Leadership was flying blind
on workforce data
Before this dashboard existed, there was no centralized place to answer even the most basic workforce questions: How many people do we have? What's our turnover rate? Where are we losing headcount? Answers lived in disparate UKG reports, manually pulled spreadsheets, and HR's institutional memory.
Every time leadership needed a workforce update — for a board meeting, a budget review, or a headcount decision — someone in HR had to manually compile data from multiple sources, reconcile inconsistencies, and build a one-off report. It was slow, error-prone, and unsustainable as the organization scaled past 700 employees.
The gap: a 700+ employee organization with no single source of truth for workforce metrics — no headcount view, no turnover tracking, no labor cost visibility. Every data request was a manual project.
Connecting the data pipes
before building the view
The first challenge wasn't design — it was data. Before a dashboard could exist, reliable data pipelines had to be established. That meant configuring UKG People Analytics and Cognos BI to surface clean, consistent workforce data, then using Power Automate to schedule and deliver report bursts automatically.
Excel served as the presentation and calculation layer — aggregating data from UKG exports, applying compensation and turnover logic, and formatting the output into a dashboard leadership could read without HR interpretation. The goal was zero manual steps between the data refresh and the finished report.
The dashboard was designed around the questions leadership actually asked — not every metric available, just the ones that drove decisions. Headcount by location, FLSA type breakdown, terminations by month, open headcount by priority. Real operational intelligence, not vanity metrics.
Dashboard modules
The tool stack
This dashboard deliberately uses tools the organization already owns and the HR team already understands — no new vendors, no new licenses, no IT dependencies. The entire pipeline runs on existing infrastructure.
From manual requests
to always-on visibility
The most immediate change was time — what used to take hours of manual data gathering now happens automatically. But the bigger shift was cultural: leadership stopped treating workforce data as something HR produces on request and started using it as a live operational input.