One of the world’s largest manufacturers curbs employee turnover using people analytics

Yildiz Holding uses predictive modeling from SAS to identify, hire and retain high-value employees

Amid a looming global workforce crisis, human resources departments at Yildiz Holding and its companies are facing growing pressures to retain and hire the right talent. The manufacturer needed a solution that would allow it to manage and analyze its HR data. With people analytics from SAS, Yildiz Holding now gets important insights from its HR data by using predictive modeling techniques on multiple, integrated data sources.

The Turkish conglomerate is among the largest food manufacturers in the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Its products are purchased by nearly 4 billion customers, and the company employs 75,000 people with production facilities on five continents.

“It may seem unimaginable, but by 2030 many of the world’s largest economies will have more jobs than people to fill them,” says Gül Erol, CIO of Yildiz Holding and CEO of Yildiz Tech. “This looming shortage points to the need for better approaches to every aspect of managing the workforce, such as talent recruitment, retention and development.”

Determining where to improve within the company

The manufacturer is working with SAS’ advanced analytics solutions, including SAS Unified Insights MM on SAS Viya, to gain a greater understanding of the challenges its employees face and proactively reduce staff turnover rates.

Utkan Menteş, Director of Advanced Analytics Solutions at Yildiz Holding, explains how they plan to understand the issues. The strategy the advanced analytics team has adopted involves collaborating with business units, data departments, data and network security teams, project managers and upper management to identify areas for improvement in HR programs. During this collaboration, the team assesses and addresses existing requirements and expectations.

Increased understanding of employee motivations

HR realized it must focus on identifying high-potential or high-impact employees at risk of leaving, as well as the most promising new applicants.

Using SAS, Yildiz Holding can provide data-driven organizational insights and predictions to the HR department. The company can also improve its understanding of its people data, provide faster analysis and implement new ideas thanks to powerful reporting and explanatory functions that would be impossible without the new modeling efforts. This helps reduce employee churn, which helps increase stability in the near and long terms.

“Yildiz Holding focused on selecting the best analytics solution and infrastructure that fit into our organization and existing processes,” Menteş says. “We evaluated the leading providers and technologies based on a variety of criteria. SAS was the only one that successfully addressed all our requirements.”

Menteş says that data quality and integration are the foundations of a strong people analytics practice. For Yildiz Holding, that meant establishing consistency and governance across multiple systems. Additionally, predictive modeling techniques help the company identify what makes an employee successful in a specific role. These talent profiles are built using an array of internal and external data. The insights can then be applied to the current talent pool, scoring applicants against that profile to identify the most promising potential hires and the best ways to recruit them.

Reaping the benefits of new insights for an improved workplace

Erol says that the SAS platform has helped Yildiz Holding reduce turnover, improve employee motivation and efficiency, and retain talented employees. The company now has greater insights on the organizational factors that cause turnover. With the amount of data the organization now has access to, building individual models instead of organizational models helps Yildiz Holding gain more insights and improve action plans.

The HR analytics project with SAS provided the organization with several additional benefits.

“Yildiz Holding can now calculate employee churn with a 70% accuracy rate and has strengthened its capabilities to proactively plan for interventions to decrease the employee churn rate,” Menteş says. “The factors affecting employee turnover vary for every individual and organization. The dynamics of each company are different, so the predictive models should be enhanced with multifactored and multidimensional analyses to understand different scenarios. SAS has provided us with the means to do this and the ability to apply it to every organization within our holding.”