Workforce Intelligence in Practice: 3 Lessons from the Talent Management Director for APAC, PepsiCo

Most talent leaders know exactly how this goes: data analysis stalls because it's siloed across departments, leadership meetings get derailed by debates over whose numbers are right, and by the time everyone agrees on the data, the conversation has moved from strategy to cleanup. The question you actually came to answer—do we have the right talent in place for where this business is going—gets pushed to next quarter. Again.

I’ve seen these patterns show up across organizations of every size. And they're exactly what Khun Teerawat Udomyingcharoen, Talent Management Director APAC at PepsiCo, has spent the last few years working to dismantle.

I recently had the privilege to host Khun Teerawat and Dr. Weerapat Sapakarn, CEO & Managing Partner at Saturday Consulting, on our webinar The Strategic Edge: How PepsiCo Leverages Real Time Workforce Intelligence to Protect Margins at Scale for a candid conversation about what that shift actually looked like. 

Here are three takeaways from PepsiCo's experience deploying Visier across 14 countries and what talent leaders can take from it.

Takeaway 1: Follow the 80/20 rule to save time (and money) debating data accuracy

Khun Teerawat told a story that most of us in the HR world find all-too-familiar: 

You've spent days preparing for a leadership meeting. You've cleaned the data, created polished visuals, and rehearsed the narrative. The meeting kicks off, and suddenly someone questions a number. Just like that, the meeting that was supposed to be about talent strategy becomes a debate about data sources. 

"Instead of spending time on decision making, we spent time talking about how to clean the data," Khun Teerawat said. And this means, the main reason for the meeting, the strategic decisions about talent and investment, were pushed down the road once again.

HR teams know that you don't always need perfect data to make the right decision (Khun Teerawat mentioned getting 80% of the way there is often good enough to see the important trends). But, when everyone is operating from a different information silo, seeing different versions of the same people data, these debates can completely derail workforce planning initiatives. 

For PepsiCo, the turning point in this ongoing conversation about data accuracy came when they introduced Visier. With all stakeholders relying on the same people data, Khun Teerawat witnessed it change the dynamic in boardrooms. "It changed the paradigm," he said.

Visier ensured PepsiCo's decision makers had to commit to a single source of truth. As Khun Teerawat explains to us, data ownership and data integrity were democratized when all stakeholders became responsible for maintaining data integrity. 

Most importantly, he's seen a shift in how HR spends their time. Now, he sees far less time going towards creating and analyzing; instead, he sees HR leaders having much more capacity to put that data to good use, transforming basic-reporting into real workforce intelligence.

Khun Teerawat will admit that the data still isn't always perfect. But, most HR leaders today will agree that achieving 100% data accuracy is a never ending journey. 

More often than not, good enough data used now beats perfect data that's never used.

Takeaway 2: Break out of data silos, operate from a single source of truth

Who owns an organization's talent decisions? In my experience, it often depends on who I ask. Talent Acquisition owns hiring. Talent Management owns development. Rewards own compensation. Does any one team really own the entire process? Each team tends to track their own metrics, build their own reports, and operate within their comfortable silos.

Khun Teerawat explained that making decisions from siloed perspectives is precisely the problem with the usual approach to workforce planning. “Imagine, finding the right talent is a Talent Acquisition job, the right role is Talent Management and at the right cost, that is the Rewards and HR operations team. So they track separately,” he explained. 

The answer? Consolidate data from disparate departments into a more unified view. In his role as Talent Management Director at PepsiCo, this has transformed the way leadership makes workforce decisions.

In the case of PepsiCo, they brought together all their formerly separate data sources under a single view with Visier’s workforce intelligence platform. Now, when Khun Teerawat has conversations with the leadership team about getting the right talent into the right roles, he no longer needs to have unconnected conversations with each HR department.

Instead, this information is already available into a streamlined, single source of truth.

He is able to see what areas need to be prioritized, where leaders need to invest in talent, and most importantly, get the right people in the right roles much more effectively. 

Takeaway 3: If you're not looking forwards, you're already behind

The final lesson I gleaned from Khun Teerawat was that workforce intelligence unshackles HR leaders from reporting on the past, and gives them the means to plan for the future.

This backwards-looking perspective is something I’ve seen play out time and time again in conventional planning cycles. All too often the HR team walks into a leadership meeting with workforce data, but it’s only telling the story of what already happened. 

Reporting on last quarter's turnover. Explaining last month's headcount movement. Valuable, yes. But reactive by nature.

These days, the conversations Khun Teerawat is having with his leadership team have moved well beyond last quarter's numbers.

Solving these questions is only possible with conversations grounded in people data, and data that transmits across the typical silos. I shared a great example of this on the webinar, using a visualization from within Visier that mapped out which employees are at risk of leaving, which critical roles are exposed, and crucially, what the financial consequence of that attrition looks like. 

When leaders can see the dollar value sitting behind a retention risk, attrition stops being an HR talking point and becomes a strategic business priority. Workforce intelligence allows leaders at all levels to understand what it would look like to lose people who could have played a major role in getting the business to the next level. 

Decisions made from workforce intelligence insights have large monetary implications overall, and need to be considered from a business perspective, not just a line item for HR. For example, unplanned layoffs that then lead to boomerang hires or an urgent need to reskill the remaining workforce can delay business goals and successes, which could have been prevented had the right insights and conversations been surfaced before the decision was made.

This is what it looks like when workforce intelligence stops looking backwards, and is able to make decisions today that optimize the talent pool in one, five, or ten years down the line.

Leverage workforce intelligence for real business impact

What I took away from Khun Teerawat's experience is this: workforce intelligence democratizes data to move past the familiar decision-making bottlenecks and make proactive talent decisions.

It allows businesses to finally leverage the data they have to get the right people in the right roles for the right investment. Most importantly, workforce intelligence at scale gives businesses the insight they need to look forward rather than backward—for measurable impact.

Curious how organizations like PepsiCo are turning workforce data into business impact? Watch the full webinar, The Strategic Edge: How PepsiCo Leverages Real-Time Workforce Intelligence to Protect Margins at Scale.