In terms of HRO's awareness and use of business intelligence software, Bristol & West is typical of many large organisations...
People Management (article updated June 2002), 25 Feb 1999
The fiercely competitive market for financial services means that Bristol & West, which has assets of nearly £11 billion and employs 2,800 people across the UK, cannot afford to ignore anything that might give it an edge, however short-lived, over its rivals.
Until recently, access to data held in its PS2000 personnel system has largely been restricted to members of the HR function. But with the roll-out of Cognos PowerPlay, one of the most popular business analysis tools, line managers will soon be able to get hold of information themselves, freeing personnel's time to concentrate on strategic issues such as succession planning, identifying skills gaps and benchmarking.
Within HR, business intelligence software promises to reduce the time it takes to generate reports and improve the quality of information within them, according to Richard Gallettly, Bristol & West's group employee relations manager.
At present, his team spends two to three days every month preparing a report for the board. Although this includes information on issues such as equal opportunities and absence rates, it doesn't look at how these relate to mortgage sales per full-time equivalent employee, for example.
Nor can it offer much evidence to justify training investment. "We spend a lot of money on training, but we're not always sure that all of it is really business-focused. A lot of it is based on guesswork," Gallettly says. Being able to track the effect of training on revenue growth, for instance, would provide valuable feedback and help to counter the perception of HR as a "high-cost function with little value", he adds.
Gallettly also hopes that it won't be long before employee attitude surveys are carried out online. Apart from being time-consuming to process, paper-based results make it hard to pinpoint the relationship between morale and staff turnover of absence levels. One particular problem Bristol & West currently faces is that of too high a churn rate among customer service staff who have been with the company for less than a year.
"One solution might be to offer higher salaries," he says. "But in a business where there is a big focus on driving down costs, you aren't going to get extra money by relying on a hunch."
Measured response By dramatically reducing the time and money spent on managing human capital, the latest HR software systems are freeing up more time for strategic thinking
