The challenge
A major provincial health organization urgently needed to implement enterprise vacation planning. During implementation, important differences emerged between the software’s assumptions and the organization’s requirements. Changing course was no longer an available option.
Reporting was a major difficulty for the organization, the union and government stakeholders. The software also struggled with seniority allocations and employee preferences. Accurate source information, including vacation entitlements and job groups, required substantial work by the data team.
The contribution
The team secured a raw data export from the vendor. The extract was messy and unwieldy, so Chris authored an R-based processing solution and ran it on a dedicated machine set up for the work.
That work made the vendor extract usable for the reporting task. The data team’s work on source information and Chris’s processing solution addressed different parts of the information problem.
The result
The recovered reporting showed that approximately 65% of annual vacation planning was completed in the first planning pass, compared with around 20–30% in previous years. More planning was completed earlier, and fewer rounds were needed overall.
The processed data also supplied inputs to workforce forecasting models, helping the organization identify expected pressure points and begin planning responses within the existing software constraints.
Explore operations and capability
Discuss initiative recovery