customized solution instead of overpaying for big-ticket software. We also remedy your resource constraints with our Workforce Analytics Concierge to provide you with real insights, value, and ROI.
We’ll take care of the details so that you can focus your efforts on using the workforce insights to make decisions. Click to learn more about how ZeroedIn’s team of data scientists and product specialists can help you today.
