Electronic Arts: Building a Data-Driven Culture with Workforce Intelligence
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Workday
- Visier Workforce Intelligence
Tech Stack
- Workday
- Visier
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Professional Service
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Human Resources
Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
- Training
About The Customer
Electronic Arts (EA) is a leading developer of interactive entertainment software, known for popular games such as The Sims™, Madden NFL, EA SPORTS™ FIFA, and Plants vs. Zombies™. The company is recognized for its innovation in the gaming industry and has extended this innovative approach to its Human Resources (HR) department. EA's HR team has invested in skills and technology to make data-driven talent decisions, transforming from a central services team to a key strategic advisor. The company employs a large workforce and has a significant focus on leveraging data to enhance its HR functions and overall business outcomes.
The Challenge
At the start of its HR transformation, EA was using a combination of an old HRMS and a custom front end to provide transactional services to users. While the company had no shortage of data about its workforce, reports were limited and difficult to produce. To begin its journey towards data-driven workforce decision making, EA’s workforce analytics team began delivering extensive, hard-coded, monthly workforce reports to HR and business leaders, prompting both an extensive data clean-up effort and a better appreciation of HR data. Over several years, the number of complex weekly, monthly, and quarterly workforce reports that the team produced grew exponentially—encompassing a variety of trends for hiring, talent movement, terminations, demographic shifts in the workforce, and other employment factors. The workforce analytics team could not keep up with the demand for data and spent its time manually creating reports instead of building deeper analyses into underlying trends, risks, and predictive models. Building reports was a reactive exercise, and because the team lacked a flexible reporting environment, it limited its ability to slice, dice, and drill down to the right level of insight needed to move from workforce observation to diagnosis.
The Solution
To address the challenges of manual report generation and limited data insights, EA implemented Visier’s Workforce Intelligence solution. This tool was chosen to complement their recently implemented Workday HR management system. Visier allowed the HR analytics team to automate the loading of data from Workday, enabling immediate slicing and dicing of workforce data. Visier subject matter experts were appointed across the HR function to champion this work within each business unit. The teams replaced standard, manually generated reports with online Visier presentations accessible on demand. This automation saved significant time, estimated at about 24 weeks of labor per year, and allowed the team to focus on deeper analyses and predictive models. Visier also enabled the creation of detailed sensitivity analyses related to hiring and termination trends, helping to meet fiscal-year headcount plans. The tool is now available to everyone on the HR team, fostering a data-driven mindset for talent decisions.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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