Semicon India: Demystifying Workforce Analytics (A) and (B)

In May 2015, Filip Daw, a human capital strategist with a leading consultancy, is hired by the Indian subsidiary of Semicon Inc (SI), an American semiconductor manufacturing company, to uncover the reasons behind the high attrition rate in the company. Established in 2005, SI is a design centre - a skill-intensive core business unit that directly impacts the parent company’s competitiveness as a supplier to the end-user industry. India’s low-cost and abundant talent was expected to add to the design centre’s competitiveness but SI’s high attrition rate proved otherwise and had started eroding its competitiveness and revenue.

Daw must identify the turnover drivers and analyse how the company’s HR policies influenced these drivers. Besides adopting a data-driven approach to diagnose the attrition drivers, Daw needs to examine assumptions held by various stakeholders. The case on Daw’s hand requires finding a proxy metric for performance and then connect that performance metric with turnover, developing hypotheses, collecting requisite data and making insightful recommendations.

This case documents a real-life analytics project in a semiconductor company that was later bought over by another company. The name Semicon India is used to disguise the identity of the original company. The project was helmed by the author Dr Fermin Diez, who was then its Regional Chief HR Officer.

Students will learn to 1) undertake a data-driven approach to solve HR problems, 2) rely on logic-based, intuitive analytics rather than complex and resource-intensive software, 3) formulate hypotheses and determine data requirements with greater precision, 4) identify potential sources of data and validate the quality of data, 5) draw actionable insights from analyses, 6) realise the value of analytics by making recommendations and assigning accountability for behavioural changes.

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