Overview
A large community services provider in Australia needed timely and accurate insights from its HR and payroll systems. We implemented a Microsoft Fabric data warehouse that combined data from several sources into one place. This decreased manual reporting, enhanced data accuracy, and gave leadership real-time visibility to support better decisions and compliance.
Client Background
Our client delivers aged care, disability support, and family services across several regions in Australia. Their HR and payroll data were spread across different systems, making reporting slow and inconsistent. Teams relied on manual spreadsheets to prepare reports, which increased effort and risk. They needed a more reliable and unified way to manage workforce data.
Challenges
- Inconsistent Workforce Data: HR and payroll data lived across multiple systems and APIs, making it difficult to create a single view for reporting and compliance.
- Manual and Time-Consuming Reporting: Teams relied heavily on spreadsheets and exports, spending hours preparing reports and validating numbers instead of focusing on operational work.
- No Real-Time Visibility for Leadership: Decision-makers lacked access to live workforce data, limiting their ability to track trends, respond quickly, and plan across regions and departments.
Solutions
- Modern Data Platform with Microsoft Fabric: Created a data warehouse (Microsoft Fabric) to securely ingest data from 19 Zambion Payroll APIs, enabling unified payroll analytics and real-time business insights through Power BI dashboards.
- Power BI Semantic Modelling: Star-schema models were built on top of the dataset to enable intuitive reporting and drill-down analytics.
- Governance and Security Controls: Implemented Microsoft Purview, Row-Level Security (RLS), and role-based access controls to maintain compliance with Australian privacy standards.
Technology in Use
- Microsoft Fabric
- Power BI
- Zambion APIs
- Azure Data Pipelines
- Microsoft Purview
Business Value Propositions
- Real-Time Workforce Insights: Leaders could access live HR and payroll data to plan staffing, budgets, and resource needs accurately.
- Faster Reporting Cycles: Reduced report preparation time from 12 hours to under 1 hour with automated pipelines.
- Stronger Data Governance: Improved data accuracy, audit readiness, and compliance with organizational governance standards through centralized controls.
- Self-Service for Leaders: Secure access to trusted reports and dashboards without relying on manual data requests.
Final Perspective
By unifying HR and payroll data into a governed, real-time platform, we simplified reporting, improved visibility, and helped leaders make faster, more confident workforce decisions.