ESR has a number of methods to produce and display data at a local level depending on the type of data and the intended target audience. These include:

• ESR Portal - The ESR Portal provides data via the various portlets through Self Service for employees and managers; and through the user dashboards for professional users.

• Business Intelligence - The ESR Business Intelligence reporting suite provides access to data across the ESR workforce solution. Enabling the monitoring of processes, performance and data quality.

• Requests - Reports are secured, and contained under a range of URP’s that provide unique reports that are specific to the URP subject area such as IAT processing reports.

Workforce information is available through the ESR Portal and its associated Dashboards to your managers and your back office functions, providing an opportunity to empower management with valuable workforce intelligence in a variety of forms to suit the user. It offers detailed business insight for managers to monitor their teams while directors, and senior managers and leadership teams get an effective overview of the entire organisation, allowing them to plan for future business development.

ESR BI can also be used to produce integrated reports with specific data from other systems, and bespoke reports can be uploaded to the ESR Portal, to ensure that the target audience has quick access to information. Benchmarking and alerting are also key parts of ESR BI enabling the ability to target users and encourage prompt action where required.

Benefits include:

• Manager dashboard with direct links to these areas and the ESR BI reports directly from the Portlets, thus reducing the reliance on centralised reporting
• Interactive dashboards allowing users to delve deeper behind the graphs to see the data that sits behind them, thus saving time from producing data in more than one level
• Greater understanding of data and workforce requirements at source
• Empower your managers to have greater control of their workforce data and targets
• Improved timeliness of reports resulting in less time spent waiting for reports to complete
• Reports can be exported into many different formats including PDF & Excel
• Ownership of data at source
• View key performance indicators for absence, compliance, and appraisals and the ability to access key career information about their employees through the Talent Profile with the ability to produce PDF reports

ESR Business Intelligence (ESR BI) transforms your ESR data into visually relevant and appealing dashboards, accessible on desktops or mobile devices.  It contains a full suite of standard reports across the full range of functionality that ESR provides; enabling processes to be monitored and provides an opportunity to empower management with valuable workforce intelligence in a variety of forms to suit the user. It offers detailed business insight for managers to monitor their teams while directors, and senior managers and leadership teams get an effective overview of the entire organisation, allowing them to plan for future business development.

ESR BI can also be used to produce integrated reports with specific data from other systems, and bespoke reports can be uploaded to the ESR Portal, to ensure that the target audience has quick access to information. Benchmarking and alerting are also key parts of ESR BI enabling the ability to target users and encourage prompt action where required.

Benefits include:

• A suite of standard dashboards easily accessible thus reducing the reliance on centralised reporting
• Interactive dashboards allowing users to delve deeper behind the graphs to see the data that sits behind them, thus saving time from producing data in more than one level
• Easy to use standard dashboards resulting in less time spent educating users
• Greater understanding of data and workforce requirements at source
• Improved timeliness of reports resulting in less time spent waiting for reports to complete
• Reports can be exported into many different formats including PDF & Excel
• Improved data quality and accuracy
• Ownership of data at source

The ESR Business Intelligence (BI) reporting suite provides access to data across the ESR workforce solution - enabling the monitoring of processes, performance and data quality.

It offers hierarchical access, with core users and managers being able to access reports relevant to their needs, whilst Workforce Analysts are able to access reports across the different functional areas of the system. It is fully accessible over the internet and on mobile devices, allowing users to quickly access reports on the go. Benchmarking and alerting are also key parts of ESR BI enabling the ability to target users and encourage prompt action where required.

It can also be used to produce integrated reports with data from other systems, and bespoke reports can be uploaded to the ESR Portal, to ensure that the target audience has quick access to information.

A standard suite of reports and dashboards is maintained centrally for all organisations to access. These cover the broad range of data that is captured in ESR. A range of subject areas are detailed below:

Please find below a breakdown of some of the key BI dashboards and their related reports which are available through ESR Business Intelligence.

The following dashboards and reports are focused on the key workforce data:

Staff in Post Dashboard

The Staff in Post dashboard is designed to provide the user with intelligence around the numbers of staff working in the organisation. It includes an overview and position detail, supervisor hierarchy, and benefit entitlement. Examples of the data included is detailed below:

Staff Movements Dashboard

Staff movement data is available through two dashboards within BI; the Staff Movements dashboard and the Staff Movements Monitoring dashboard. These are designed to provide users with intelligence on the movements of staff within the organisation. Examples of the data included is detailed below:

Workforce Profile Dashboard

This dashboard is designed to provide the user with intelligence around the profile of an organisation’s workforce (it is only available at an organisation level). This includes:

• Equality and Diversity
• Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) ONS Returns
• Retirements
• Fixed Term Contracts
• Gender Pay Gap
• Online ESR Access

Examples of the data included is detailed below:

Absence data is available through two dashboards within BI; the Absence Analysis Dashboard and the Absence Dashboard, which are detailed below:

Absence Analysis Dashboard

This dashboard is designed to contain analyses relating to all types of absence. Please note that on this dashboard, organisation prompts will return all organisations that existed within the period to enable users to select organisations that were used in the past, enabling retrospective reporting. The dashboard provides a range of data including absence trends, reasons for absence and headroom analysis. Examples of the data included is detailed below:

Absence Dashboard

This dashboard is designed to contain analyses relating to all types of absence. Please note that on this dashboard organisation prompts will return all organisations that existed within the period to enable users to select organisations that were used in the past, enabling retrospective reporting. The dashboard provides a range of data including summary and detailed absence data, absence timeline, absence estimated costs and % by organisation, long term absence; as well as different absence types such as annual leave and study leave. Examples of the data included is detailed below:

There is a suite of education, learning and compliance dashboards which provide detailed information to the user.  These include:

Education and Learning Dashboard

This dashboard is designed to provide the user with intelligence around Education and Learning that is applicable to Managers and Learning Administrators. Examples of the data included is detailed below.

Learning Administration Dashboard

This dashboard is designed to provide the user with intelligence around Learning Administration. Learning reports are available in four different categories below:

• Class Management
• Learning History
• Analysis
• E-Learning

Examples of the data included is detailed below.

Compliance Dashboard and Compliance Trending Dashboard

These dashboards are designed to provide users with intelligence around compliance levels within the organisation and highlight trends in compliance to enable organisations to plan their education offering based on demand. Examples of the data included is detailed below.

This dashboard is available to your managers through Manager Self Service and is a valuable tool to aid them in the management of their teams. It provides high-level intelligence on a number of areas including:

• Absence
• Staff Movements
• Compliance
• Pay Bill
• Staff in Post
• Staff Requirements

This dashboard also has a ‘tour’ or ‘wizard’ functionality (titled: First time using this dashboard?) which shows first time ESR BI users around the dashboard and explains the different objects commonly used e.g. prompts, analysis etc. Examples of the data included is detailed below:

Self Service offers organisations a valuable employee engagement tool, in which employees have the capability to interact with their NHS employment records including updating their personal data, viewing pay and benefit (Total Reward Statements) information, and managing their performance, learning and development. It is widely recognised that if staff feel valued and supported in the workplace by their line managers and the organisation as a whole, this further encourages them to deliver a high level of patient care that supports the values of your organisation.  

Self Service provides organisations with the opportunity to reduce costs on administrative based tasks and supports local strategies around compliance, engagement, and wider productivity and efficiency plans. Self Service also supports paperless office strategies – both reducing associated costs and supporting environmental policies.

Information held within ESR is presented to its users in an easy to read, pre-analysed format, in the form of portlets within the portal or as dashboard reports using Business Intelligence (BI). Such data is available at multiple levels across an organisation, including workforce strategic leaders having access to a ‘Management Dashboard – showing graphical data of key performance indicators in near real-time, on desktops or mobile devices.

Organisations have the ability to set Automatic Internet Access for all their workforce, thereby allowing all their ESR users to automatically access their ESR portal remotely, enhancing the usability of ESR and promoting 24/7 access.

Effective Establishment Control, along with good workstructures management ensures your organisation’ position hierarchy in ESR is reconciled with the general ledger and critically, the Full Time Equivalent (FTE) values are routinely maintained in synchronicity. This in turn ensures appointments are only made to an established post with funding and an authorisation to recruit. Good workstructures management is not only essential for managing your workforce establishment, but is also an important part of ensuring data quality to enable you to provide effective workforce reporting at local and national levels. For further information on how ESR supports the recommendations outlined in the Carter Review click here.

FTE costing data held against the workforce positions as set-up in ESR can provide valuable information for organisations that are proactively managing their workforce requirements and associated staffing costs. Full utilisation of Establishment Control mechanism in ESR, as recommended by the Carter review, can significantly reduce the time that organisations spend reconciling their financial ledger with ESR whilst providing greater integrity of the recruitment process. For further information on how ESR supports the recommendations outlined in the Carter review click here.

Benefits:

• Ability to monitor and report on vacancies accurately through the use of Establishment Control through ESR BI, providing quick and easy identification of the true vacancy rate.
• Can prevent over recruiting
• The accurate maintenance of ESR workstructures allows other areas of ESR to be correctly reported and processed, such as sickness reporting and competency requirements
• Employees will always report into the right cost centres with correct procedures in place

Poor data quality can impact upon every aspect of the workforce, from vacancy management to leaver analyses, employee details to aggregate staff reports and from pay to pension.

Workforce data in ESR is clearly important to each employee and each employing organisation, but it is also increasingly significant to a variety of national bodies - some of whom have direct access to it via the ESR Data Warehouse, for instance the Department of Health & Social Care, NHS Digital, the Care Quality Commission. Every aspect of managing the NHS relies on workforce data.  Organisations also have a legislative responsibility, e.g. General Data Protection Regulations recently introduced in May 2018, to ensure a subjects (employee’s) data is both accurate and is managed/processed correctly. Across many parts of the ESR solution – including Self Service for employees to access and manage their own data quality, ESR is a key enabler to organisations being legislatively compliant.

ESR provides functionality to assist in improving data quality:

• Utilising the Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) process - providing a full employment history and reducing the need to re-enter data already available
• Access to Self Service enables data to be viewed and updated at the point of source in a timely manner, with less points of contact, reducing errors or loss of forms
• Implementation of interfaces to ensure no duplication of data entry
• Implementation of Establishment Control provides an opportunity to cleanse ESR of unnecessary positions and ensure workforce spend is controlled
• Utilise ESR Business Intelligence (BI) to report on data errors for cleansing

For further information on how ESR supports good data quality click here.