Trifacta Legends recognizes a customer every month who is doing groundbreaking work with data using Trifacta.
We’re pleased to announce the Trifacta Legend for February 2022: Bob Hall, Sr. Manager of People Analytics at The Home Depot.
Bob Hall is a Sr. Manager of People Analytics at The Home Depot, where he and his team help support and drive efficiency for Home Depot’s field associates. Bob is passionate about process innovation and democratizing data to provide actionable and intelligent insights to his organization. During his time at Home Depot, Bob has played a key role in upgrading antiquated processes and replacing them with automation powered by a modern data stack. Bob has a bachelor’s degree in Business Management from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
We talked to Bob about his experience and insight into process innovation at The Home Depot. Bob shared some of the challenges he and his team faced and how he overcame those obstacles to create scalable processes using Trifacta’s Data Engineering Cloud.
Trifacta: First, thank you Bob for being a valued customer of Trifacta. It has been a pleasure to work with you and we look forward to the continued partnership. Can you tell us a little more about yourself and your role at The Home Depot?
Bob: Certainly. I am deeply passionate about process innovation. As you can imagine with a huge company like ours, there are some systems that are antiquated and some processes that are antiquated. Home Depot is really invested in making sure we’re staying up to speed with the times, and part of that is how do we make things better for our associates? All of our roles here at the Store Support Center are to support our field organization and our field associates and make their jobs easier.
Trifacta: That’s awesome. Can you tell us about one of the great use cases that you’ve delivered with Trifacta?
Bob: Sure. So we have a Paycard Reconciliation use case. This is one of our foundational use cases. And I say that because this is a use case that we identified very early on that really allowed us to test and learn.
So what is Paycard Reconciliation? Basically, as we’re delivering paycards to either terminated associates or people who have elected to get a paycard, we’re trying to ensure that this payment reconciles back financially. This is a very important process that has compliance aspects to it and associate satisfaction is also tied to it. It’s all about reducing errors, reducing fallouts, and ensuring accuracy and compliance. There’s also a big time saving component. Spending a couple hours doing this everyday was not going to be beneficial for our team when they could lend their expertise to something else and drive more value to our associates and customers.
Trifacta: So what was this process like before you started using Trifacta?
Bob: We were using a combination of Excel and Access. We would take Workday files and files from our banks that we leverage. In Excel, our associates would spend a couple of hours looking at an Excel spreadsheet and manually reconciling things that were fallouts or outliers. Then, we had to feed this back to the Access database so that we could re-reconcile the next day for the next run. So overall, it was a highly manual process with a lot of steps, pulling in a lot of data from different sources and disparate systems.
With Dataprep, until we get to RPA to feed Dataprep, we still have to take those reports and reconcile them from our vendors, our banks, but after that, the process is purely automated. So Dataprep takes them from storage, it does the reconciliation for us, it calls out any fallouts or errors, and then it feeds it back into the Dataprep cycle. We now have daily execution and automation through scheduling functionality in Dataprep. And we now save over 2 hours per run on this per day, saving us a significant amount of time while ensuring consistency and accuracy, which is probably one of the more important things for us.
Trifacta: That’s amazing. So when you talk about Trifacta, how would you articulate the value?
Bob: What’s the value? We’ve reduced the daily reconciliation process by 2 hours, and really annually by around 520 hours. That’s a huge measure of value for us. It’s also improved the quality of work. No one wants to do manual reconciliations for several hours a day. So we’ve improved that quality for them so that they can hopefully do the same for our associates that interact with our field customers. There’s also risk reduction. We now have full confidence in completeness and accuracy around this process, so that if we’re approached for audits we can now walk everyone through all of the steps. We’ve used Trifacta to scale up operations. Before, we had to manually scale down our scope, but with Dataprep, we can scale up virtually to audit the entire population systemically.
Trifacta: That’s incredible! Thanks again Bob for walking us through your use case and all the value you’re adding to The Home Depot. We really appreciate it.
Bob: You’re welcome!