USA 
United KingdomA decade of data: How Southern Glazer's transformed business outcomes with people analytics
‘Our dashboards provide people data visibility that directly supports our strategic pillars and empowers HR to drive business outcomes,’ the wine and spirits specialist tells HR Grapevine...
Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits has spent nearly a decade honing the art of using people data to shape better decisions. Its People Analytics Dashboards have become an essential resource for HR Business Partners and business leaders, enabling data-driven strategies across talent acquisition, management, and development.
Since its first dashboard, Workforce Insights, launched nine years ago, the system has evolved into a sophisticated suite of analytics tools used to track turnover, headcount, recruitment trends, and leadership pipelines. Each dashboard provides real-time visibility into the health of Southern Glazer’s workforce, directly supporting the company’s four HR strategic pillars: Leadership Capabilities, Employee Experience, Cultural Transformation, and Building HR for Tomorrow.
Rickey Carroll
Senior Director of People Analytics, Southern Glazer's
The firm has built an integrated people analytics framework that has reshaped HR decision-making, reduced costs, and helped the organization plan for the future.
Our dashboards provide people data insights and visibility that directly inform and support our strategic pillars. They help ensure our HR teams can translate data into meaningful business decisions
How Southern Glazer’s built its People Analytics Dashboards
The People Analytics function was established nearly nine years ago to make workforce data more accessible to its HR teams. The initial Workforce Insights dashboard offered transparency around turnover rates, headcount shifts, and employee separation reasons.
Southern Glazer’s People Analytics Impact
- Nine years of data-driven HR decision-making
- 1,000+ dashboard interactions in the past six months
- Cost savings of $70,000 per year through internal reporting
- Real-time turnover and headcount tracking across all regions
- Cloud-based data lake enabling advanced analytics and AI potential
The system has since expanded to include dedicated dashboards for Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, and Talent Development. Each provides targeted analytics to guide HR and business strategy.
For example, the Talent Acquisition dashboard tracks replacement reasons, age of requisitions, seasonal hiring surges, and applicant origins, to help allocate recruiting resources more effectively. Talent Management dashboards highlight performance calibration trends and succession health, ensuring the company’s leadership pipeline remains strong. Meanwhile, Talent Development dashboards identify which people managers are eligible for leadership programs, track participants’ experiences, and monitor pre- and post-assessment results to measure impact.
“Our dashboards provide people data insights and visibility that directly inform and support our strategic pillars,” the firm explains. “They help ensure our HR teams can translate data into meaningful business decisions.”
From spreadsheets to smart data lakes
In its most recent transformation, the firm moved from static Excel-based reporting managed by Alteryx and hosted on an on-premise SQL server, to cloud-based data. It is a transition that allows dynamic integration of structured and unstructured data from multiple HR systems, unlocking new possibilities for data analysis and visualization.
Using Tableau as the primary visualization tool, HR teams can interact with real-time data through filters, charts, heat maps, and geographic visuals. The shift has significantly improved access, accuracy, and responsiveness.
“Our Workforce Insights dashboard has been accessed over 1,000 times in the last six months,” SG says. “So we know we need to keep this dashboard fresh and evolving as business needs change.”
I deeply value my regular meetings with our West Region HR Leaders to review our headcount, turnover, and requisition requests. These meetings and the workforce insights reviewed provide me confidence in making the necessary decisions as it relates to managing our human capital across the West
Cost savings and continuous improvement
The dashboard strategy is built on continuous refinement. Usage metrics and end-user feedback identify when dashboards need updates or new functionality. One recent upgrade even eliminated the need for a third-party reporting platform, saving approximately $70,000 annually.
The company recently completed its first enterprise-wide employee survey in five years and is building new dashboards to visualize engagement data, with the intent to connect survey insights to business performance, and guide prescriptive interventions in Talent Management and Talent Acquisition.
Building HR for tomorrow
With its new data lake fully operational, Southern Glazer’s next phase will be to move from People Analytics to Systemic Business Analytics, combining workforce data with key business KPIs for deeper insights.
To achieve this, the team plans focus groups, dashboard branding standards, and AI integration to make insights even more accessible. “We are investigating how to leverage AI so HR Business Partners can ask an AI agent, in natural language, for insights and recommendations on timely interventions,” the team says.
The goal is to be the industry’s most valued provider of people insights, aligning data, culture, and leadership to drive sustainable growth.
