Harri iQ puts hospitality workers ‘in the driver’s seat’ to boost service sector recovery by embedding ThoughtSpot Everywhere

Britain’s favorite eateries like Côte Brasserie, Pizza Pilgrims, and The Ivy rely on Harri’s human capital management platform to build, manage, and engage their most important resource: their people. And never have restaurants like these, along with hotels and retailers, needed it more. Of all parts of the global economy, the pandemic hit the hospitality sector hardest. In the UK alone, some 98% of the hospitality sector workforce was unable to work during the first lockdowns.

Harri’s software helps with everything across the employee lifecycle, including talent acquisition, employer branding, applicant tracking, scheduling, time and attendance, communications, compliance, and analytics. A global brand with offices in the UK, New York City, and the Middle East, it has also been named a Top Startup by LinkedIn.

As economies re-open, supporting and managing precious people resources as efficiently as possible is extra important. That’s why the company chose ThoughtSpot Everywhere to power the next generation of its platform, Harri iQ. Harri iQ is designed to empower managers on hospitality’s frontlines with intelligent data insights to get them out of ‘firefighting’ mode and rebuild healthy, sustainable businesses.

Challenge

Over recent years, customers had increasingly been asking for more data self-service, customisation, and interactivity in Harri’s products. While Harri's product development team responded to this by developing new talent acquisition and workforce management products, it meant that business analytics needed more resources than were available. Realizing that it could no longer scale or maintain its old solution, Harri set out to re-launch its platform as Harri-iQ with best-in class embedded analytics.

The vision for the new Harri iQ platform is ‘Your Data, Your Way.’ This means that the platform needs to be easy for its users - those like store managers and kitchen chefs who deal with people, not technology - to get fast, easy answers to data questions that come up in their real-world scenarios.

To deliver on this, Harri’s data team amassed a huge body of feedback from its clients - from casual dining contexts to entertainment venues. This analysis helped Harri understand how analytics could help busy service professionals working in high-stress environments make better, more timely decisions to meet the demands of the current very tight job market.

Harri battle-tested ThoughtSpot over competitors Looker and Sisense using a test scenario with a billion rows of data against a 150-point checklist. Among the reasons it chose ThoughtSpot were its ability to scale and perform on cloud data, its modern, consumer-friendly UI that would ensure usability, and its pricing model that’s based on data, rather than user numbers.

We loved ThoughtSpot for its search-driven, social media-type experience, and a really consumer facing UI. Having worked in embedded analytics for 10 years, the key to success is user adoption. The more you engage with your end consumers, and make applications compelling and easy to use, the greater the adoption - and the more we can monetize a product, because it becomes an essential part of our customers' whole ecosystem.

Mike ShipleyStrategic AdvisorHarri

Solution

Set for Q1 2022 launch, Harri iQ is set to be among the first production implementations of the ThoughtSpot Everywhere low-code embedded analytics environment. The first Harri iQ module to deliver the full power of analytics to customers will be in the critical “Source and Hire” recruitment processes. This was initially built for a top global hotel chain, for use by global recruitment managers, hotel general managers, and field managers. Harri designed tailored experiences for three different personas, defined by their level of data access.

• Bronze: ThoughtSpot Liveboards only, aimed at data insights ‘consumers’

• Silver: Liveboards and data search capabilities for data insight ‘creators’

• Gold: Liveboards, data search, and AI-driven SpotiQ for data insight ‘explorers’

This is where the real revolution starts. This is the first time in the whole history of this industry, where - thanks to ThoughtSpot - our users are in the driving seat. They decide where they want to go, they decide what they want to search, they decide which areas they want to explore.

Matt LukowskiDirector of Advanced AnalyticsHarri

Box-out (Harri iQ customer)

Using Harri iQ means we can filter our reporting by country, by hotel and by offices. In my Talent Acquisition role I have far more awareness of what is happening in terms of hotel recruitment throughout EMEA which gives me the confidence to challenge hiring managers if I need to, but it also gives them the visibility to hire far more easily.

I can give a customized dashboard to our senior leadership team that provides a high level overview of what’s going on. When we look at the detailed data, we can get to the root of any problem in any area, especially when the candidate pipeline is scarce; this enables us to anticipate upcoming issues and give us the ability to plan, budget, and look at sourcing trends.

- Talent Acquisition Manager EMEA, Daniela Müller, Radisson Hotel Group

Modern data stack

The key to getting Harri iQ to market quickly has been re-architecting the platform using modern data stack components. This new approach unifies data analysis and manipulation tools in the cloud, simplifying both developer and business analysts’ lives. Harri’s internal analytics team shares this vision, and so really value ThoughtSpot’s easy integration with the other key products they want to harness to power Harri iQ. The most important are DaaS (data-stack-as-a-Service) platform leader Keboola, and powerful SQL query engine and cloud data warehousing tool Snowflake.

Together Snowflake and Keboola store and perform the ETL processes on all the business data that feeds into Harri iQ’s intelligent and visually appealing UX, built on top of ThoughtSpot Everywhere. These modern data technologies are key to making personalized, self-service business analytics easy and fast for busy hospitality workers. The proof: Harri has already won a major new contract based on Harri iQ’s demonstrable ability to transition team members into the flexible work shifts the current tight labor market requires.

Users will be able to do everything from analyze the number of job vacancies they have in different regions, which capabilities are in demand, down to three open pizza maker slots in California. ThoughtSpot helps them drill behind the data for any particular period and can get to the ‘why’ questions much faster.

Matt LukowskiDirector of Advanced AnalyticsHarri

What's next

Harri has ambitious plans to enhance more Harri iQ modules with ThoughtSpot Everywhere’s analytics in several areas including workforce management, employee satisfaction, and employee performance. For example, managers will be able to analyze individual restaurant or franchise sales to see if the right people were working at the right times to meet actual demand. Harri also emphasizes its plans to ‘integrate integrate integrate’ third party data like guest sentiment and point-of-sale in order to create and provide contextual analytics to its users.

We will be able to show you what teams work well together based on inputs like their customer reviews and table spend or complaints. Soon, customers will be able to intelligently match the best managers with the best employees. That’s a difficult task that will mean us going heavily into AI and machine learning for cross-correlation—and ThoughtSpot will play a very important role in helping us visualizing and actioning that data.

Matt LukowskiDirector of Advanced AnalyticsHarri