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Using OLAP Tools for e-HRM: A case study

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 Using OLAP tools for e-HRM: a case study

Alysson Bolognesi Prado, Carmen Freitas and Thiago Ricardo Sbrici

Unicamp – State University of Campinas
Human Resources Department – DGRH
Campinas – Sao Paulo – Brazil
{alysson,carmenf,thiago}@unicamp.br

In the growing challenge of managing people, the Human Resources

department needs effective artifacts to support decision-making. On Line

Analytical Processing is intended to make business information available for

managers; it is time for the HR to encompass this technology in its favor. This

paper contains the summary of a project in which we built a Data Warehouse

containing actual Human Resource data. We provide the data models and

show their use through OLAP software. We also discuss the progress and

some obstacles of the project, from the IT staff viewpoint.

Keywords: Business intelligence, Data Warehousing, Online Analytical

Processing, Human Resource Management, Absenteeism, Workforce Analysis

Introduction

Since the late 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's, Business Intelligence (BI) tools have

been proposed as valuable tools for companies (Inmon, 2005; Kimball et al, 1998), helping

with decision support. Inside and outside the Human Resources department there is need

for information that is not delivered by traditional HR systems, such as intranets

(Guiderdony, 2007). On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is one of the BI proposals for

making information available for managers.

Most of the literature examples of OLAP used in companies is based on financial or

production data, for instance, the sales amount. According to Ngai & Wat (2004), the use of

Information Systems in the HR to help make more precise decisions is only the tenth in the

ranking of their perceived benefits.

In this paper we present the experience gathered during the course of a project that aimed to

apply OLAP tools for HRM, targeting on employees demography and absenteeism. This

text represents the point of view of the IT staff regarding the project progress and sequels,

intending to provide an example of how such powerful technology can help the Human

Resource area, and potential difficulties in this way.

The projects began in 2005 at the Human Resources department of a public Brazilian

University. It offers 58 undergraduate and 127 graduate courses and is organized in 20

Institutes and Schools, one academic medical center, 23 research centers and an

administrative area. The institution employs teachers and researchers, technical and

bureaucratic staff, physicians and nurses, comprising about 10,000 workers.

This paper is organized as follows: in the next Sections there are, respectively, an overview

of the adopted Business Intelligence theory, the description of implementations of two Data

Marts regarding Human Resource information and how their content can be provided to

final users. In the remaining Sections we discuss the challenges faced during the project,

the drawbacks, lessons learned, project follow-up and present our final remarks.
Business Intelligence overview

The concept of Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the abilities of the corporations to

retrieve information related to their operation processes and area of activity, in a flexible

and dynamic way, allowing the analysis, detailing and understanding their work and

providing means for decision support. The term has been popularized since the late 1980’s

by Howard Dresner and the Gartner Group (Power, 2002).

The data managed by Business Intelligence systems have certain specific characteristics,

reflecting on the way they are gathered, stored and retrieved, which will be briefly

explained in the following sessions.

Extract, Transform and Load

The process of obtaining and modifying the data for feeding a Business Intelligence

database is called ETL, in respect to the three steps it involves: Extract, Transform and

Load.

In the Extract step data are typically queried from other systems of the company, the so-

called OLTP – On Line Transactional Processing – that supports the day-by-day

organization operations. Spreadsheets and plain text files can also be used as data sources

for Extraction.

In the Transform step the data are handled aiming to fit in the view the users of the decision

support system have of the process and of the facts they represent. This means unity
conversions, codes standardization and data filtering, categorization and so forth.

In the Load step the data produced by the prior steps are stored in a special database

structure called Data Warehouse, which is described as follows.

Data Warehouse and Data Mart

The Data Warehouse (DW) is a large data repository (Inmon, 2005), obtained from all the

relevant sections of the organization. The Data Warehouse contains the raw material for the

management’s decision support system.

When the Data Warehouse is updated from ETL, no data is deleted or overwritten. Instead,

the data are accumulated, constructing the history of the data involved in the company

operations.

The data structure of a DW often does not follow the common database systems techniques

that use normalization to ensure data integrity and less storage space. Instead, the data are

de-normalized and arranged in such a way that helps to query for reports and analysis.

From the organization Data Warehouse, the information related to each area of interest is

separated, forming Data Marts. Each Data Mart (DM) is a subset of the whole DW focused

on a special subject of the decision of user’s support systems.

 [INSERT picture 1 HERE]

Picture 1: BI architecture example

Data on a DM is arranged according to the star schema: each relevant data from the

organization, known as fact, is stored in a structure called cube, which can be viewed or

decomposed according to pre-defined categorization of the data, known as dimensions of

the cube. The dimensions are some typical meaningful attributes of the fact, such as time,

customer type, products and geography of the organization.

The dimensions can have several hierarchies for classifying the facts according to many

points of view, each hierarchy being composed by different levels of granularity.

On Line Analytical Processing

Retrieving data from a DM requires specialized software that can deal with cubes and

dimensions. Besides, it must be able to provide a single entry point for the managers of the

organization to search for the information needed to their decision making process. This

role is fulfilled by the On Line Analytical Processing systems (OLAP).

An OLAP system provides means for accessing a Data Mart, listing its cubes and related
dimensions, constructing reports, regardless of the particular data it contains. This way, the

user does not need to learn how to operate different systems, and also programmers do not

need to develop new programs and reports for each subject addressed by the Data Marts.

Through an OLAP, a user can build reports and charts that summarize the facts retrieved

from the DM according to the selected dimensions. This way, it is easy to create cross-

tabulation by dragging and dropping dimensions on rows or columns.

It’s also easy to change the granularity chosen by a certain dimension, in a process called

drill-up or drill-down, when the user navigates trough the hierarchic levels of a dimension.

For each of these modifications on the table structure, the data on the cross-table cells are

re-summarized on-line, providing immediate answers for the user and helping decision-

making.

Operational Data Store

Along with the use of data warehouses, companies sometimes faced situations in which the

information needed to support a decision was not fully present in the BI systems, neither

available nor, at least, difficult to retrieve from the operational systems and databases. To

bridge this gap, Inmon et al. (1996) proposed the Operational Data Store – ODS.

The Operational Data Store can act as an intermediate repository for data coming from the

operational and legacy systems, and going to the Data Warehouse and Data Marts. The data
ODS content is fine-grained, current-valued or at least often updated, and subject-oriented.

The ODS is fed with operational data from several sources, which are put together to serve

as a single source of information for reports and another Decision Support Systems, and for

the ETL of the DW.

[INSERT picture 2 HERE]

Picture 2: ODS role in BI architecture

Embedding OLAP visualization into web applications

Sometimes managers need to see data with different levels of granularity in the same

computational environment. Facing any unpredicted or suspect behavior in the operational

data triggers a lookup in the BI data in order to discover a trend, prevent some future failure

or explain any apparent outlier information. Having both the current and the historical data

side by side is helpful to place the suspicious data in the historical scenario of the

organization and take the necessary decisions and steps.

Nowadays, there are many available technologies that enterprises can adopt to bear their IT

software infrastructure. Some are proprietary or customized, bought or developed

exclusively for that organization. On the other hand, the growing presence of free software

that provides solutions with the same level of quality is undeniable. From the first set, we
can cite the Microsoft .Net Framework used by many organizations to support their

software; from the last one, the Java and particularly the JEE platform has a broad spread

use.

Many literature sources (Few, 2009; Casati et al., 2004; Malik, 2005; Niven, 2008) refer to

a need of an “enterprise dashboard” in which BI data can be promptly seen and understood.

This artifact can be achieved by the use of a report generator such as Jasper Reports

(http://jasperforge.org). It is a software solution that can be embedded in a large range of

Java applications, both for web and desktop environments, and has both free and

commercial license models.

There is a whole package of tools from the Jasper repository intended to be used with

Business Intelligence and OLAP visualization, called Jaspersoft Business Intelligence

Suite. Its main component is the report generator, but there is also support for interactive

querying and dynamic dashboard customization for advanced users.

With the report generator, components such as the Pivot Table can be mixed with pie charts

in order to obtain the desired visual information. The IT team responsible for the

development and maintenance of the operational Human Resource Information System can

add this functionality to the new or existing software.

As information security is always a concern in HRIS, in order to not expose unnecessary or

confidential data from the employees, the BI Suite provides single sign-on integration with

external security systems such as LDAP and Windows Active Directory Services, with
granular access control by row, column, cell or report. It also enables an audit trail logging,

with which one can know who accessed which report and when.

As a result, when someone from the HR staff uses the operational software in his or her

daily activities – let us say, interview a candidate for a job or a promotion – he or she can

see the necessary updated or outdated data from the person, with the background data of the

whole organization or of a single department in a single software tool, providing better

reference for comparisons and decisions.

Implementation of Data Marts

To help with the decision-making of the Human Resource area of the University we

modeled the Absenteeism Data Mart and Employees Data Mart. Thus, we met the demand

for information referring to workers counts and absenteeism rates distinctly. The following

sections will detail each constructed Data Mart.

Using BI on the Workforce Analysis

The ability of profiling the workers of an organization is a common need in Human

Resource activities. According to Burke and Ng (2006), some of the up-to-date subjects in

HR are related to demographic changes of workers, such as aging and cultural diversity. In

the studies presented at the United States Worker Health Chartbook (NIOSH, 2004) the

major variables considered were age, sex, ethnicity and occupation. These variables can be

applied both inside and outside an organization. But specifically inside the enterprise, more

attributes may be added to depict the worker’s profile.

Modeling the Employees’ Data Mart

The Human Resource Management Systems (OLTP) used at the organization stores the

workers’ enrollment data in several distinct tables. Our first challenge was to choose a set

of attributes, candidates to become dimensions, which accomplish the maximum number of

requirements from some Human Resource departments and other business areas of the

University.

Besides, we decided to elect some extra dimensions to put in the model, trying to avoid a

new modeling caused by new requirements in a short period of time. As the fact for the

(unclear to me!)cube we defined a simple sum of the amount of employees. Thus, we

conclude the data model shown in Picture 3.

[INSERT Picture 3 HERE]

Picture 3: Star schema for Employees’ Data Mart

This cube was planned to be updated monthly, so the Time dimension contains month and

year for every snapshot of an employee’s situation, taken on the last day of the month. The

Statute dimension stands for the legal characteristics of hiring contracts.

Workplace means the current position in the physical and organizational structure,

(institutes, departments, and so on): the Journey dimension represents the nominal workday
length and Frequency Situation reflects the employee availability at the workplace (still

working, retired, on vacation, absent and so on). The other dimensions are self-explanatory.

Applying BI for Absenteeism

According to Chiavenato (2002), Absenteeism is an expression used to designate a

worker’s faults or absences in the enterprise. Quick and Lapertosa (1982) suggest the

following classification, regarding the cause of absence:

 sickness at Work Absenteeism: originated by professional diseases or work

accidents;

 Health Absenteeism: produced by diseases other than those related to work;

 Legal Absenteeism: when the absences are predicted and accepted by laws;

 Compulsory Absenteeism: situations beyond the worker’s will, for instance, any

penalty or arrest.

 Free Will Absenteeism: generated by personal affairs and situations without legal

subsidy.

Couto (1998) emphasizes that it is very important to know how to measure and understand

absenteeism rates in a corporation, based not on a single point of view, but instead

involving areas as:

 Operational Management: focus on frequency control to detect and avoid problems

with team productivity, exceeding hours on duty and overload of tasks.

 Human Resources: build projections to foresee the future needs of the working

force.

 Occupational Safety and Health: aims to detect and prevent diseases produced by
 work situation, resulting in programs to deal with hazards and enhance life quality.

Based on these approaches, authors define several different absenteeism rate formulas, with

slight variations in the input data, but all having the general rationale of quantifying the

ratio between absent and expected workforces. Couto (1998) defines his rates based on the

average number of employees working and the number of days that are important for each

analysis: number of missed days, number of days on medical leaves, and so forth.

Couto (1998) highlights the importance of choosing a single standard of absenteeism

calculation in order to make it comparable in terms of time evolution and distribution in the

company geography. This convergence can be obtained by a single system that provides the

data to the whole organization, however respecting particular needs, by using tools the as

Business Intelligence software described below.

The Absenteeism Data Mart

From an OLTP system used in the company to store and process data related to the daily

attendance of the employees, we define a star schema that uses this information in a

consolidated and complete way. The information structure is modeled in agreement with

the dimensions that were defined in the project.

To build the Cube, in the beginning of the project, we considered the use of the number of

days of absence (Couto, 1998) as the fact for the cube. But due to characteristics of the

organization, such as the variety of shift durations, and the availability of data on the HR
operational system, we changed it to use the number of hours to populate the cube.

The cube thus sums the amount of hours every employee has for each frequency situation

of the organization. The number of hours is obtained through the verification of the

employee frequency, which is registered in a database that stores the daily amount of hours

that the employee works, is absent, or is in any other exceptional situation.

To use as Dimensions, besides some historical dimensions of enrollment data like the

workplace, frequency situation and gender, we created a special dimension called

Absenteeism, which contains the items Integral Actuation, Partial Actuation and Long

Term Absence (Figure 4).

[INSERT picture 4 HERE]

Picture 4: star schema for Absenteeism Data Mart

We considered as Integral Actuation on the company all employees that worked, or were

absent in accordance with the Brazilian Consolidation of the Labor Law (CLT, 2007, art.

473) during the frequency month.

Absences that were shorter than thirty days in a row or that were not legal were defined as

Partial Actuation on the company. Absences exceeding thirty days in a row were regarded

as Long Term Absence.

It's possible to view the amount of hours in a certain frequency situation using only the fact

itself, without estimates. The number of hours is split among Integral Actuation (I), Partial

Actuation (P) or Long Term Absence (LT).

Besides, we can apply a function to translate the raw number of hours into a generic

absenteeism rate, r (x). To get the Integral Actuation rate in the company, we divide the

amount of hours of the Integral Actuation by the total number of hours of Actuation,

Integral plus Partial, or

r (I) = I / (I + P). (1)

The absenteeism rate of the Partial Actuation is obtained from the division of the amount of

hours of the Partial Actuation by the sum of hours of the Integral Actuation plus the hours

of the Partial Actuation, or

r (P) = P / (I + P). (2)

To get the Long Term Absence rate, just do the division of the amount of hours in the Long

Term Absence by the sum of hours of the Actuation Integral plus the hours of the Actuation

Partial plus the hours in the Long Term Absence.

r (LT) = LT / (I + P +LT). (3)

Based on these formulae we built some reports that access the absenteeism Data Mart,

providing the HR staff and managers with a worker’s absence information.

Spreading knowledge
The data marts were finalized, though the information is still obscure for the end-user, then

we concluded that a layer have to be created between the data mart and the end-user,

because there must be means to access the data to get valuable information for analysis.

Rasmussen et al. (2002) describe five different scenarios for integrating BI tools with the

data source:

a) Adopt only one BI tool to access the OLTP data source;

b) Adopt more than one BI tool to access the OLTP data source;

c) Integrate some BI tools to access the OLTP data source, by using a single web

portal as a user interface to all the BI tools;

d) Use BI tools that come with the OLTP information systems by accessing its data

source (e.g.: functions of the HRIS that might generate analytical reports and

querying.);

e) Use one or more BI tools by accessing a data warehouse.

We knew that the end-user has, not often been able to manipulate any kind of BI tool, thus

some reports have been made available on a web browser. On the other hand, some users

were experts at generating reports, graphics and analytical functions using a BI tool, for

that reason, having an OLAP tool available was essential. Therefore, maintaining a portal

where analytical reports could be accessible on the web, and disposing a BI tool for some

end-user was our goal.

Have BI tools accessing the HRIS data sources was unnecessary, because we had the data

warehouse and data marts structured, consequently, alternatives a), b) and d) were

disregarded, but c) did not, because use a web portal for some reports was fact, then we

joined options c) and d), thus, our setting was build a web portal where analytical reports

could be available, and in the same interface give access to the BI tool adopted to access the

data marts.

Using the OLAP tool

Aiming to exemplify the features of an OLAP tool, we will describe below the use of the

Absenteeism Data Mart through a BI software tool. The use of the same tool for accessing

the Employees Data Mart is very similar.

By accessing the Data Mart the managers can create themselves several spreadsheets and

charts, or access some pre-built ones. Figure 5 below shows a simple but typical table,

where we can perceive the star-schema structure: dimensions on rows and columns, and a

fact summarization on the center cells.

[INSERT FIGURE 5 HERE]

Figure 5: Typical BI table, showing dimensions (gray) and facts (white)

The dimension Time was used for columns on the Month hierarchy level, and the
dimension Absenteeism was placed row titles, using both levels Type and Subtype. The

fact presented is the number of hours for each situation, summarized by a Sum function.

The data were filtered for showing only the months 01/2006, 02/2006 and 03/2006.

A common OLAP tool allows us to apply user-defined functions and calculations to the

raw facts. For instance, to the same data used for Figure 5 we can apply the formulas

described on the previous section for the absenteeism rate on the organization, producing

the report shown on Figure 6.

[INSERT FIGURE 6 HERE]

Figure 6: Processing the raw fact using Absenteeism rate formulas

Since the users’ needs for this system concern mainly the Partial Actuation index, we can

plot a chart to view its behavior during all the months of 2006, as shows Figure 7, simply

changing the filter of the Time dimension and applying the fact data to the Y axis of the

chart.

[INSERT FIGURE 7 HERE]

Figure 7: Chart for the Partial Actuation rate during the year of 2006

If the user becomes curious about whether this behavior repeats for every year, he or she
can drill-up the Time dimension, accessing the Year hierarchy level, and producing another

report and chart (Figure 8). Managers now can get informed about possible workforce

variations along the year.

[INSERT FIGURE 8 HERE]

Figure 8: Drilling-up the Time dimension and showing the last 3 years

Other dimensions, as Workplace for instance, can be added to the sheet by simply dragging

and dropping onto the rows or columns, and then the same procedure of drilling up and

down can be applied for finding departments or offices of the organization where the

absenteeism rates require more attention from the Human Resources department.

HR-BI Portal
Set the portal as the primary point of interaction was our purpose, and then Human

Resource – Business Intelligence Portal was the name granted by the web interface that

made available the access to the BI tool and the analytical reports created.

The end-user community has access to this web portal according to three security levels:

1. Public: human resource quantitative reports, created in the BI software, that were

chosen as a valuable information accessible to everyone;

2. Private: human resource costs and payroll reports, created in the BI software, that

only human resource area, managers and authorized users can access;
 3. BI tool restrict: qualified users able to generate analytical reports and graphics

according to their needs.

Lessons learned
When our first cubes were released to users there were a great acceptance and signals of a

promising future to the project (Prado et al., 2007). But during the following months, we

perceived a gradual disinterest from users to the system. Despite of many available

warnings concerning BI project pitfalls (Imhoff, 2005), we faced a situation in which we

needed to investigate the real causes and try to correct them. The following topics

summarize these findings and some considerations from the IT team.

Raw data has Value

A common requirement after the implantation was to allow users to see which people were

summarized on each cell of the fact table. This requirement shows us that data in a human

resource system has a singular feature when compared with other systems, as his raw data

is about persons which, by themselves, are significant to manager analysis.

This behavior affords us to consider the use of an Operational Data Store in addition to the

Data Warehouse, as a data source for Decision Support Systems for Human Resource. The

data store has a fine-grained amount of data, where the information about the people is

preserved, while in the data warehouse we could focus on quantified data to manager

analysis. It is important to note that we must try to build an OLAP that establish

communication between the two bases, starting from the DW but going to the ODS

whenever it is needed.
User interaction deserves more attention

The most common user interfaces for exploring multidimensional data use the table-based

approaches (Siefer, 2006) in which the user displace dimensions and facts on a

bidimensional structure and electively applies filters. The user constructs nested or

compound tables and may have navigational control through subsets of the data available in

the cubes. The table paradigm fits well with users’ capabilities, since they are familiarized

with spreadsheets and other Office-like software.

Nonetheless, the data selection and filtering prior to the table viewing revealed to be a

problem. Sometimes the users did not applied correct dimensions combination, leading to

inappropriate results, lack of reliability in the tool, and they abandoned its use. The

purchased OLAP tool did not provide some necessary data constraints, leaving the user

“free in excess” to handle the data.

Another drawback was the absence of a reach-trough capability in the tool, enabling the

user to scrutinize the raw data (maybe in an ODS, as proposed in 4.1). Issuing a query to

retrieve the underlying data became an IT task, via SQL, and the final users evaded the

direct interaction with the OLAP software. Front-line employees cannot wait for IT queries,

and as a result, take action based on experience and intuition rather than in facts (Ahlberg,

2007).
Frequently changing requirements

After the data warehouse implantation, it was very common to arise new requirements from

some clients that were not asked in the previous phase. A quick solution could be a data

warehouse refactoring, resulting in some ETL process tuning. But, just after the new

solution, the clients asked more dimensions or facts that were not served by the data

warehouse. BI reporting has grown and changed in dramatic ways (Ahlberg, 2007), and

scalability must be provided by the building techniques.

Faced with this reality we believed that, inspired in the software development process

evolution, which assumed a requirement changing as a part of the development process and

not as the big evil that we need to avoid, the development of a BI system should also

assume that as unavoidable. So, despite of the project methodology in BI systems,

evolution must be the premise, or rather, we need to understand that the clients and

business needs will not be stable, and could be based on agile methodologies that were

already concerned about it. Agile development strives to deliver small units of functionality

that make good business sense (Chu, 2005).

Data granularity varies with its aging

In face of the requirement change addressed by the users we observed that the variability of

a requirement is totally dependent of an up to date data. A data warehouse project need to

have this concerned, up to dated data will need low granularity while old data will not.

Considering that, we suggest that the premise in a BI project identifies not only which data

are relevant, but also which data are relevant in a timeline. For example, we observed that
for the last absenteeism data, the managers need to know which people are qualified to act

directly with each person. By the other way, in an older data analysis (older than 12

months) we observe needs for statistic data that shows evolutive institutional snapshots,

resulting macro decisions despite of punctual decisions.

Managing data and business context together in real time and ensuring the data structures

are aligned to handle different levels of granularity and completeness of data is a key

feature that we must make an effort to achieve (Rogalski, 2007).

Project evolution and the chase for maturity

Despite of team’s great expectation in the beginning of the project, as time went by the

final product has become little helpful in making decisions related to human resources, after

two years of existence.

The employees data mart has supported the statistical yearbook report, nowadays, the main

usefulness of the OLAP tool. Dynamic reports were built by team in 2006 and it has been

used since then. Unfortunately this task has been executed for IT area. IT area has used

OLAP tool to extract data, after it converts into spreadsheets, format spreadsheets and

finally send data to final user. The final user hasn’t extracted data because the OLAP tool is

considered very difficult to use and the IT area hasn’t had top management’s support to

pass this task to final users.

The absenteeism data mart was abandoned, nobody extracted data directly on OLAP tool.

The final users always need others dimensions and always need the names of employees.
The IT team has extracted data from data store with SQL consults. Other problem is that a

lot of absent data are edited after the ETL’s day. In the future is very important IT team

review the ETL.

The data store has supported many others reports that are important in a Human Resource

Area. These reports have extracted from data store with SQL consults. The team’s

expectation was to implement improvements and develop more data marts, but the urgent

demands have taken all time of the team.

We believe that the main factor to minimize problems is to form a team focused on

Bussiness Intelligence. This team will have primary responsibility for developing the

environment of business intelligence based on the urgent demands and difficulties of users.

This team would provide rapid solutions to promote quality assurance of data and promote

the increased use of OLAP tools for users.

Final words
As highlighted by Zeleny (2007), there is a growing need for information and knowledge in

the Human Resource area. Business Intelligence has been providing this information for

other areas in the organization. It is time for HR to encompass this technology in its favor.

In this paper we provided two sample models for OLAP cubes containing Human Resource

specific data and showed its use through software. We also discussed the progress of the

project and how some difficulties specific from HR have arouse.

The daily practice is showing us that modeling HR systems for BI should not follow only

the literature examples and practices, but must instead define its own methods and models,

in order to address the specific issues of Human Resources area.

We believe that the future of this project relies on making an effort to address the points

covered in Section 4. We hope this could alert other projects regarding the use of BI in

HRM, aiming to avoid these misfortunes and having better results.

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