25 June
By Divya Malik, Marketing DirectorâOracleÂ
The number of COVID-19 cases continues to rise around the world. Our lives have been turned upside down. The largest enforcement of remote workers in history is in full swing, and many of us are having to get used to managing our work and home responsibilities concurrently.
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As companies navigate through this time of uncertainty, information and analytics become more important than ever for HR leaders. Access to blended data between HR and finance provides HR leaders with pertinent insights into revenue targets, budgets, employee costs, and employee performance, all of which enable them to make informed decisions to support business objectives during these times of uncertainty.
Business leaders donât have the time or patience to wrestle with time-consuming reporting and siloed information. They need to be able to make decisions fast, be nimble and have confidence that the data they rely on can be trusted. Â
Here are five examples of how blending data from finance and HR can provide business leaders with unique insights.
Insights Driven by HR
1) Employee Health and SafetyâEmployees are a companyâs most valuable asset. Their well-being, good health, and safety are top of mind for any business leader; and so employers need to have the information they need to ensure that employees are well taken care of, as their well-being also enables business continuity. When it comes to employee safety, leaders need deep insights from available employee data. In addition to people analytics through internal systems, the ability to blend reliable third-party data, such as from the CDC or COVID-19 dashboards, feeds into available employee data, which then allows leaders to create visualizations and see how many employees are in hotspots (epicenters of the pandemic) and also know which other areas might be impacted.
Incident tracking enables HR leaders to analyze trends and identify reported incidents. For instance, you can track data and conduct incident investigations into certain work locations where a high number of employees have reported flu-like symptoms or where customers/visitors to the premises have tested positive. This allows management to take the right action, mitigate the issue, and keep employees safe by shutting down the vulnerable location, ordering additional tests, or adding replacement workersâthereby limiting risk for the rest of the employees and the business.
There are five areas that we encourage CMOs to look at. The first is, what are my future-back platforms that will lead growth for the next 5 to 10 years? Taking today’s profit pools and forecasting them present forward just won’t capture the level of disruption that’s impacting these industries.
2) Workforce CompositionâAnalytics into the geographic distribution of the workforce and employee composition can further inform leaders in which employees may be at higher risk. For example, knowing that a large percentage of the workforce in the Houston area is older than 55 helps direct additional attention to that location. This knowledge allows companies to shift capacity workloads to regions that are less impacted and keep the business running smoothly while meeting service-level agreements and overall productivity targets. It also helps with understanding if business-critical employees are required at specific locations, whether they’re required to come into the workplace, and which locations will have to remain open to accommodate them.
3) PerformanceâIn-depth performance analytics can help leaders understand who their top performers are and how that talent provides current and future contributions to the organization. Leaders will be well informed to answer questions about their top talent should they need to make any workforce adjustments. Leaders can provide incentives to retrain their top talent and take advantage of the job market when the situation improves. Steps taken today should and will have a lasting impact on the future.Â
When market conditions and needs change this quickly, leaders need to be nimble and make necessary adjustments to seize opportunities. An in-depth understanding of workforce analytics helps steer the company in the right direction. For example, understanding the available skills in the organization helps if re-skilling the workforce becomes necessary, as has been seen recently in several industries. As an example, some food services companies have invested in online/self-paced learning programs to prepare their staff for life after the shutdown. This is allowing them to learn new skills such as safe food handling practices, how they will connect with guests using protective gear, using online technologies in a no-touch world where they can guide guests for self-ordering (in lieu of paper menus).
Besides just HR analytics, no business decisions can be made without knowing the current and future financial impact.
Insights Driven by Finance
4) Revenue DataâGetting a clear view of revenue targets, both global and geo-specific, understanding overhead related to staffing for each geography as well as operational costs for each geography, are all important. Juxtaposing these with relevant data ingested from feeds updating the pandemicâs impact on various locations worldwide enables leaders to understand potential revenue impacts to their organization. They can take informed action around which projects need to be scaled back and provide recommendations on staffing adjustments. They can also assess the financial impact to the business in the event of a furlough. As seen in the healthcare and food retail industries, there was an unexpected requirement to increase staffing to meet market needs. A single-dashboard view of financial and HR data will help leaders prepare for the future when they will need to scale back or scale back up.
5) Payroll DataâHR leaders need to have detailed analytics on earnings information across their employees, enabling them to accurately trend, forecast and manage employee salary budgets.  Payroll analytics can also provide deep insights into staffing capacity and performance. In the event of an unexpected requirement to increase or decrease staffing, analytics can provide detailed insights such as any tax implications for your organization and the impact of increased headcount on other support roles such as IT. Armed with this information, leaders can weigh options accordingly.
Creating scenario modeling with current variables and looking at new projections will determine the right path forward. The return to normalcy is still uncertain but having a single dashboard view of financial and HR data, the right tools and actionable insights can help leaders make informed decisions today and carry the business forward successfully.
To help businesses get the right insights and meet these business needs, Oracle has recently announced new cloud solutions for human resources and finance. Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics enables HR leaders to quickly access data from Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) to get better insights into their employees and easily pull in third-party data as well as data from other departmental sources such as finance, sales, and marketing. Additionally, Oracle Fusion ERP Analytics empowers finance teams and leaders who are using Oracle Cloud ERP with best practice, prebuilt key performance indicators to easily monitor financial performance.
 To learn how you can benefit from Oracle Analytics, visit oracle.com/analytics.Â
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