Case Study: Budget and Personnel Decision-Making Made Easy

Client Profile

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is a non-profit organization founded in 1895, dedicated to environmental education and the conservation of wild species and places. WCS operates in 53 countries worldwide, and employs more than 800 people full time, 700 to 1000 during peak season. Its domestic operations include the Bronx Zoo, New York Aquarium and the Central Park, Queens and Prospect Park zoos. WCS has used MUNIS since 1994.

Challenge

In 2008, WCS’s new human resources director sought to implement new “best practices” procedures in the HR department, which included providing useful, reliable information to top management to facilitate budget and personnel decision-making.

The new director soon found that the required personnel statistical data, trends and cost analysis data available were not readily accessible in a usable format. The first task was to find a way to gather the MUNIS data needed to make informed long-term planning decisions.

Technical Situation

MUNIS stores data in a relational database. With over 2000 tables and no database architecture guide, writing complex custom reports that require data from different modules and programs is a challenge. WCS faced these issues:

Solution

Crystal Reporting Solutions (CRS) had worked previously for WCS Finance and Budget areas, providing several financial and budget reports. This success prompted the HR director to contract with CRS to train, consult, and write reports.

CRS worked with WCS HR to resolve the following issues:

Says WCS’s HR specialist of her experience with CRS, “Ed responded immediately to our requests and found a way to deliver high quality reports every time. I highly recommend Crystal Reporting Solutions.”

Benefits

Equipped with training and ongoing CRS assistance, WCS HR now gains insight into human resources management, and is able to leverage existing tools to generate comprehensive, valid, and meaningful reports and queries. WCS HR now has valuable trending and data analysis reports with which to make informed personnel decisions affecting WCS globally.

“Crystal Reporting Solutions understands our business reporting needs,” says WCS’s HR specialist, “so they can proactively suggest ideas that add a lot of value to our organization.”

HR’s success in reconciling previously-irreconcilable data, and in presenting valuable new data that contributes to the efficient operation of the WCS worldwide, has brought HR new recognition throughout the organization.