Client testimony

Astral Forest has proven to be a strong and reliable partner in data & analytics.

Spending just a couple of days, they quickly provided me a comprehensive set of Power BI reports that allow us to finally have a clear picture of HR costs.

Astral Forest drove the development process in tight collaboration with us, showing great passion and orientation towards our common objective.

I definitely recommend the services of Astral Forest.

Mateusz Jesiołowski, CTO, Krynica Vitamin

About the company

With 30 years of experience in the beverage industry, Krynica Vitamin is the leading beverage producer in central and eastern Europe, specializing in contract manufacturing of beverages for global brands and retail chains. Krynica Vitamin, the public company traded on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, offers packaging services of beverages in aluminum, PET, and glass packs for energy, soft, functional drinks, coffees, dairy, and alcoholic drinks. Their products are available in 38 countries throughout the globe, with a very strong presence in the European market and strongly stepping up in the US.

The challenge

Historically, Krynica Vitamin was relying on purely manual work in order to analyze data and collate reporting in HR at both operational and managerial level. Extractions, spreadsheets, and consolidation of data from different tables to get the right report for different stakeholders required a heavy workload, especially that these activities were performed repeatedly every time data had to be refreshed for a new period.

Consequently, both top management and stakeholders from HR were lacking a clear and unequivocal view on the costs of labor, trends in costs and productivity, as well as the efficiency of HR processes and activities, such as costs of leaves, overtime, and others.

Opportunity

Seeking to apply a modern approach to analytics, Krynica Vitamin discussed with Astral Forest the possibilities to create a first set managerial reports addressing the most burning topics in HR.

During the initial meetings, Astral Forest demonstrated a consistent and proven approach not only to designing the reports and visualizations, but also to structuring the data models. Especially that last item caught the attention of Krynica Vitamin and facilitated the decision to greenlight the project and hire Astral Forest for the task.

Solutions

Since the whole business data has already been stored in the operational database, Astral Forest decided to tap into the operational database and build a dedicated data mart with all the necessary business logic, mappings, segments, and rules added on top.

This data mart, with all the data cleansed and properly organized, was then fed directly to Power BI. The final reporting consisted of a set of screens following the principle ‘from general to specific’, answering business needs of both the board, other top management, and HR operations.

The new reports allowed HR specialists to accurately monitor the health of HR finance while exploring interesting trends and patterns. This has greatly facilitated answering business questions such as:

• Do we observe soaring costs of labor?
• If so, which business units, locations, professions drive the cost trends?
• Do we pay too much for labor demand fluctuations?
• Should we hire more staff?
• How are we affected by planned and unplanned absences?

Results

Astral Forest’s set of Power BI reports enabled Krynica Vitamin a thorough analysis of the essential KPIs related to HR costs and processes. Thanks to those reports, the company saves lots of time spent on building manual reports. Now, this time can be allocated to taking the best, data-driven decisions.

Finally, the report has revealed that the existing operational data store was returning several inconsistencies in the results, therefore fueling the efforts to raise the data quality of the database and the reports.