U.S. businesses are facing unprecedented challenges, ranging from keeping up with rapidly changing customer demands to adapting to a changing labor market and economic pressures. Data-driven decision making is critical to finding success in this era. However, to deliver vital insights to stakeholders, businesses must build an effective data pipeline that uses technology and business processes to move raw data from key sources to storage and analysis.
The right pipeline practices can move mountains for your business, acting as the foundation to automate labor-intensive data management tasks while maintaining a high standard of data security, positioning your team to address initiatives that will make a real difference for your business.
Every company has some form of data management. It may be manual, automated, intentional or de-facto. A valuable pipeline is one that delivers all relevant, necessary information for decision making and streamlined business processes. To achieve that value, each business must decide whether to work with a specialized partner or rely on internal resources and time to build and maintain an effective pipeline practice.
Automation
Comprehensive tools that help you build a productive data pipeline support a workflow that effectively manages your data including automation, extraction, transformation, and loading your data (ETL). This empowers your team to focus on more important tasks like long-term implementations of business transformations or continuous improvement of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals.
Building your data management strategy around a great pipeline workflow can also reduce the cost of data processing and analytics by automating time consuming tasks. This includes eliminating the need for manual data entry and analysis. Your team could use these time-savings to complete mission critical tasks that are very likely simmering at the bottom of their to-do lists.
Data Accuracy
A working process for administering a data pipeline allows you to fix the errors one time then implement automated rules to transform data over time to eliminate 80-90% of the manual intervention needed to clean and update data. Additionally, implementing a data streamlining system can help ensure that HR data is available and on hand to provide key insights into all aspects of the employee journey and life-cycle, from hire to retirement. This also typically requires processes to clean and integrate data from multiple, disparate sources.
Improved Efficiency
One way to realize ROI from efficiently handling your data? While the labor shortage continues, talent retention is still at the forefront of hiring issues for the foreseeable future. Streamlining your business’s ability to unify and visualize data will create opportunities for reallocating resources into activities designed to retain talent like skills acquisition, faster onboarding, mentoring and leadership development programs.
This workflow can also streamline HR processes when paired with data management software. Good pipeline practices will use software solutions to automate some of the data-intensive tasks in performance evaluations and employee onboarding. With an effective pipeline, analytics tools can deliver insights in near real-time, which is particularly useful for organizations that need to act on data as soon as new information becomes available.
Better Decision-Making
Purpose-built tools and strategies for building an operative data pipeline allow HR teams to focus on improving the employee experience while removing time-intensive processes of gathering and aggregating data for analysis. With better decision-making, you can expect better outcomes that lead to real business impact. This might include higher retention rates, improvements in performance, deeper engagement, and a higher customer satisfaction rate that leads to repeat business and retained clients.
Creating a functional pipeline can lead to organizations seeing gaps or shortcoming much more quickly than before. This helps teams react, adjust, and implement counter measures before major issues arise.
Scalability
Having the right model, process, and infrastructure for your data pipeline process will allow you to scale Data volumes increase as an organization grows, and solid practices for administering your pipeline make it easier for HR teams to manage employee data.
Effective organization-wide data management can also facilitate collaboration between different teams and departments more easily by providing a central platform for storing and accessing data. When your entire team can access the data they need, you can count on better success rates. Multiple brains on a problem are better than just one, after all.
Data Security
A strong data pipeline will help ensure that HR data is secure, as processes can include measures such as encryption and access controls. This will also assure your team that they are in compliance with relevant laws and regulations and automatically track and record HR-related activities. There are also security benefits in ETL services as automatically cleaning and transforming your data reduces the risk of errors and inconsistencies.
The Power of the Pipeline
Having a people analytics provider with powerful tools for managing your data pipeline has many benefits, including the expertise and ongoing support that you may need. Additionally, the time-savings of a customized, cost-effective solution will help drive growth for your organization.
When you implement a data pipeline, you can expect a notable business impact and better performance from your analytics tools. Trust an industry leader as a partner on your path to better data practices.
