BJ’s Wholesale Club is a U.S.-based warehouse retail chain with nearly 240 clubs providing 7 million members with unbeatable value on quality groceries, household goods, furniture, electronics, and other goods and services.
BJ’s success relies on accurate reporting on sales, inventory, membership, employee retention, food waste, and safety, among other metrics. This information is displayed in over 50 Tableau dashboards and disseminated to thousands of employees across the field.
Chris Arnold, BJ’s Senior Director of Analytics, Clubs & Online, discovered CData Drivers – the only out-of-the-box Workday connectivity solution on the market – which helped the Human Resources (HR) team reveal and share some incredible insights that resulted in a significant reduction in employee turnover.
“CData has definitely made our lives easier, because now we have 1,500 leaders in the field that we need to disseminate data to. And we do that through Tableau today. Getting that data from Workday to those users easily wouldn't be possible without CData.”
– Chris Arnold, BJ’s Wholesale Club Senior Director of Analytics, Clubs & Online
The challenge: Gaining actionable insights from Workday data
The BJ’s HR department needed an effective way to share information with market vice presidents, regional directors, and club managers across the organization. Arnold’s team decided that automatically ingesting Workday data into Tableau for visualization and dissemination was the best solution.
The snag? Workday doesn’t offer native integration with third party reporting platforms like Tableau.
One path forward for Workday integration involved having HR generate their Workday reports, push them to a shared folder, then build a custom process that would pick up the reports and push them to a data warehouse. From there, the data would be moved into a Tableau dashboard. While this would answer the need, it wasn’t sustainable over the long term.
They needed to find a simple, pain-free, and scalable way to achieve their reporting goals.
Enter: The CData Workday Tableau Driver.
The solution: Turning a data dump into surprising insights
CData Workday Drivers provide instant connectivity from Workday to hundreds of enterprise applications – without the need for custom data pipelines, manual data extraction, or workarounds. Once Arnold’s team installed the driver, they were able to see live Workday reports within their existing Tableau dashboards.
Now, the HR team can visualize and share BJ’s employee data from the national level, all the way down to each club, and each position within a particular club. These comprehensive Tableau dashboards are automatically distributed to leadership in a regular cadence, allowing everyone in the organization to gather vital information about employee satisfaction, hiring trends, and more.
The insights they discovered were eye-opening.
“Now, with [the CData Workday Tableau Driver], I can connect to native Workday reports in Tableau and automatically share those, versus having to connect to the raw data and build something.”
– Chris Arnold, BJ’s Wholesale Club Senior Director of Analytics, Clubs & Online
Watch this customer video testimonial to learn how BJ’s Wholesale Club used CData Drivers to analyze live Workday data in Tableau.
The outcome: Increased employee retention and informed hiring decisions
Regularly analyzing Tableau dashboards with live Workday data, BJ’s discovered insights that further helped the HR team analyze employee trends. This helps BJ’s leadership to understand where they need to focus in their effort to improve employee retention.
“We’ve been understanding which recruitment avenues are the most effective and lead to the best retention, and we’ve been doubling down on those,” said Arnold.
Analyzing these Workday metrics helped BJ’s to take steps to increase employee retention by over 10% in the last 12 months.
In the near future, Arnold is keen to work with the HR team to create an automated HR scorecard analyzing employee hiring and turnover rates, open positions by location, 401k and benefits statistics, HR training participation, and more – all from one centralized, shareable dashboard in Tableau.
CData helps you work better with Workday
CData Workday Drivers are built to integrate live and historical Workday data with your favorite business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools – whether that’s Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, or Amazon QuickSight.
Need more than one driver? Want the flexibility of connecting in the cloud? CData Connect Cloud bundles all the drivers you need to connect your cloud data, all within one cloud-based virtualized interface. Download a free trial today.
