Enterprise Analytics for Human Resources
Today, it’s more apparent than ever that an enterprise’s success depends heavily on effective Human Resources (HR) operations and an empowered workforce. HR plays a huge role in retaining top talent, delivering insights into the workforce, and supporting strategic decision-making.
HR needs to create effective headcount plans and to do that, they require assessing and managing headcount and tenure, diversity, salary and performance, as well as employee satisfaction.
The Benefits of a Single Solution for HR
- Consolidate data from across the business. Instead of your data being spread across multiple systems in various departments, an enterprise analytics platform ropes everything together, in real-time.
- Information is received in a timely manner. HR is incredibly fast-paced, and teams are incredibly busy. Having instant insights at their fingertips is crucial, so HR can respond to rapidly changing business conditions.
- Detecting trends and acting in the moment. HR managers know how important it is to detect future outcomes, such as flight risk or salary budget. That’s why having the right tools to help discover possible future outcomes is so important.
The best enterprise analytics solution for HR specialists is anything that offers a large suite of products that enables teams to expand on their HR strategies. These typically include:
- Talent management
- Employee experience management
- HR analytics
- Workforce planning
However, to become truly future proof, we also recommend businesses look for a solution that offers self-service business intelligence and planning for HR, so that their team can get real-time insights to make quick and strategic decisions for their company.
Here are some things you should look for when evaluating your enterprise analytics solution for your HR team.
1. Augmented Analytics
Augmented analytics is an invaluable tool. It helps HR professionals quickly surface answers to their business questions, such as “how’s my field performing?”. This helps save time sifting through data. Natural language processing is considered by many to be a “must-have” feature. It makes it easier for business users to get relevant insights or smart predictive features—helping professionals see workforce trends that are automatically updated as new information becomes available.
Featured Resource: How Advanced Analytics Solve Employee Churn

2. One Single Source of Truth
Make sure the solution you go with allows you to consolidate all your data so you can see a 360-degree view of your entire enterprise data, all in one place. Your solution should provide your team with the ability to connect to any other relevant data sources, even if it’s from a vendor’s competitor. This removes any manual data entry and saves your team a massive amount of time. All that enterprise data in one place means that decisions can be made based on the whole picture, rather than just a small part.
3. Collaborative Enterprise Planning
Robust planning features help your team in areas like salary planning, workforce planning, and making future forecasts. For example, if an HR manager is looking to forecast hiring needs and wants to see how many employees would quit in the upcoming year, augmented analytics capabilities for planning features could quickly analyze your historical data and generate predictions, provide insights into correlations that might show cause for higher attrition rates, and show steps to take to rectify those issues.
Payroll analysis is also a lot easier with the right cloud solution; you should be able to quickly get a clear snapshot of payroll and get suggestions on distributions and allocations.
Featured Resource: How Predictive Forecasting Can Benefit Your Business
4. Data Visualizations
Data needs to be understood for decisions to be made. Data visualization helps bring all that data to life and makes it easier for you and decision-makers to discover insights.
HR teams need to leverage data visualizations to analyze attrition and hiring trends, training spending, diversity details, and any other relevant workforce data. For example, in SAP Analytics Cloud, our data visualizations are called “stories,” and teams can create multiple dashboards for the areas they want to track – one dashboard for recruiting and talent management, one for headcount, and one for salary planning. This way, by navigating to the relevant page users can get at-a-glance insights on trends and adjust business activities accordingly.

We’ve really only just skimmed the surface. If you want to learn more about how to make strategic decisions faster for your HR team, be sure to check out our enterprise analytics solutions for HR.