A clear view on employee cost at Bridgestone with SAC Workforce planning
For an international organisation like Bridgestone, having real-time insight into employee costs is vital for informed decision-making. But what’s the most compatible, effective way to get a clear budget overview – and what about forecasting and simulations? Here's how Bridgestone created a workforce planning tool with SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) that offers these key capabilities and more.
As a global player with expanding activities, Bridgestone is familiar with complexity, not in the least when it comes to HR data. To illustrate, Bridgestone is the world’s largest tire and rubber company, with offices in 40 countries and over 100,000 employees. As you can imagine, gaining insights into overall employee cost is increasingly crucial for decision-making.
Defining HR analytics in a complex organisation
Achieving those insights, however, has long proved challenging for the Bridgestone EMIA HR department, for several reasons:
- Bridgestone has several business entities upon which the characteristics of employee data are based: Sales, Manufacturing, R&D and Headquarters (HQ). For example, an employee working in a manufacturing entity has a different contract than someone in HQ.
- Each country in which Bridgestone’s entities operate has its own employment legislation.
- Every country’s HR department had a unique way of gathering, saving and reporting on employee data.
“Every entity at Bridgestone had its own way of working, gathering data in Excel sheets and using separate definitions for HR and financial data. Because of that regional diversity, it was practically impossible to create an accurate report of the actual wage costs based on parameters such as type of contract or employee profile. “
Bridgestone wanted a solution that would combine all this disparate, varied data. That would help them get clear, fast reporting and forecasting pertaining workforce budget without any extra manual work. It was the perfect time to introduce a workforce planning tool!
Why workforce planning with SAP Analytics Cloud?
Bridgestone choose to base the workforce planning tool on SAP Analytics Cloud. That was a logical choice, as the organisation had already implemented an SAC planning tool for the Finance department. Same familiar SAP environment, zero surprises.
SAP Analytics Cloud was the perfect fit for workforce planning because it:
- supports basic processes;
- provides easy insights;
- offers fast reporting possibilities
SAP Analytics Cloud workforce planning: insights into the present and future
The workforce planning tool unifies HR and financial data into one single source of truth. Where HR and Finance previously had to find a way to manually consolidate their data, both departments can now generate relevant insights using only one tool.
What’s more, the tool:
- shows data in real time;
- offers the possibility to generate accurate reports;
- provides forecasting and simulation capabilities.
The benefits were noticeable soon after the implementation. According to Chloé, the tool provides valuable insights, quickly and without adding to the HR workload.
“In Belgium, we had to calculate the impact of wage indexation on our budget recently. With the SAC tool this took us about 20 minutes. Previously, this calculation would have meant over half a day’s work for our team. “
Watch the Studio HR interview with Flexso consultant Koen Vanderwegen and Chloé Ostyn, HR Controller EMIA at Bridgestone below.
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