Ensuring access to relevant salary data in Cloud solution 

Ensuring access to relevant salary data in Cloud solution 

Building a portal for HR users with SAS® Visual Analytics, TietoEVRY has enabled HR officers among the members of The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR) to compare salary and compensation packages for public employees, ensuring fair and balanced pay structures across Sweden’s public sector.

How do you ensure that public employees across a large country get comparable salary and benefit packages and that public organizations are not unfairly competing against each other by offering vastly different compensation models? Giving the information that will allow public salary analysts to determine the right salary structures is one of many data-related tasks for SKL Kommentus, a wholly (98%) owned subsidiary of The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR).

“The Salary Link (LöneLänken in Swedish) is a service for all customers of SKL Kommentus, which means all the 290 municipalities and 21 regions in Sweden and also potentially the 1000 plus municipality-owned companies. They all need to be able to make a comparison of salary structures for different roles and responsibilities, to set their own salary and compensation packages at a level which is consistent with other public employers in the country,” says Peder Hofman-Bang from TietoEVRY.

A consistent approach to comparisons SKL Kommentus chose SAS and TietoEVRY after a round of requests for information and subsequent bidding process. The winning bid is a software-as-a-service, cloud-based model consisting of a user-friendly portal system from TietoEVRY in which the SAS ® Visual Analytics® tools are embedded.

Peder Hofman-Bang led the sales process along with team members and in close collaboration with SAS. SKL Kommentus already had several SAS tools in use and were very interested in a system that could build on existing solutions but could add a stronger visualization component. Together, TietoEVRY and SAS were able to deliver a winning bid in which ease-of-use, visualization tools, and expansion possibilities were mapped out in a convincing manner.

“We were able to visualize how easy it would be to use for both Kommentus’ customers in the municipalities and regions, as well as for Kommentus’ administrators. New capabilities can be added on, it is very easy to onboard new customers, and there is a news section to keep users aware of how the tool is developing”, says Peder Hofman-Bang.

The analytical tools are set up in the portal in the form of standardized reports which ensure that salary analysts are using the same approach, when looking at and comparing salary information from across the Swedish municipalities and regions.

“As a product advisor, you are rarely involved in the actual implementation projects, however, in the Salary Link 3.0 project I was involved in developing various reports and it was fantastic to experience how powerful SAS Visual Analytics is and how well SAS Visual Analytics is performing in real-life use cases”, says Carl-Olow Magnusson at SAS Institute.

Unique for this solution is also how the Rest API calls was setup. “It was really interesting to see how well Rest API calls works to fully automate the integration between the portal system developed by TietoEVRY and SAS Visual Analytics”, says Peter Nordwall at SAS Institute.

Transparency with privacy controls 

While transparency is a vital component of the Salary Link structure, privacy is never compromised.

“We have to adhere to all the elements of GDPR, both in terms of the access and the ability to drill down in data. We have a twofactor identification process for access via a high standard ID protocol, and there is differentiated user access depending on your role. Some users can drill further down into data while others only see information at a very aggregated level". says Peder Hofman-Bang, TietoEVRY.

With this, SKL Kommentus can offer a nationally aggregated salary planning tool for municipalities and regions across Sweden while ensuring the privacy of each of its employees.

“The Salary Link, built on the strong SAS Visual Analytics platform, is the first application delivered in this fashion. Going forward this can be the foundation on which other analytical applications, for other functions within Municipalities and Regions, are based,” says Peter Thomasson SAS Customer Advisory Public Industry Nordics and Fredrik Herrlin SAS Engagement manager Public Industry Nordics.

“This shows that together in our partnerships, we can solve challenges combining TietoEVRY expertise in Public Sector and SAS analytical toolset on all available data sources” says Einar Halvorsen, director, Alliance & Channels - Nordics at SAS Institute.