The burden of producing regular management reports of HR information can be significant. Automation is essential to reducing costs and increasing the reliability of standard people reports.

Create your HR data platform

Most HR software tools such as Oracle Fusion, Workday and our own Waypoint HR platform include some standard reporting capabilities. These are great when the standard reports meet the requirements. Furthermore, it doesn't work if the data required for the reports is stored in various data sources in addition to just the HR database.

When more advanced reports, or more sophisticated automation capabilities are required, a dedicated HR data platform offers advantages.

An HR data platform allows data to be aggregated from various sources and historical versions of data to be retained for analysis.

Automating the data processing

The process of fetching data from various sources, ingesting into your HR data warehouse and transforming it into a format suitable for reporting are essential to automate.

When these data engineering tasks are performed manually, they are incredibly time consuming. Just as important - data engineering tasks are almost impossible to do reliably when done manually. A further benefit of automating the data engineering is that the security and governance processes are much more rigorous.

When automating data processing, consider how the data needs to be sanitised and reviewed for quality. The data may also need to be anonymised or aggregated to meet data privacy requirements such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA etc.

Automating report generation and delivery

Manually creating reports works well when creating a very small number of reports infrequently - perhaps as a one-off report of proof-of-concept. But scaling up reports so that more people can benefit from more relevant information requires automated report generation and delivery.

Reporting and Business Intelligence platforms such as Power BI and Tableau are able to create reports on a repeating schedule. This is particularly useful when the number of reports grows.

There are various options for automating the delivery of reports. The simplest approach is an scheduled email, though this can present some security and data-loss issues that must be considered. A more flexible approach (and one that can integrate with existing security and IT practices) is the creation of a self-service reporting tool that allows end-users to access the reports they need from a web-based portal. This also opens up the possibilities for more advanced reporting and analysis capabilities.

Getting started

We help teams automate their regular HR reporting tasks by offering advice, designing cloud reporting platforms and building great people analytics software.