THE CHALLENGE

Buried in manual reports

The developer of The Sims, Madden NFL, EA SPORTS FC, and Plants vs. Zombies, Electronic Arts is an innovator in interactive entertainment — and its HR team set out to match that, transforming from a central services function into a key strategic advisor. At the start of its HR transformation, EA was using an old HRMS and a custom front end for transactional services. The company had no shortage of workforce data, but reports were limited and difficult to produce.

To start its data-driven journey, the people analytics team delivered extensive, hard-coded monthly reports to HR and business leaders — a hit with leaders, but a growing burden. Over several years, the volume of complex weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports grew exponentially, covering hiring, talent movement, terminations, demographic shifts, and more. The team couldn't keep up, spending its time manually creating reports instead of building deeper analyses into trends, risks, and predictive models. Without a flexible reporting environment, it couldn't slice, dice, and drill down to move from workforce observation to diagnosis.

THE SOLUTION

Insights at scale, loaded automatically from Workday

Having recently implemented Workday, EA wanted a complementary tool that could produce deep, trended analytics — and after a thorough due-diligence process, HR chose Visier. During onboarding, Workday data was set up to load automatically into Visier, so the analytics team could begin slicing and dicing workforce data immediately. Visier subject-matter experts were appointed across HR to champion the work in each business unit, and the team replaced its standard, manually generated monthly and quarterly reports with online Visier presentations leaders could access on demand — with “mass customization” so each leader could add the measures most meaningful to their line of business.

On my team alone, Visier has conservatively saved us about 24 weeks of labor per year—a half a year's time of a senior analytical resource. More importantly, we have given HR the ability to self-serve and gain insight into the workforce where there may not have been the bandwidth to do so in the past.

— Leonard Dandurand, Group Director of HR Information Services and Workforce Planning, EA

THE OUTCOME

A data-driven culture — and a stronger case for campus hiring

Leonard Dandurand, group director of HR information services and workforce planning, conservatively estimates Visier saves EA about 24 weeks of labor a year — half a senior analyst's year — by automating manual report generation. As more HR business partners and leaders adopt self-service analytics, he expects those savings to grow in direct proportion to the number of people using it.

Visier also helped EA justify the value of its University Relations program. By analyzing performance, promotion, and cost data from four years of hires, the team showed that after two years of tenure, new-grad hires were promoted at a higher rate, were more likely to be top performers, and cost less than their more experienced peers. The University Relations team used that evidence to win commitment to a more aggressive new-grad hiring target.

With Visier, we showed that new grads acquired through the University Relations program cost the same or less than their experienced peers, yielding a better performer with more potential at the same or lower cost.

— Leonard Dandurand, Group Director of HR Information Services and Workforce Planning, EA

With the time saved, the team is moving into predictive work — analyzing attrition and the workforce factors that predict success for the teams behind EA's games, comparing attributes like engagement, performance, cost, manager, and span of control with product quality, financial results, and customer satisfaction.

Ready to build a data-driven culture? See how Visier automates the reporting grind and frees your team for the analysis that moves the business. See what Visier can do for you.