How Circus Group streamlined their HR controlling & Workforce planning setup within a day

Victoria Annich, Chief of Staff at Circus Group, was tasked to streamline people cost reporting, increase actuals and forecast accuracy and establish a scalable workforce planning process.

API integrations

1 day

Implementation time

90%

Reduction of manual tasks

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Customer

Meet Circus, bringing full autonomy to food service

Locations

Hamburg, DE

Size

70+ FTEs

Industry

Robotics

Founded

2021

HR Tech Stack

Circus Group (XETRA: CA1) is a global leader in AI solutions and autonomous robotics, transforming the EUR 2.6 trillion food service sector through full autonomy. With its proprietary AI platform, CircusAI, and the world’s first commercially viable AI-robot in food service, CA-1, Circus is pioneering AI in food service to address industry-wide labor shortages.

More Facts on Circus Group:

Business model: Develop AI-powered robotic systems for autonomous food service
Biggest department(s): Hardware & Engineering
Managers involved: 8+ (for company-wide planning and decision making; department/team-individual planning left aside)

Demand for solid reporting structures increased the pressure to streamline people cost & planning processes.

Victoria Annich, Chief of Staff

Context

Mounting people data requirements along with growing organization

Increased reporting duties and a growing organization added administrative overhead and complexity, demanding improved processes for HR controlling and workforce planning. The existing Excel-based headcount reporting and planning was not suitable anymore for Circus' stage:

Manual Data Mapping: Mapping payroll data from the tax advisor into the target format wasn't easily doable, adding significant administrative burden and increasing the potential for errors.
Complex and Outdated Reportings: Updating planning data to align with the latest hiring plans and integrating forecasting + budget information led to a time-consuming constant alignment and update cycle, leading to insufficient live data accuracy.
Cumbersome KPI Tracking: Repeatedly updating critical KPIs, such as FTE developments and people costs, was time-consuming and error-prone, which led to less visibility on historical and forward-looking metrics and trends.

In order to report FTE developments, planned hires and people costs, I had to manually consolidate information from 4 different places: payroll, HRIS, ATS and other internal documentations.

Solution

Automating manual and error-prone processes

Victoria tested several systems before deciding for Cartha. Cartha convinced her threefold:

Live integration: All changes that happen in the integrated systems (in this case Personio) are directly reflected in Cartha, replacing any manual consolidation and updating effort
Automatic controlling: Cartha automatically updates the forecast whenever changes (leaving dates, start dates) are registered, providing constant insights on deviations to the budget
Single source of truth: Consolidates all key people cost data, including current employees, new hires, leavers, hiring pipeline, budgets, and approvals

Victoria tested several systems before deciding for Cartha. Cartha convinced her threefold:

Live integration: All changes that happen in the integrated systems (in this case Personio) are directly reflected in Cartha, replacing any manual consolidation and updating effort
Automatic controlling: Cartha automatically updates the forecast whenever changes (leaving dates, start dates) are registered, providing constant insights on deviations to the budget
Single source of truth: Consolidates all key people cost data, including current employees, new hires, leavers, hiring pipeline, budgets, and approvals

All relevant stakeholders including Management, HR and Finance now have a highly accurate single source of truth for all people cost data and relevant workforce planning insights.

Learn how your team can benefit from Cartha

Learn how Cartha helps you

Outcome

Remarkably short time-to-value

Already after a few weeks, Cartha generated various productivity increases:

Victoria strongly automated the error prone and manual HR controlling process giving her time to focus on other strategic tasks
Preparing people cost reportings takes around 90% less time than previously
Circus can accurately plan various workforce scenarios to stay agile.
Excel sheets were abandoned and the hiring plan is now maintained within Cartha, drastically increasing workflow quality and alignment with Finance and management as well as the data quality, insights and accessibility.

Already after a few weeks, Cartha generated various productivity increases:

Victoria strongly automated the error prone and manual HR controlling process giving her time to focus on other strategic tasks
Preparing people cost reportings takes around 90% less time than previously
Circus can accurately plan various workforce scenarios to stay agile.
Excel sheets were abandoned and the hiring plan is now maintained within Cartha, drastically increasing workflow quality and alignment with Finance and management as well as the data quality, insights and accessibility.

The implementation happened within a day and even changes to our reporting structure can be easily updated in the settings.

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We used to send surveys around asking each budget manager whether they are over or under budget. Imagine doing this with 40+ managers. It was a manual process not synced with data.
Sarah Düing
Chief People & Legal Officer at lavera
Read the full case study

Manually adapting the hiring plan and exporting the new information into the forecast was time consuming and increasingly inaccurate.
Sebastian Heck
Chief People Officer at MIFCOM
Read the full case study
We used to send surveys around asking each budget manager whether they are over or under budget. Imagine doing this with 40+ managers. It was a manual process not synced with data.
Sarah Düing
Chief People & Legal Officer at lavera
Read the full case study