Data-driven companies are on everyone’s lips, including yours. This aligns with the current trend, but it largely depends on the quality and rapid availability of employee master data. The data landscape in HR management often evolves over the years, leading to data silos, duplicate maintenance, and occasional workarounds. This unintended complexity has a negative impact on operational processes and workflows within your human resource management environment and indirectly affects your entire company. At first glance, this may seem exaggerated, but upon closer examination, it is exactly what happens on a daily basis in all areas of a company.
When it comes to data and profound change, the capacity to implement projects often falls short. To prevent this, based on our experience, it is advisable for management to take the lead in projects related to employee master data. Employee master data serves as the foundation for much more than initially assumed. These five reasons clearly support the approach we propose:
1. Implementation of a data culture in the company
The journey to becoming a data-driven company is not fast and often not easy. It is characterized by a profound cultural shift throughout the entire organization. The first step is to develop a data culture that aligns with the business activities and successfully implement it. This is closely related to data understanding and data competence. It means that master data is uniformly understood and interpreted throughout the company, and the necessary databases and tools are available. Only when all employees work together towards the same goal can the transformation to a data-driven company be successful and permanently embedded in the corporate culture.
2. Reliability of reporting in HR management
Reports and analyses in the context of HR management are the foundation for operational and strategic decisions in this area and in other business areas as well. Often, employee master data is manually consolidated, which leads to long lead times and a high susceptibility to errors, and some information may not be available due to the heterogeneous data landscape. These inadequate conditions are far from optimal for making sound and accurate decisions. Only with constantly available, complete, and reliable employee master data from a central master data repository, you have the necessary information to make solid, data-driven decisions.
3. Efficient digitization in all business areas
If your company is to remain competitive in the long term, a digitalization initiative is essential. The quality of your employee master data determines how efficiently and error-free your digital processes run in all business areas. Users are always necessary for these processes, and their foundation is the employee master data. If the quality of this data is poor, the processes built upon it, such as invoice approvals, time tracking, or identity and access management, will not function properly.
4. Mitigating the impact of the skills shortage
In certain industries, such as IT, the skills shortage has been a topic of concern for some time, but currently, more and more industries are being affected by this phenomenon. The foundation for finding the right employees and retaining them in the long term lies in your employee master data and the employee lifecycle. The better your employee master data is, the more efficiently you can provide appropriate support to your employees. This support begins with pre-boarding and continues until the employee leaves your company. With low turnover due to employee loyalty, the associated costs of recruiting are also minimized. Finding new employees is time-consuming and expensive.
5. Efficiency and profitability of operational activities
Your employee master data is the foundation for all operational processes and activities that take place within HR management. This encompasses a wide range of operational tasks, such as time tracking, payroll processing, shift planning, or workload calculation. The better the quality of your employee master data, the more efficient, faster, and error-free these operational processes will be. Indirectly, this increases efficiency and profitability throughout the entire company, as mentioned earlier, employee master data plays a fundamental role in all business areas.
Before completely rebuilding the IT landscape surrounding your HR management, consider implementing our personnel master data management solution. The central Enterprise Suite integrates into your existing IT landscape, regardless of prevailing systems and vendors. This all-in-one enterprise software combines central data consolidation, data storage, data management, data hub, workflow, and reporting system. In doing so, you establish both a shared data understanding and the necessary data competence within your company, which are crucial for successfully establishing a data-driven company culture.
