Retail giant automates leave provision analysis

The customer

The customer is a leading retail organization with a footprint of over 500stores and a workforce exceeding 100,000 employees. The company operates across multiple retail formats, offering a wide range of consumer goods and services to millions of customers.

As one of the country’s largest private employers, the business manages a high volume of employee-related data and places a strong emphasis on operational efficiency, compliance, and financial accuracy.

Challenge:

The company needed to analyze and explain month-to-month movements in its long service leave provision—a critical task for accurate financial reporting and workforce planning. However, the volume and complexity of data, covering over 100,000 employees, pushed desktop tools like Excel beyond their limits.

Spreadsheets frequently crashed under the weight of data, making the process slow, error-prone, and difficult to maintain. Teams spent most of their time wrangling data rather than interpreting results, leaving limited time for meaningful analysis. In addition, insights were difficult to present and share with senior stakeholders, due to the manual nature of the process and lack of visualization tools. A faster, more scalable, and transparent solution was needed to support the business and deliver actionable insights.

Solution:

To overcome the limitations of manual processing and desktop tools, the company implemented an automated solution using Solvexia to analyze and compare long service leave movements for over 100,000 employees. The solution processes and validates 150,000+ records each month, detecting changes and generating insights into the drivers of provision shifts.

The automated workflow includes over 30 systemized steps, producing both Excel-based reports and interactive online dashboards. These outputs help the team easily identify exceptions, uncover patterns, and visualize key trends. The initial solution was configured with less than one hour of consultation from a subject matter expert, with a prototype ready in weeks, ensuring rapid deployment with minimal disruption.

Results:

What once took hours of effort and posed technical limitations now runs in under five minutes. The company has achieved a 90% reduction in time required to produce monthly results, allowing teams to spend more time on analysis and lesson data preparation.

The solution enables real-time stakeholder engagement with drill-down dashboards, helping senior leaders quickly understand month-to-month changes in leave provisions. With a consistent, repeatable process now in place, the business has improved both efficiency and transparency, ensuring it can meet reporting demands at scale—without relying on fragile spreadsheets or manual effort.