2017: A Year of BI Development

2017 was an extremely busy year in the ongoing development of ESR BI. It included the implementation of a large number of enhancements as part of the Reporting Strategy/Roadmap, with a focus on enabling organisations to extend the list of reports now being regularly executed in ESR BI.

Key developments during the year included:

• Embedding of BI data into the ESR Portal;
• Enabling access to BI reporting capability, for both managers and professional users, on mobile devices and via the internet through a controlled, two factor authentication process;
• Development of alerting and benchmarking capabilities.

The NHS ESR BI Team continues to develop and enhance the range of standard BI dashboards (over 160 change requests were raised and implemented in 2017) in order to provide the reports that organisations have requested and require to support their business processes. Alongside the enhancement work we have also been working towards creating BI equivalent reports to those currently provided in Discoverer; this is a key objective within our Reporting strategy as we plan the decommission of the Discoverer tool later in 2018. There are now 198 standard Discoverer reports that have equivalent reports in ESR BI in key areas such as Absence Management, Datetrack Changes/Change Events and Education/Learning.

To support the decommissioning of Discoverer we intend to adopt a phased approach to removing certain Discoverer workbooks, by the summer of 2018, where equivalent BI dashboards now exist. We will, of course, provide further information on this approach but we encourage organisations to begin investigating and embedding these BI dashboards into their business processes at the earliest opportunity.

East Kent University Hospitals NHS Trust has already begun to plan their move to ESR BI in readiness for the withdrawal of Discoverer.  Jan Jerram, the HR Systems Manager explains:

“We started this move by documenting all of our regular reports and mapping them to the corresponding BI reports. We then held an all-day session, away from the office, where we ran a few of our regular reports using both DISCO and BI and compared the results.  This allowed us to discuss the outputs and increase our confidence in BI. This has become an on-going process.  It has been a difficult change to achieve, and we still have work to do, but we are slowly moving the production of our reports to BI.  Because ESR BI is much more user friendly and intuitive compared to DISCO, it offers us the opportunity to improve our service, e.g. by increasing the number of staff who can run their own reports directly from BI, rather than waiting for our central team to produce them, our staff have up-to-date information whenever they need it”.

Enhanced Reporting Areas

Absence Timeline

These are highly utilised reports in Discoverer that provide the monthly and quarterly absence rates and estimated absence cost - updated weekly at each weekend.  These reports are also part of the ESR BI catalogue and are provided by the absence dashboard – the key difference being that the data is updated overnight in line with the rest of the data in ESR BI.

Additionally, in ESR BI these figures can be analysed by organisation, staff group and a number of different grouping attributes. Benchmarking is also available for the absence rate to allow managers to compare their absence rate with that of the organisation as a whole.

Change Event Log

ESR Release 33 enabled the enhanced change event log in ESR BI which captures 1,000 change events to support organisations in extending audit capability of their important data. In addition, further reports have been produced to allow organisations to measure the number of changes being done via ESR Self Service, therefore directly measuring benefit from the introduction of this service (see example chat below).

View event auditing was also made available in ESR Release 34 enabling organisations to audit the viewing of employee data by central teams and managers.

Education and Learning

This large area of reporting has been significantly enhanced in ESR BI when compared to the Discoverer reports, with the inclusion of Certification subscription reporting. A comprehensive subject area in ESR BI has been designed to ensure users have all of the data items and logic required to produce accurate and meaningful intelligence for local teams. The standard dashboards build on the well-used Discoverer reports as a base, but are significantly enhanced beyond what we were historically able to achieve with Discoverer with items such as ‘Class Planning’ and the ability to report on all courses, classes and enrolments regardless of person type or source of booking.

Compliance

Compliance reporting has always been a well utilised area in Discoverer – in ESR BI we have developed this area further so that it now includes:

• The ability to report on External Learners’ compliance
• Predicted Compliance analyses
• The ability to report on competency requirements set as Supplementary Role and Assignment level
• More flexible ways of grouping and selecting data and competencies to fit local requirements.
• Ability to look at trends of compliance over a period of time

Payroll

The popular Element Schedule report from Discoverer has been replicated in ESR BI. In addition, to support Payroll teams, further reports for Pay History and Pay Analysis have been made available. These enable payroll users to look at the gross and net pay values for employees to quickly resolve any payroll queries.

These reports also support organisations in spotting potential issues with pay values over different periods.

Starters/Leavers

BI includes a range of reports for starters and leavers, including cumulative headcount and Turnover rates (monthly and 12 month rolling). In addition, ESR Release 37 gave users the ability to ‘benchmark’ their key measures against their region and against the NHS national figures in ESR BI.

A number of grouping attributes are provided to enable users to find key areas of the organisation that may need attention. BI also contains reports to show staff movements not considered as part of Discoverer – for example staff who move from Bank to Substantive posts.

ESR User Access

The Workforce Profile dashboard contains an ‘Online ESR Access’ tab which lists all staff along with details of whether they have an ESR user account, an internet ESR account and whether they have registered to ‘Upgrade Access’ in the ESR portal if they have other access to ESR. This is particularly useful to understand the access your employees have to ESR following rollout.

Next Steps

As we move closer to the decommission of the Discoverer tool, the next three to four months will involve further ESR BI developments (these will be in addition to our normal development process). These developments will include:

• Payroll Balances
• Travel and Subsistence
• Reporting on Future Changes
• BI Report Usage Tracking
• Data Quality
• Vehicle Repository

Discoverer will be withdrawn from ESR during 2018 so for NHS organisations, it is imperative that they begin to reduce their reliance on Discoverer reports.  The suite of ESR BI reports offer a superior reporting solution to users, and as we have outlined above, the range of reports will continue to grow over the coming months.

There is a Reporting section on our website where you can find out more about ESR BI, including helpful documents and a new report writer's guide that you can download. 

If you need guidance about how to get started with ESR BI or have specific questions about the functionality, or need support to prepare for the withdrawal of Discoverer please contact your NHS ESR Functional Advisor.