In a commercially tight production environment, this organisation developed a data reporting framework to keep overtime and absenteeism in check, and it’s having powerful benefits to its bottom line. 

The cost of labour is critical to every business. However, in the volatile market conditions of the manufacturing industry, it can make or break a company’s profit margin.

Timber manufacturer Hyne Group faces a significant challenge – and a common issue in manufacturing – whereby excessive levels of overtime and unscheduled absenteeism can inflate labour and production costs, creating operating pressures in an already fluctuating economic climate.

Myself and my team identified a key driver: a lack of access to real-time workforce metrics, due to legacy reporting systems. This meant business leaders and managers were running over their budgeted overtime costs – unaware until the financials were released midway in the following month.

As a result, business unit leaders on-site were responding reactively to levels of absenteeism and overtime in their teams, which bled into our production costs.

In the manufacturing sector, particularly within a timber industry that is highly dependent on macro-economic factors such as interest rates, maintaining your production cost basis is fundamental to achieving targeted EBITDA returns. 

Cost overruns represent real risk to the business’s ability to maintain EBITDA returns in line with the organisation’s strategic plan..

To meet this challenge, we developed a standardised data reporting dashboard to arm frontline site leaders with updated analytics on overtime and absenteeism, which I led as part of my case study for AHRI HR certification.

Read HRM’s article on using data to make your presentations more impactful.

How we did this: Delivering real-time, data-driven insights

Addressing overtime and absenteeism was central in working towards achieving our organisation’s 2024-26 Strategic Plan and objectives, and we had a clear vision forward.

With the support of the executive team, I scoped and planned the development of a data reporting framework. 

Here’s how I was able to successfully deliver it in collaboration with another senior member of my team.

1. Meaningfully engaging stakeholders

Before selecting or implementing any new software systems, we reached out to key internal stakeholders (using the interest-power matrix) to understand what they needed, their current administrative processes, and what was currently lacking.

One-on-one interviews revealed a common thread: they all wanted to be able to track overtime levels, personal leave levels and whether this was scheduled or unscheduled, at a glance. 

In its absence, production and site managers were manually collating this information from reports through the companies rostering/time and attendance software.

From there, we collated and integrated their individual feedback and performed demonstrations to inform the format of the reporting dashboard, the type of information included and the ways it sat alongside existing workflows.

With this information, we built 17 unique reporting dashboards, tailored to the every day and operational needs of our on-site workforce managers distributed across multiple production sites.

2. Building on existing resources

One of the most important success factors to this data reporting initiative was that it didn’t require investment into new systems, which would have required influencing and building a well-considered business case for executive buy-in and introducing training across the workforce.

We took advantage of systems and resources we already had. In this case, our rostering/time and attendance and payroll systems.

In my audit of legacy internal systems, I discovered we were not fully optimising our rostering/time and attendance system for other workforce management capabilities. This represented an opportunity for a quick-win solution.

In consultation with our IT Director and external software providers, and based on the gathered feedback, we developed visual dashboards that provide graphical representations of the levels of overtime and unscheduled leave per week.

This data was readily available in our existing payroll system; it simply wasn’t being reported in a substantive or standardised format.

In a climate where HR practitioners are being asked to do more with less, leveraging our existing capabilities not only contributed significantly to reducing time-to-delivery and increasing buy-in to the project, it, importantly, made it very accessible to the people it’s designed to service: our production managers and business leaders. 

While it may seem like a minor aspect, it meant we weren’t adding further administrative burden to our people’s workloads with another product or system they needed to learn.

3. Empowering frontline capabilities

As individuals who sit at the coalface of the business, we know our business leaders on-site are best placed to manage production, staffing levels and communicate with their employees about professional or personal issues. 

By adding a layer of visibility to levels of overtime and absenteeism on a system they are familiar with and have access to, they’ve been able to integrate HR metrics with operational data, such as weekly production costs, to proactively perform cost analysis. 

The data reporting tool is also enabling on-site managers to swiftly identify bottlenecks in overtime and adjust rosters accordingly.

So far, we’ve heard positive feedback from various leaders across the business around its visual ease of use, as well as significant time savings of an average of an hour a week, previously spent on administrative busywork. 

At its core, the uplift of data reporting is reinvesting time back into more strategic, high-value production management.

Final reflections

Leveraging evidence-based insights for strategic decision-making is critical as Hyne Group continues on the pathway of acquisitions and enters a period of workforce change.

There’s still a lot to do in order to develop the reporting initiative into one that tangibly reduces levels of overtime and absenteeism. For one, I’m working with my HR colleagues to develop structured wellbeing strategies that act upon absenteeism metrics once identified within teams. Having a more precise view of the trends enables leaders and HR business partners to start conversations with team members who may be struggling and activate early, targeted interventions.

By transforming workforce data into a strategic enabler, we’re moving our on-site managerial workforce from playing catch-up, to making business decisions based on sophisticated insights and enabling long-term organisational agility and sustainability.

Debbie McCourt CPHR is the Group Payroll Manager of Hyne Group.

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