Johannesburg, 09 Feb 2007
Sun International, Africa's most significant tourism, gaming and leisure group, is using business intelligence and data analytics software from QlikView South Africa to enable its HR managers to make informed business decisions, which affect the entire group, in record time.
Sun International employs more than 8 000 people in southern Africa and operates in 14 regulated jurisdictions in six countries including South Africa, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Lesotho.
Each operation has its own HR department and the data required on a daily basis is vast.
"I don't know of any other company in the country that has a HR data model that enables them to analyse their data in the way that we can," says Andr'e Harmse, HR Systems Manager for Sun International. "With QlikView, we're able to drill down into many dimensions at the click of a button."
Sun International uses PeopleSoft to log and keep track of all relevant HR information. The company soon found that the more data it had, the greater its need for an analytics tool.
"Even though we had all the necessary data, it was difficult and time-consuming to track and identify trends in our key HR indicators," says Harmse. "We had standard reports set up for most indicators, but as soon as anybody wanted a variation of the standard report, or if they wanted to dig deeper everything had to be reworked.
"Take labour turnover for example, it is easy to calculate it for a single dimension, problematic if you want to analyse it in multiple dimensions and very problematic to find correlations between turnover and other HR indicators within the multiple dimensions. It is very difficult to do this with standard paper-based reports and we evaluated a number of BI options. We could not find a solution that gave us exactly what we wanted and in the end we decided to build our own data warehouse.
"We had planned to start the project in January 2005. However, in November 2004 we were introduced to QlikView's technology. Although the presentation related to financial data, we had enough confidence in what we saw, to ask them to build us an HR data model," says Harmse.
Following preparatory work, it took a week to build the core data model and one week for the necessary HR professionals to be trained on QlikView.
The technology went live in July 2005 and was rolled out to the first users in September. "We see this as an ongoing project, with changes being initiated as we receive feedback from the users," continues Harmse.
"Sun International was an interesting challenge for us," says Davide Hanan, MD of QlikView South Africa. "Apart from the issues already discussed, we also had to deal with the fact that Sun International operates in eight provinces, each with different gaming boards which have different statutory requirements. QlikView has provided a solution which spares management from having to produce separate reports."
"It's difficult to quantify, but it's safe to say that QlikView has saved us hundreds of thousands of rands. Reporting time is reduced, and it's much easier for management to be proactive and to identify problem areas early on. Many of our senior executives are not functional users of our HR system, but love using QlikView because it is so simple to use. It's just so easy," concludes Harmse.
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