Challenge: Wilson James struggled to tie together disparate data from multiple operational platforms across business units, hampering their ability to understand their true business performance. 

Solution: In partnership with Manzeera Solutions, Wilson James implemented Domo to connect critical operational platforms into a single business intelligence layer to deliver a single source of truth. 

Impact: Wilson James is now creating a data-driven culture to manage its business, improve its client relationships, measure its impact, and better compete for talent.

Wilson James builds a culture of data with Domo.

Founded in 1991, Wilson James has risen to become one of the top skilled labor and professional services firms in the United Kingdom. Their specialist workforce can be found managing security, providing construction logistics support, and facilitating customer service across the region’s airports, corporations, sporting facilities, and major infrastructure projects.

“I look back on our early, pre-internet days when we were still using manual processes for most business tasks, and now we are in a new reality of real-time data, predictive analytics, cyber threats, and digital infrastructure as significant as any built environment,” said Mark Dobson, CEO at Wilson James. “The world is more complex now, and we need more and better data to drive strategic decisions and investments. That’s why we developed a partnership with Domo.”

“To be in business for over thirty years is a great achievement. But we’re looking at what will keep us in business for the next thirty,” said Gemma Quirke, COO at Wilson James.

“The work we were doing in 1991 isn’t the work we are doing today. And it’s not the work we’re going to be doing thirty years from now. Domo is positioning us to navigate the coming leaps in technology and social change to ensure that we and our clients remain secure, operationally resilient, and commercially strong.”

Unlocking the full potential of SAP

Before Domo, Wilson James struggled to tie together all the disparate data required to maximize their investment in systems, hampering their ability to truly understand the full depth and breadth of their business performance.

“We have a number of platforms and solutions to serve the individual needs of all our locations and service lines but had no way to bring all our data together in a meaningful way to make business decisions,” said Tom Giles, Business Improvement Director at Wilson James. “We were looking at all those sources in isolation and bringing data together manually in spreadsheets to try and operate our business.”

In 2022, Wilson James determined it needed a way to unlock the full potential of the data created by its operational platforms, which power everything from health and safety compliance to time-tracking, payroll, and procurement. While some of its platforms were able to connect together, data from its SAP-based systems that Wilson James uses to run its core operations was almost impossible to consolidate.

“We considered a number of options, but the only one that really ticked all the boxes for us was Domo and its ability to connect with our SAP systems,” Giles said. “Once we unlocked SAP, that was the key to unlocking the rest of our data, as all our platforms hinge on their relationship with SAP.”

“Domo allowed us to connect each and every one of our operational platforms into a single business intelligence layer to deliver a single source of truth, which is critical for our senior team to manage our business,” Giles said.

Not only does Domo make it simple to integrate data into a single view, but it makes it simple for non-technical business users to leverage data as part of their everyday decision-making process. “The best part about Domo for me is the look, feel, and usability of the platform,” Giles said. “We needed to put the end user first and foremost, and that is where Domo really shines.”

Once Domo was in place, it gave Wilson James the capabilities it needed to finally build a culture rooted in data. In order to get a quick win and demonstrate the potential of the solution, Wilson James’ first use of Domo was seemingly simple yet something it was unable to achieve before: get an accurate, real-time headcount of all its employees across each client site.

“How many people work for us today, and in what capacity? It sounds silly, but we had no centralized visibility into that before, as our headcount is extremely fluid at any given moment and mandraulic processes for people management created an information lag to our head office.” Giles said. “As soon as people saw that we could do this modeling in real-time, they started to come forward with their questions and seek to use Domo in their daily operations.”

Taking data to new heights

Today, Wilson James uses Domo as their single source of truth for the entire employee experience, collecting data across recruitment, hiring, managing, payroll, and offboarding into a single business dashboard. A top-down view of KPIs and organizational metrics keeps senior leaders and frontline managers on the same page. “It gives everyone insight into how the business, or their specific focus of operations is running so they can make data-driven decisions instead of relying on experience or intuition,” Giles said.

For example, one of Wilson James’ largest clients is Heathrow Airport. As the Heathrow Account Director, Heather Taylor relies on Domo to help deliver customer service and manage security for one of the world’s busiest transportation hubs.

“We have about 2,000 employees operating in Heathrow Airport. Before Domo, we were creating a lot of data but didn’t have the tools to bring all that data together. Now we can give our employees the data they need to work, while also providing our client with more transparency into our performance data to ensure we are achieving our SLAs. Heathrow’s senior leaders can even access the information themselves with a real-time dashboard instead of waiting for us to provide that information to them,” she said.

“We used to spend quite a lot of time chasing down information. Domo enables us to be a lot less reliant upon the human touch,” Taylor said. “It’s really built confidence in Heathrow as our customer, as well as our own leaders, knowing that they are both receiving the same information at the same time.”

In addition, Domo helps Wilson James meet its Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) commitments so the company can set itself apart in the eyes of clients and prospective employees.

“Domo allows staff across the business to access real-time information, interrogate the data, and measure progress to ensure we stay on top of our EDI targets so we can achieve goals like eliminating the gender pay gap and meeting our racial diversity stats,” said Jordan Cadore, Director of Strategic Proposals and Contracts at Wilson James. “We now have a constant, 360º view of data that we can feed into our EDI strategy going forward.”