SAP Analytics Cloud boosts workforce planning at RBI Bank

At a time when industries are faced with fast-changing market conditions, workforce planning may prove challenging. It is key to be able to react fast and flexibly, taking into account the latest data that you have and applying them to your evolving business. This was also the case at Raiffeisen Bank International, one of Austria's premier international banks.

From manual adjustments to flexible and scalable processes

Operating across all these different markets, RBI felt a need to bring more transparency and reporting flows to the organization.

Just like many other companies, they had already moved towards SAP S/4HANA, the cloud-based ERP system. That allowed them to streamline their business processes and gave them a future-proof base for better collaboration among colleagues on all levels and functions.

But for automating the planning and reporting flows on HR-level, they still faced some tough challenges:

• Getting a comprehensive view on the scope and complexity of internal processes
• Choosing a suitable platform
• Correctly implementing all business logic, including non-standard procedures
• Aligning all data coming from various sources, also from non-SAP systems
• Reducing the number of manual calculations

Discovering the possibilities with Cloud Analytics

Early 2020, RBI started the process. Having already made a strategical company-wide shift towards an SAP integrated landscape with S/4HANA and SuccessFactors, choosing SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) seemed a logical next step for supporting the planning and reporting processes. In addition, the standard content available in SAC would serve as a solid foundation upon which customized applications, various calculations and tailored reports could be built.

“Before, our workforce planning was done centrally and involved a lot of manual effort”, says Matthias Loidolt. “This process was inherently risky: it depended on the time and expertise of a few key individuals.”

To guarantee a smooth transition towards the new reporting and planning tool, RBI works with an agile setup: they have four implementation cycles per year during which they add functionality to the solution. The basic application has now been set up and is running. While currently largely automated, the workforce planning is still done centrally. KPIs are added to the process one after the other. The cost centre owners can already get a feeling of how the application will work for them, but they cannot yet influence the numbers. That will be possible in the next budgeting cycle after the summer of 2022.

Matthias Loidolt: “When we started out, much of the implementation work in our team was done by Flexso. But thanks to our partner’s training, RBI’s team was soon able to add new functionality autonomously. Gradually, the input of Flexso has shifted from implementation to support.”

Challenging, but rewarding

As successful as the project is, Matthias and his team also encountered some challenges along the way. “Clearing up legal questions, tracking all the various data sources and translating the business logic with all its variations and exceptions took more time than anticipated. But it also made us realise how essential this exercise was and how much we gained in terms of flexibility, decentralising and de-risking.”

One of the goals of the project was to be able to run various budgeting scenarios, a requirement that has become all the more pressing in today’s volatile geopolitical situation.

We’d foreseen that simulating scenarios would become possible in the future, even on the level of the cost centre owners. But we hadn’t anticipated that it would be possible so early on. Now, we were able to run various sets of numbers from the get-go.”

Running the workforce planning cycle was RBI’s first introduction to SAP Analytics Cloud. The platform proved to be a solid foundation for planning and analysis. RBI is now scaling up the workforce planning solution by integrating other entities and adding extra functionalities already outlines a clear path forward. Looking ahead, RBI continues to explore the different possibilities, including extending SAP Analytics Cloud to other use cases in the organization.