Kingfisher Transforms People Analytics with Alteryx

A better world starts with better homes. That’s the motto of Kingfisher plc, an international home improvement company based in London with nearly 2,000 retail stores in eight countries. But there’s also another type of improvement on the minds of company leaders — using advanced analytics to become a data-driven organization.

Putting people at the heart of Kingfisher

With the hypercompetitive global job market, Kingfisher understands the importance of adopting new technology solutions to attract and retain talent and improve employee satisfaction. That’s why in October 2021, Kingfisher formed the People Analytics Team, led by Iain Reid.

The team’s mission was to consolidate global employee data and establish a governed HR global data set that was readily accessible. It was a daunting project — the existing data related to more than 80,000 global employees was large, complex, and disparate.

Iain was also tasked with making data available to executive leadership and domain experts, enabling users to find answers and data insights themselves, without the help of data experts. “I needed to find a technical solution that empowers users to drive their insights themselves,” said Iain.

Getting a global picture of employee data

One of the primary challenges of reporting employee information was the decentralized nature of data that needed to be retrieved from various sources. Getting answers required manually extracting non-standardized data from disparate sources and compiling it in Excel.

“It’s a fairly traditional data problem. The answers that would come back would be different, depending on how you asked the question,” said Iain. “There was no standardization or governance around the data, which meant decision-making was more sentiment-driven.”

Another challenge was the varying levels of analytics maturity across the HR department. Stakeholders wanted to interact with data and analytics in different ways, with varying levels of detail & analysis.

Transforming global HR reporting 

Iain was familiar with Alteryx and knew the advanced analytics platform would be central to transforming the global HR reporting process. But with a 6-month timeline to get a solution in place, he knew he needed a trusted partner. Iain and his team chose Bulien Consultancy for its extensive experience in advanced technologies like Alteryx.

Bulien proposed a two-fold approach of using Alteryx’s connectivity, automation, and predictive capabilities together with Power BI’s interactive reporting. “Within the first week, Iain and the Kingfisher team were already generating their own Alteryx workflows and creating their own analyses,” said Mark Jackson, Bulien.

Empowering intelligent decision-making by all

With Alteryx and Power BI in place, Iain set out to deliver on the company mission to make data insights approachable and usable by stakeholders with different levels of expertise. Auto Insights by Alteryx proved to be invaluable, allowing executives and decision-makers to make more intelligent decisions at scale without the need for technical skills.

“C-Suite executives get their monthly dashboard showing them all of their key KPIs,” said Iain. “Auto Insights tells them why those KPIs have changed, what’s influenced the number, and they’re allowed to model the data themselves in real-time to drive their own analytical insights.”

As a result, stakeholders are more willing to engage with analytics to get their ad hoc questions answered at the speed of business. This reduces the back-and-forth waiting game of asking analysts to build new dashboards to answer additional questions.

Lowering attrition rates with predictive modeling

The first use case HR leaders set their sights on was improving employee turnover rates, a common and costly problem in the retail industry.

Using Alteryx Intelligence Suite, Iain’s team is looking at historical data to understand the reasons for employee turnover at its stores. The insight allows them to build predictive models to better understand trends in attrition.

“We’re applying all of that criteria modeling we’re doing with Alteryx to look at our existing headcount and predict who is likely to leave and the reasons they are likely to go,” said Iain.

Forecasting models built in Alteryx also provide insight aligned with the organization’s strategic pillars, enabling HR to use data to inform wider business decision-making.

Transformative results

The results of HR innovation using Alteryx have been significant. Kingfisher is saving 170 FTE hours per month and delivering considerable cost savings. The team also built automated Alteryx workflows to reduce month-end data consolidation from 2 weeks to 2 days.

Alteryx is empowering an entire tier of HR domain experts to upskill in analytics and use data-driven insights to solve problems closest to them.

It’s been career-boosting for some. One of the HR data specialists became Core Certified in Alteryx in just 4 months. Iain jokes “My job now is to keep the work really interesting so they don’t look somewhere else to use Alteryx.”

The path to becoming a data-driven company is proving that a home improvement retail giant has a powerful improvement story to tell with its own data.