The recession is here…

And the cost cutting season has begun. We know the drill: across the board budget cuts, new projects delayed, the organization chart de-layered, voluntary retirement packages and, of course, reduction in force and severance packages.

This is not just an exercise in reigning in escalating costs. The more agile organizations also take such opportunities to align their corporate workforce to the new realities of their business and acquire new employees with the skills that are more suited to their  core competencies and evolving business focus.

This brings into focus the need to retrieve and analyze information about employee performance, learning, compensation, benefits, payroll, time management, and recruiting. As with most modules, there are plenty of pre-built HR Analytic applications like Oracle Daily Hr Intelligence, Oracle BI Applications (Siebel Analytics) – HR Analytic module, Cognos Performance Applications, Business Objects HR Analytic Application, to name the leading few. However, more often than not, you will find that these applications work very well if you haven’t customized your HR application (be it Oracle HRMS or SAP R/3 HR module). They will lack some of the most critical information of your business that you have carefully stored in the customizations of the ERP application as I am experiencing while analyzing an Oracle HRMS implementation at one of my clients. After careful evaluation and cost-benefit analyses, we decided to build a custom data mart, rather than buying a pre-built BI application from Oracle or BO. I will focus this series on building the HR data mart from Oracle eBusiness Suite, based on this recent experience.

Building a HR data mart is considerably more difficult than building other common data marts like a Sales data mart or Finance data mart.  The challenges are many, and not all of them are technical. For example, although HR is the second largest (after Finance) provider of information for internal managers, it has a much tighter budget and a smaller cast of analysts to provide you with good analytic requirements. HR analysts are also very wary of sharing “sensitive” information like salary, benefits, and bonuses about the company’s employees. Thirdly, the skills inventory in HR is rarely taken very seriously and hence HR often struggles to gain the focus and attention of senior management for their BI initiatives. From a data warehousing perspective, extracting HR data is more challenging if auditing and date tracking features are enabled in Oracle (which is true over 80% of the time). Moreover, security in HR systems is far more stringent, given the sensitive data that these systems hold. Security in HR goes beyond standard user or responsibility-level security for system access or even restrictions on data visibility based on the organization chart. I will write more about it in a later post, when we talk about the overall design of the data mart.

The HR data mart, particularly in the context of Oracle eBusiness suite has a rather large functional footprint. You need to understand several functional areas / modules to be able to design a data mart that is effective in meeting the reporting / analytic goals of your users. Of particular interest are: HRMS (Core – Employees, Recruiting, etc), Advanced Benefits, Incentive Compensation, iRecuitment, Payroll, Time and Labor, Performance Management, Learning Management and Workforce Scheduling. Although it is not common for a single company to require analytics for all these subject areas, a subset of this (HRMS, Performance Management, and Payroll) is very typical. Most companies have specialized HR reporting needs, for example, on immigration – that are not covered readily in a standard implementation of Oracle HRMS. More on that as we get to the analytics.

Before anything else, here is a quick map of how this series on Human Resources Analytics will be laid out:

Part 1: Overview of Oracle HRMS
Part 2: Key analytics for HR
Part 3: HR data mart design and considerations
Part 4: Source system, ETL tips

Stay tuned…