Workforce consulting, KellyOCG increases productivity by 25% & elevates talent to the next level with Tableau

KellyOCG®, the outsourcing and consulting group of Kelly Services®, with more than $7 billion annual labor spend and more than 500,000 workers employed. SVP and CIO Judy Snyder adopted Tableau “for scalability, governance, and enterprise-readiness.” With Tableau, KellyOCG streamlined reporting by 10 hours per week and increased operational productivity by 25%—leading to internal and partner growth. Suppliers now have fast access to analytics, encouraging innovation and “driving the collective business forward.”

KellyOCG manages billions of dollars of purchased labor spend on behalf of global strategic partners. Of the nearly one million open positions that the company fills each year, Kelly Services directly employs 500,000 workers; they place the rest via a global network of talent suppliers and partners.

Previously, KellyOCG’s client reports—including annual business reviews and quarterly ‘scorecards’—were static PowerPoint presentations. This quarterly pace made it difficult for suppliers to make timely changes to business processes and the static format prevented them from asking questions of the data. A few strategic customers approached KellyOCG with a request for faster, deeper insights.

Internally, KellyOCG’s leadership also wanted data to guide company-wide decisions. With five years’ worth of this transactional data stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database along with data from Salesforce.com, vendor management systems, and Google Analytics, KellyOCG’s operations manager spent 10 hours every week putting together data sets culled from up to four different reporting systems.

In response, "KellyOCG made a deliberate investment in analytics because we understood that companies lacked the insights to make decisions about the right way to use talent,” said John Healy, Vice President and Managing Director of Global Talent Supply Chain for Kelly Services.

“We needed a real-time delivery platform for insights,” shared Tom Tisdale, Vice President of Talent Supply Chain Analytics for Kelly Services. “This platform needed to be flexible such that it would become a foundation pillar of a much more encompassing supplier enablement strategy.”

The analytics team turned to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, evaluating prospective solutions based on ease of use, data connections, ability to embed dashboards into web pages, and a flexible licensing model to minimize upfront capital investment.

“We went through every vendor in the ‘Leaders’ segment of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant to evaluate the right choice. Tableau came out on top,” John recalled.

The team worked closely with Judy Snyder, to vet their final choice. “We looked at Tableau to make sure it would meet our needs for scalability, governance, and enterprise-readiness. Tableau has been able to meet the rigor of our complex data and IT ecosystem,” said Judy.

Today, a core group creates visual analyses in Tableau Desktop for several audiences—connecting to tables with up to 25 to 30 million rows of data. They publish dashboards to Tableau Server and embed analytics into their Center of Excellence portal as the collective analysis platform for customers, suppliers, and program teams.

“With this platform, for the first time, everyone is seeing the same analysis and insights in real-time,” said Richard Fisher, Director of Talent Supply Chain Analytics, KellyOCG.

“Tableau allows us to visualize a significantly complex business problem in a way that allows our operations team, our customers, and our suppliers to make business decisions that drive their collective business forward,” said John.

In the early stages of Tableau, KellyOCG eliminated 10 hours per week from the previous manual reporting process—a 25% improvement in operational productivity. And once a dashboard is up and running, the team can schedule it to refresh the data—creating an essentially evergreen report. “Now our operations manager is able to focus on more value-generating efforts,” said John.

With Tableau, KellyOCG accelerated their supplier scorecard pace by months—leading to supplier innovation. Today, instead of delivering the scorecards each quarter, KellyOCG provides weekly insights to its suppliers.

“Using predictive algorithms in Tableau, for the first time, suppliers can now determine their investment before committing to an order or a SOW and they can determine the probability of success,” explained Tom. "This is unique to KellyOCG’s Managed Service Program (MSP)."

“Now our suppliers have visibility into the marketplace, into their performance, and into the clients’ true demands in a broader way—that is leading to innovation,” explained John. “As companies address the changing dynamics of the workforce, our customers have been demanding the kind of innovation that we are delivering through Tableau.”

Suppliers use this data to conduct market assessments, detect optimal pay rates to attract the right talent, identify the best number of sub-suppliers, along with other benchmarking efforts.

Within KellyOCG, the team can forecast labor trends within a company or provide comparative analyses against other companies looking for similar employee profiles within an industry or geography. To meet European data privacy laws, all personally-identifiable information is stripped out of published analyses.

“This benchmarking gives the operational teams a competitive advantage,” explains Tom. "They can now be predictive and prescriptive versus reactive with our clients.”

They are pleased with Tableau’s advanced analytics capabilities, such as forecasting, probability analysis of outcomes, and prediction using simulation and correlation models in conjunction with Michigan State University. They also use Tableau’s native R-integration for comprehensive predictive analytics.

KellyOCG uses Tableau to make their business reviews more dynamic and more exciting. They simply log into the .net site and customers can review information and drill down into areas they need to understand.

“At a certain point during a customer review, the formal presentation just stops and everyone gathers around the laptop looking at the dashboard. The customers are saying, ‘What is that jump there? Why did that happen? How can we repeat it?’ or ‘I knew we were doing great over here, but I had no idea that there was a quality problem over here,’” said Tom.

“Now there is a collective realization that the stale customer review has moved from a reporting on the efficiency of the program exercise to a collaborative session on improving the effectiveness of the program…..we move the discussion from what happened to what needs to happen...game changing” explains Tom.

Kelly Services' leadership team views analytics as a key differentiator. In early 2017, the company purchased 1200 interactor licenses on a subscription basis to continue the momentum they have already seen with Tableau.

Tom Tisdale believes that the flexibility of Tableau’s subscription model will enable more internal and external users to adopt Tableau quickly, rapidly scaling self-service analytics within the enterprise and across their external network of vendors and suppliers.

“The ROI of the subscription model from a financial consideration, was that it provided us with the flexibility to spread the costs of licenses over 3 years versus a large upfront payment,” explains Tom. “It enables us to ramp up the user populations today versus having to prove ROI to justify a large financial outlay upfront.”