Table of contents
About the client
Our client is a UK-based company that supports institutions in meeting the country’s safety regulations.
The company provides services for organisations managing residential and public-sector buildings, ensuring they meet required standards through scheduled inspections and ongoing maintenance.
Business challenge
The client’s HR team regularly prepared reports on key workforce metrics, such as headcount, absences, and training status. However, with data spread across multiple systems, compiling these insights took around 100 hours each month.
Answering new queries could also take up to two business days, limiting managers’ ability to access information independently and make timely decisions.
The company saw an opportunity to boost efficiency and enhance reporting quality by introducing a more automated, data-driven approach.
From manual spreadsheets to a single source of truth
Recognising the need for greater accuracy and speed in HR reporting, the company decided to explore automation possibilities. They engaged us to design and deliver a new reporting solution based on the Microsoft’s Power BI.
Working closely with the client’s HR, IT and Finance teams, we identified the key data sources (a bespoke database, attendance records, training databases, and Excel sheets) and the crucial metrics that needed to be reported. Then we delivered a full suite of Power BI dashboards and reports, each designed to cover a specific HR domain.
Our collaboration in numbers
95% ROI
achieved within one year
98 hours
£30,000
in annual cost savings (equivalent to approx. 0.5 FTE)
12
dedicated HR Power BI reports and 1 executive dashboard delivered
3-5
analytical tabs, glossary, and documentation in each report
16 to 2
hours reduction in time-to-insight
43.5%
increase in BI maturity* (rising from 15% to 21.5%)
*Reflecting the organisation’s progress in using data, analytics, and BI tools to make informed decisions.
Real-time insights and smarter decisions
The solution gave HR professionals access to real-time, reliable data in one place, freeing up their time for complex analysis instead of manual data gathering.
Managers across the organisation could now explore relevant insights independently, supporting faster, more informed decisions and helping lay the groundwork for a data-driven culture.
The platform was built around a suite of 12 reports and a dashboard tailored to key areas of HR operations:
- Total Absence, Annual Leave, and Sickness Reports to track absence levels, monitor vacation usage, and identify sick leave trends.
- Headcount, Turnover/Attrition, and Leavers Reports to provide a dynamic, real-time workforce count and detailed insights into employee churn, including reasons for departure and tenure.
- Training Records and Project Allocation Reports to monitor training completion and compliance, and to align employees with projects for effective resource planning.
- Engineer/Manager Report: specialised report giving line managers a consolidated view of their team’s statistics, such as absences and training status.
- Fleet Availability Report: dedicated report tracking the allocation and availability of vehicles, a key KPI for a mobile workforce.
- BI Maturity & KPI Success Dashboards: these reports assess the organisation’s analytics maturity to establish a baseline for improvement and provided an executive summary of all key HR KPIs against their targets.
Each report was built with interactive filters, allowing users to slice data by time, department, and other crucial dimensions.
We ensured automatic data refreshes, eliminating manual updates.
Beyond building the reports, our team conducted training sessions with HR staff and key managers. By involving the HR team throughout the development process, we fostered a sense of ownership that helped drive user adoption and laid a foundation for a data-driven culture.
Moreover, we provided thorough documentation and an integrated glossary with each report so users could easily understand metric definitions.
Benefits of our collaboration
- Near-elimination of manual report preparation, reducing the monthly effort from 98 hours to almost zero through full automation.
- Annual cost savings of £30,000, the equivalent of 0.5 of a full-time employee, allowing staff to be reallocated to strategic activities like employee development.
- 8x faster time-to-insight, with the time needed to answer critical HR questions dropping from 16 to just 2 hours.
- A 43.5% increase in BI maturity, moving the HR department from a 15% to a 21.5% score and establishing a clear roadmap for future improvements.
- Increased trust and credibility for the HR department, as managers now have immediate access to a reliable single source of truth for all people data.
Technologies used in the project
