Lohn & HR: Empower Faster Decision-Making with Embedded BI
Background
Lohn & HR is a leading independent payroll software firm that provides human resources (HR) software solutions to the Austrian market, with a focus on mid-sized and larger companies. Offering its software as both on-premise and software as a service (SaaS), the firm empowers customers with a full solution for all aspects of payroll accounting and personnel management.
During the payroll process and managing the data of employees, CEOs and managers often have to extract data out of the system on short notice. As such, Lohn & HR’s customers require fast, easy access to this data – especially during the global pandemic. They chose Yellowfin to better meet these needs.
We have incorporated Yellowfin into our software platform to enable a new level of data literacy amongst our customers and the same business-critical decision making to enhance commercial performance, which proved critical during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christian Buchsteiner, COO, Lohn & HR
Challenge
Complex analytics without ease, speed and flexibility for critical decisions
Lohn & HR’s customers have faced increased challenges in securing control over their employee operations and costs during the COVID-19 crisis. Many require a deeper level of analysis to evaluate data better and make timely decisions around payroll, working times, and leave for their employees, making better and faster HR reporting vital.
The firm previously offered its customers another business intelligence (BI) tool as part of its product, but this tool presented certain issues in fully meeting their users’ BI needs:
- Complexity in navigating, creating and sharing content
- Lack of multi-tenancy integration
- Needed client software and turnaround time on the client’s side
With customers facing these limitations, and needing to navigate multiple graphical user interfaces (UIs) to create dashboards and consume critical reports, some have found it difficult to extract data and pass it on to relevant parties in an efficient and seamless manner. To help them meet all their BI needs better, Lohn & HR sought to offer new functions, and a fully Web-enabled software for their product’s BI offering. With their legacy BI software also reaching end-of-life, this led the firm to search for a modern analytics platform to support and fit its future vision.
Solution
From multiple interfaces to one point for payroll and HR reporting
Lohn & HR opted to adopt Yellowfin as its new BI platform based on its breadth of features all accessible in one UI, that would help reduce complexity and enhance usability of analytics for its customers.
“When we looked at other BI tools, we had the impression that its capabilities were split across different UIs with different technical requirements to learn – we liked the approach of Yellowfin being in one easy product,” said Christian Buchsteiner, COO at Lohn & HR. “Yellowfin is a really streamlined user interface; you have one access point for defining the meta-data layer and reports, and consuming them – a true one-stop shop for all the BI activities for us and for our customers.”
Lohn & HR also found Yellowfin was able to support its desired integrations around tenant and user management, to better define the permissions and privileges their users have directly in the BI tool. “It was important to not lose any functionality when switching to another analytics product, but Yellowfin covered all of what we had before, and gave us things we didn’t have in the past,” said Christian. “One important factor is the possibility to make use of user-based functions within the tool, so we could integrate our functions directly in the queries and reports. We didn’t find this in competitors, or our legacy BI.”
“If you have a SaaS offering with a payroll solution, it’s expected the BI tool also supports the use of organization IDs and fine-grained access control on a role-based level, to define access to employee data for a certain range of employees and not for the whole company. The use of APIs to help us integrate our software with the BI tool, and support for on-premises and SaaS, was a key sticking point for choosing Yellowfin.”
Results
Seamless self-service BI for customers for faster, easier decision-making
With Yellowfin, Lohn & HR has eliminated previous complexities and time-to-insight users found with its former BI toolset, and significantly improved the ease and speed of reporting and data management for all its customers by leveraging Yellowfin’s all-in-one embedded analytics capabilities.
“Yellowfin BI provides great support for the HR department; they can get their data out of the system easily, and the management can support the decision process with good data from HR, fast,” said Christian. “I think it’s very important that they can handle this on their own to get the information out of the database; they don’t need to purchase reports from us, or have a long waiting time – they really can quickly react to the data needs and requests they are facing from the CEO or head of HR.”
“The ability to create dashboards, storyboards and to have a good graphical layout of their reports is also great,” said Christian. “They can choose from a large number of charts, arrange dashboards as they need it, and align it to their company identity to make it their own, while providing easier access to data. When we have managers perform self-service analysis, they can directly view a dashboard with the most important KPIs and numbers much faster and easier. This wasn’t possible in the past.”
For Christian, the importance of fast, easy BI can’t be understated: “We like the way of Yellowfin – to have all BI features usable in one UI, so it’s easier for the customer to learn, use and benefit from the product they use.”
Future
Lohn & HR plan to integrate Yellowfin reporting more directly into their batch processing, so customers can automatically gain reports and analysis when they start their monthly payroll runs, and integrate dashboards more directly into their employee and manager self-service interface.
For Christian, it comes down to enabling whole new ways of working: “With Yellowfin, we can do all of this; it all wouldn’t have been possible with our previous BI tool.”
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