Berkshire Bank HR Analyst Cashes in on Data Prep

Background

With more than 97 offices in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Berkshire Bank provides a variety of financial services including personal and business banking, insurance and wealth management. The institution was founded in 1846 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and now manages more than $9.3 billion in assets.

Challenge

Berkshire Bank’s Human Resources (HR) department manages more than 1,300 employees and must produce monthly reports related to short-term incentive plans, compensation and salary, talent management and internal/external auditing requests. Over the years, as Berkshire Bank expanded its operations to what it is today through both organic growth and acquisitions, the HR Department deployed several disparate HR systems to support the institution’s growth. HR data was “locked away” in various systems, and it became increasingly difficult to access, reconcile, and combine information from multiple vendors, and various Excel spreadsheets.

According to HR Analyst Mary Anne Christian, “We were grappling with what seemed like black holes. Not only were we spending exorbitant amounts of time gathering data from each system, it was also evident that not all the information was current and accurate. As the sole HR analyst, I am tasked with building multiple tables and databases to tie all of this information together for timely reporting.”

Solution

Christian was seeking a single platform to eliminate the common hurdles to HR reporting and discovered Monarch. She initially employed Altair® Monarch® for reconciliation of the short-term incentive plan reporting, and was astounded by how quickly she could access, blend, reconcile and prepare data. What used to take her four or more hours to aggregate and redistribute, now takes only five minutes–and she’s able to effortlessly drop the prepared data into a visualization tool for analysis.

In a few short weeks, Christian found many more uses for Monarch. Using the platform, Christian can more quickly blend data to create detailed (and repeatable!) turnover, talent management, and compensation reports and dashboards for better, visual reporting to senior management. She also applies Monarch to get a clear picture of the statistical details of her datasets, in order to ensure the currency and accuracy of data being used.

Results

Christian can acquire, blend and prepare HR data in minutes. This gives her new found time to read, analyze and glean meaningful insights from the data.

From day one, Christian was surprised at how easy and intuitive Monarch is. She added, “The self-service platform makes it incredibly easy to combine data. Before Monarch, I spent hours cutting and pasting information between different spreadsheets. As a result, I was scrambling to deliver accurate, up-to-date information on time. Now, I have the ability and the time to actually tell a story with the data and present it in a cohesive manner to the management team.”