Improving KPI management

  

Business intelligence enhances case follow-up and reporting

The Social Law Inspection Department is a Belgian federal government administration focusing on the protection of the individual workers' rights. Its duties include informing workers and employers about social laws, controlling worker/ employer relationships, following up corporate social elections, and investigating social fraud. The department has 24 offices across the country and employs approximately 330 people, including 200 controllers who process around 36,000 cases per year.

Easy reporting saves time and resources

The department must generate statistics about the cases it has processed on several occasions throughout the year. For instance, general management must send an annual activity report to the International Labor Organization (ILO) and to Belgian authorities. Such reporting, however, was a very time and resource-intensive activity. It required quite a lot of manual data collection and processing, thereby increasing the risk of human error. It also required the help of the ICT Department. "The IT staff was the only one with access to case statistics. They had to allocate resources to create the reports," says Michel Aseglio, General Director of the Social Law Inspection Department. "With the help of SAS, we were able to change all of this, saving valuable time and substantially reducing the risk of error."

By implementing the SAS business intelligence-based system, Social Law Inspection no longer requires IT experts to generate case reports. Every employee can create reports via the system's portal, although access rights differ according to the role and needs of each user. The system automatically generates pre-programmed reports, instantly providing reliable statistics to draw up the annual report, and is able to export the data to Excel spreadsheets.

A complete overview of case statistics

As part of their day-to-day activities, controllers electronically manage their cases via an Omnis application. The data that they used to record mainly revolved around the cases themselves, such as their investigation progress status, the number of social law offenders, and company sectors. There was no record of personnel data. Christian Pochet, ICT Director, explains: "When implementing the SAS solution, we took the opportunity to add another application designed to collect personnel-related data, such as time tracking per activity for each controller. Combining case data with workload data in reports provides us with a much more comprehensive view, thus enabling us to monitor the achievement of our objectives on a much timelier basis. Now we can easily identify issues, such as long treatment times for cases, and monitor the evolution of cases in order to take effective decisions, among other things."

Enabling self-assessment and personnel management

Since the SAS portal is accessible to everyone, it can also be used to improve personnel management. For instance, employees can use it to visualize the work they have accomplished and self-assess their performance. Team leaders and branch managers can use the reporting functionalities to monitor their team or branch KPIs, manage their personnel, and allocate their human resources more efficiently. Finally, the general management can use the portal to assess the overall performance of the department. Access rights protect individual data. Workers only have access to their own data and to anonymous general data. Division staff member only see globalized anonymous results and not the details for each controller, whereas the head of each division only see the detailed results of their controllers. The purpose of these restrictions is to avoid inappropriate interpretations and unhealthy competition and to keep decision-making at the right level.

Extension of functionalities to other systems

"During implementation, SAS consultants supported us in the design phase and provided return on experience for the KPI development phase," says Michel Botte, General Advisor Central Division. "It was crucial that we be able to adapt the SAS system to our specific corporate environment, and not the other way around. The SAS consultants helped us tune the application to our particular needs."

The project also revealed that the SAS solutions are quite compatible with other software systems. As a result, the department is already speaking about future developments. Christian Pochet again: "Now that we have gained experience with the platform, we feel comfortable extending its functionalities to other internal systems. We are currently preparing the integration of corporate social election follow-up data within the application. We are also considering expanding the system to the other departments inside FPS Employment". Future project developments also include the installation of a management cockpit and the rationalization of the data collection process.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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