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Labor Cost Benchmarking

Reimagining Workforce Planning

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The State University of New York at Buffalo

The State University of New York at Buffalo, more commonly known as the University at Buffalo (UB), is a public research university serving more than 20,000 students in Amherst, New York. The university has enrolled over 32,000 students in 13 schools and colleges as of Fall 2020, making it the largest and most comprehensive public university in the state of New York.

As one of the top 40 public universities in the country, the University at Buffalo is committed to continually improving its administrative and academic programming to drive student success. However, like most higher ed institutions, administrative costs take up a significant portion of Buffalo’s budget. The university knew they needed to rethink how they approach workforce planning to re-allocate their resources—but to do that, they needed access to reliable, centralized data.

"We needed to really compile all our data and do that deep analysis to make a case for this new approach. HelioCampus gave us the tools to draw those connections."
Mark Coldren
Associate Vice President for Human Resources

How UB Uses the Data

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Leveraging Analytics to Uncover Effective Hiring Strategies

Before, UB had a manual and time-intensive approach to workforce planning and was based on the best guesses of each department head. The lack of a data-driven system that wasn’t based on guesses challenged UB to make strategic hiring decisions and where to invest for the next few years.

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Preparing for Change with Data-Driven Insights

The next challenge was to convince leadership to make changes to how Buffalo approached hiring and redeployment. UB needed to compile their data to perform a deep analysis to make a case for a new approach, pinpoint opportunities to shift, and compare current hiring data against peer institutions.

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Strategic Redeployment for Long-Term Growth

UB can now optimize their way of HR spending by retaining and reallocating personnel whose roles may shift with actionable data.UB has drawn connections by looking more closely at the metrics to use them as a guide to making forward-thinking decisions.

Learn More About the Results

In search of a new way to optimize their HR spending, Buffalo reached out to HelioCampus. Read the case study to learn how they were able to conduct a holistic analysis of their administrative spending using benchmarking data and come up with a new approach for hiring.

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