BNL -- Gruppo BNP Paribas captures 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 is leveraging its investment in HR systems, using SAS to turn SAP R/3 data into intelligence.

And the investment is paying 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 Euro Zone for market capitalization, with 138,000 employees around the world.

BNL has approximately 17,000 employees. Managing the HR budget is a real challenge, and so too is recruiting, developing and retaining talent. With so much at stake, BNL wants to ensure that it uses employee time as effectively as possible, identifies the areas where the company gets best return on its investment in human capital, and spends the training and education budget wisely to align company and individual development needs.

Claudio Geloni is the company's HR Controller, responsible for predicting the personnel needs of the organization in Italy, preparing annual HR budgets, providing statistical and compliance information, and managing the HR data base developed by the IT department.

In 2005 BNL started a project to leverage SAP administrative data and DM payroll transactions in its HR system, to enable the bank to evaluate its intellectual capital assets, carry out gap analysis and map out 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 costings, personnel, sources and vacancies and turnover plans, as well as supporting a management scorecard.

The human capital management is refreshed with data extracted from SAP every day and from DM payroll every month. Features of the first phase implementation include 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
• Study fixed and variable labors, simplifying 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 puts 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.

"It is still early days but 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 will derive from the HCM solution's scorecards, which enable us to plan future HR needs," concludes Geloni.

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