CubeServ Enhances HR Analytics and Workforce Planning for Clients Using Amazon QuickSight

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This is a guest post by Alex Thompson from CubeServ. In this article, we explore how CubeServ transitioned from a proprietary BI solution to offering embedded analytics through PeoplePLAN, utilizing Amazon QuickSight. Established in Switzerland in 2001, CubeServ is a leading consulting firm that focuses on making data actionable and relevant for its clients. The company excels in providing advanced analytics solutions, ensuring that data insights are accessible and assisting clients in the ideation and execution of BI initiatives.

A vital component of our team is the HR Solutions group, dedicated to developing innovative solutions for operational workforce planning and other intricate HR challenges. Our latest offering, PeoplePLAN, is a SaaS solution designed to assist clients with their workforce planning needs. Launched in 2019, it incorporates our team’s extensive experience from numerous successful business analytics and warehousing projects.

In-house BI solutions often restrict usability and flexibility, a limitation that PeoplePLAN seeks to address. Designed to be functional out-of-the-box, PeoplePLAN empowers clients to better plan by tracking personnel costs and headcount, creating projections, and accessing essential data for informed decision-making.

Initially, we relied on an internal dashboard solution, but we soon realized its limitations concerning usability, flexibility, and data visualization. We began searching for an embedded analytics tool that would enable us to integrate custom dashboards easily and enhance data analysis for our clients. Since we were already utilizing the AWS ecosystem, Amazon QuickSight emerged as the obvious choice.

Utilizing Amazon QuickSight for Seamless Dashboard Integration

Our existing AWS stack made QuickSight the ideal choice due to its seamless integration with other AWS products and services. The decision was also straightforward because of several key features:

• User-Friendly Dashboard Embedding: QuickSight is designed for easy embedding into third-party applications, making it perfect for our needs. We could quickly implement and launch dashboards for our web application without extensive coding.
• Customizable Security and Access Authorization: QuickSight offers granular authorization features, including column- and row-level security, simplifying data access control. Data authorizations are managed through tags, ensuring effective row-level security.
• Interactive Dashboard Experience: QuickSight facilitates not only our dashboard creation but also empowers clients to generate their own. We introduced custom authoring capabilities for premium users, enabling them to tailor dashboards to their specific needs.
• Effortless Reporting: QuickSight simplifies reporting, allowing clients to generate reports focused on specific KPIs or insights without the need for custom development or manual reporting.

A Detailed Look at the Development of PeoplePLAN with QuickSight

Integrating QuickSight into PeoplePLAN and launching the enhanced product was accomplished in just two weeks. We began with dashboard capabilities and quickly adopted additional features, including row-level security and end-user authoring.

In our QuickSight dashboards, we track KPIs related to personnel costs and capacity, including:

• Employee Turnover Rate: This metric measures the percentage of employees leaving the organization within a defined timeframe, helping identify potential issues in recruitment or retention strategies.
• Labor Cost Ratio: This ratio assesses the relationship between labor costs (wages, benefits, etc.) and total operating costs, informing budgetary impacts of workforce expenses.
• Cost per Employee: This figure calculates the average expense involved in employing a single worker, aiding in identifying cost-saving opportunities.
• Workforce Cost Forecast Accuracy: This KPI evaluates how closely workforce cost forecasts align with actual expenses, assisting clients in refining planning and budgeting processes.
• Cost of Vacancies: This metric quantifies the financial implications of unfilled positions, underscoring the importance of efficient recruitment.

A screenshot of one of our dashboards illustrates various graphs that facilitate comparisons of organizational structure, staff numbers, and overall personnel costs. Users can compare different measures and their impact on Full-Time Equivalents (FTE), as well as analyze cost elements such as wages and bonuses across cost centers.

Our Architecture

PeoplePLAN aggregates data from a PostgreSQL database into SPICE, which operates on AWS. SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) is the powerful in-memory engine of Amazon QuickSight, enabling rapid calculations and data serving. This significantly enhances the speed of analytics, allowing instant processing of direct queries while reusing data at no additional cost, greatly benefiting our QuickSight deployment.

With QuickSight, we have achieved remarkable results:

• Accelerated Time to Market: Clients can access dashboards within just 2 to 3 days, compared to the previous weeks-long timeline.
• No-Code Authoring: Users can create dashboards, visualizations, and reports without requiring development resources.
• Integrated Reporting: PeoplePLAN now features detailed, customizable reporting capabilities.
• Cost Savings: We have reduced in-house development expenses.

Our sales conversions for small and medium-sized enterprises rose significantly, exceeding projections by 32%. Additionally, we have observed an increase in our NPS and retention rates. The use of SPICE has resulted in a tenfold improvement in query response times, leading to substantial time savings.

“Amazon QuickSight has enabled us to deliver faster time to market, with clients accessing dashboards within just two to three days, including customization without development effort. We also leverage it for our existing documentation and tutorials, providing a fully integrated and customizable reporting solution for PeoplePLAN.” – Alex Thompson, Cloud Architect and Development Lead.

What Lies Ahead?

Looking forward, we are eager to integrate Amazon QuickSight Q into PeoplePLAN. QuickSight Q introduces natural language querying and AI support, allowing users to pose questions in plain language and receive accurate answers with relevant visualizations in seconds, making PeoplePLAN even more user-friendly.

For more insights, check out this blog post that delves deeper into the subject. If you’re interested in further understanding the benefits of embedded analytics, visit Chanci Turner’s website, an authority on this topic. Additionally, for more information on the hiring process, this resource is excellent.