How BNL -- Gruppo BNP Paribas captured the full value of human capital

Company leaders in financial services often say "people are our greatest asset." At BNL -- Gruppo BNP Paribas, it is more than a mantra; BNL leveraged its investment in human-resources systems, using SAS to turn SAP R/3 data into intelligence. And the investment paid handsome dividends.

Return on investment through compliance and skills matching
BNL is one of the largest Italian banking groups and ranks among the top 60 European banks and the top 100 banks in the world in terms of total assets, with over 3 million customers in retail, private and corporate markets. Following the completion of the public tender offer on BNL's ordinary shares, the bank's capital is held by BNP Paribas, number one in the Euro Zone for market capitalization and with 170,000 employees around the world.

BNL has approximately 16,000 employees. Managing the HR budget is a real challenge, and so too is recruiting, developing and retaining talent. With so much at stake, BNL wanted to ensure that it used employee time as effectively as possible, identified the areas where the company gets best return on its investment in human capital, and spent its training and education budget wisely to align company and individual development needs.

Claudio Geloni, the company's former HR Controller and now its IT Controller, was responsible for predicting the personnel needs of the organization in Italy, preparing annual HR budgets, providing statistical and compliance information, and managing the HR database developed by the IT department. BNL had started a project to leverage SAP administrative data and DM payroll transactions in the bank's HR system to enable the company to evaluate its intellectual capital assets, carry out gap analysis and map a path forward.

"Clear and transparent information on intellectual capital increases the total value of an organization," says Geloni. BNL wanted a solution that could be rolled out quickly to a large user community via a Web interface. It therefore selected SAS to build an intelligence solution that would feed reports on HR costs, personnel, vacancies and turnover plans as well as support a management scorecard.

With SAS, the bank refreshes data extracted from SAP every day and from DM payroll every month. Features of the first phase implementation included the ability to:

• Trace historical trends in staff costs, detect redundancies, and monitor and plan phenomena related to personnel costs such as turnover, age, seniority, education, rate placement and payroll.
• More effectively manage employee growth paths and skill maps.
• Simplify budgeting and reporting.
• Highlight compulsory special charges against the company, provisions for severance pay and long-term benefits, taxable income and other amounts connected to compensation.
• Simulate cost reductions and analyze the impact of external change such as the economic climate – on the organization and on compensation.

In the second phase, BNL is adding new features to its SAS solution, enabling it to:

• Trace historical trends of time worked and absences.
• Analyze roles and positions, map and trace skills and expertise.
• Analyze performance through scorecard models.

 
"Our SAS Human Capital Management solution put valuable intelligence in the hands of local managers, enabling them to make decisions for themselves rather than waiting for information and instructions from the center," he adds.

Challenges such as succession planning can be dealt with in a more timely fashion.

"We have already seen a return on our investment in SAS, especially because it has supported compliance with IAS regulations. More important is the long-term ROI that we derived from the HCM solution's scorecards, which enabled us to plan future HR needs," concludes Geloni.

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