Motoring organisation the RAC is reducing absenteeism and raising employee and customer satisfaction levels using business intelligence (BI) software.

The application provides the RAC with a comprehensive view of staff performance, which it will use to develop effective working practices as part of its People Profit & Loss (P&L) initiative.

‘The performance-related data has actually got human resources (HR) talking to managers in the call centre or field engineering, for example,’ Graham Pritchard, RAC data warehouse manager, told Computing.

‘There is a dialogue happening now that perhaps didn’t happen before because the data wasn’t readily available.’

Business intelligence provider Cognos has provided the software, which went live alongside specialist graphical analysis software from vendor Strata at the beginning of this year.

The system is able to measure key performance indicators against the HR records of 11,500 RAC employees.

People P&L is intended to reduce the number of days each employee is off work each year, from 10 to 8.5 days. Pritchard says that figure is now 8.54.

‘Performance-related initiatives and reduced absenteeism is proving that there is a direct correlation between good HR management and higher customer service levels,’ he said.

‘We have managed to combine 3,000-plus reports into 300, run on a single morning, instead of over a week, after the data warehouse refresh.’

The company now wants to add more data from other business areas or applications to

further develop the People P&L reporting process.

‘Having a clear strategy, management support, clean data, a simple, effective BI tool, and a graphical presentation layer is allowing us to see the data any way we want and in a more flexible way than before. We want to build on that,’ he said.