Spreadsheets may be easy – but they are not a Self Service System
by Lois MelbourneThe cost of using spreadsheets for unintended purposes can be enormous. While working with our prospects we find they are often distributing spreadsheets for data collection to hundreds of people. HR professionals and managers are asked to complete individual spreadsheets with data, such as who reports to which manager, which cost code is assigned to each department or individual, as well as verify other data elements that might be missing or inaccurate. THEN the spreadsheets are emailed back to a centralized team and the real fun begins; all those spreadsheets must be aggregated.
Let me take you through a common scenario for prospects and customers we are working with:
A company is moving to a new HRIS system. They are implementing SAP® ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) solution, and they need the hierarchy of their employees in order to go-live. They test the process of distributing spreadsheets to HR Partners to build the list of employees assigned to each manager. In this example the company has 10,000 employees.
The test of this manual process yielded the following cost projections:
150 HR Partners, spending 170 hours each on the project total 25,550 hours of effort. A conservative estimate of $30/hr for this portion of the project totals $765,000. But that is only the beginning of their problems.
4,000 managers must then spend at least 2 hours each on the project at a very low estimate of $40/hr. This will cost $320,000. We are now up to $1,085,000 just to get the hierarchy built within this organization.
Then two very scary elements become clear. They still need to aggregate the data from all those spreadsheets and the duration of the project prior to aggregation is sitting at 4 months. This pushes back their go-live date, which is completely unacceptable.
Enter Aquire. Our rapidly deployed solution using Unifi and OrgPublisher allows the HR partners to reduce their effort to less than 50 hours and the managers’ time to approximately 20 minutes. Because the solution is collaborative, the data is ready as soon as the managers review it. There is no further preparation required to pull the information together. Bottom line of the story really is a huge cost savings of over $850,000.
In addition to that savings they won’t have to spend the money to aggregate the data (that is done automatically via the nature of the Aquire solution); go-live can be achieved 75% quicker; everyone is happier and they now have tools to help them with their workforce planning and modeling, their org charting, and many other reporting and management needs.
Cheers,
Lois
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