This document is designed to instruct you on how to use the MF Analytics module for TMS 8. MF Analytics is a suite of reports that can be deployed to provide  analytical information about your organisation, using the data present in TMS 8. Using MF Analytics, you can quickly and easily see the most important data from across your organisation, and display it in a dynamic and informative format - enabling you to efficiently analyse and identify key information about our workforce.

MF Analytics is displayed as Tabs on your Dashboard, which are populated by Widgets displaying analytical data. It is intended to be used by Supervisors, who will each require an individual license to use the features available in MF Analytics.

Before you begin

MF Analytics is an optionally licensed addition to TMS 8, and does not come by default. In order to begin using MF Analytics, you will require a license from Mitrefinch. Your TMS 8 system will then require additional set-up, which will be handled by the Mitrefinch Professional Services team. If you are interested in using MF Analytics, please contact the Mitrefinch Sales team, who can arrange a demonstration in the first instance. 

Creating the MF Analytics Dashboard Tabs

MF Analytics is a feature that will be available and most useful to HR managers & Supervisors. They will be given access to additional Tabs on their Supervisor dashboard that will display the Widgets that comprise the MF Analytics feature. Initial deployment will be undertaken Mitrefinch’s Professional Services Team. Once deployed, your system administrator can log in to TMS 8 as the MASTER user and use Dashboard maintenance to create or manage these new Tabs, and give the access to appropriate User profiles for your Supervisor. 

On the Dashboard maintenance page, click New tab in the left-hand Navigation pane:

On the next page, you need to create the preferences for the new Tab. This Tab can be named however you like, but the Number of columns should be set to 1. Additionally, you should use the User profiles selector to designate which User profiles can access this Tab:

 

In the above example, and accounts with the ‘HR’ User profile would see a new tab on their Dashboard labelled ‘MF Analytics Tab 1’.

Click Submit to continue.

You will then be taken to the Tab configuration page, where you can add and remove Widgets from Tabs. A new Widget will be available with the MF Analytics licence: the Analytics Widget. Drag-and-drop this Widget onto the Tab.

This Widget is then configured for the specific tool to be used in MF Analytics. There are three to choose from:

1. Time & Attendance – this can be used to view Widgets such as Worked hours vs Planned hours
   
2. Organisational Chart – this Widget allows you to view the hierarchy of your organisation, viewing drill-down charts of things like Departments, Managers and Employees
   
3. HR  - this contains Widgets that are useful to get useful HR data about your organisation, such as Employee turnover
   

Click on the drop-down menu on the Widget, and click Modify Widget:

This will take you to the Modify Widget page. On this page, you will need to make several changes to the Widget:

1. Remove the Title so that it is blank
   
2. Set the Height to 7 using the drop-down menu
   
3. Set the Style to None
   
4. Choose which Report to use, choosing from the options discussed above
   

Once these changed have been made, click Submit to save them.

Licensing Supervisors

If a User Profile has been granted access to the MF Analytics tabs, this does not necessarily mean they will be able to view their contents. To give a Supervisor permissions to view the MF Analytics Widgets, they must have an Analytics Licence. Without a licence, they will see the following message:

Use the Employee licensing page to give your desired Supervisors the Analytics licence. Click the checkbox in the appropriate column and click Apply:

Dashboard Tabs

MF Analytics is available to TMS 8 Supervisors through Tabs on their Supervisor Dashboard. When viewing the Dashboard, up to three new Tabs will be available for use that have customisable names, in the following examples they will be named Analytics, HR Analytics and Organisational Chart:

The three Tabs house the three separate functions of MF Analytics. The three functions are as follows:

1. Time & Attendance – this can be used to view Widgets such as Worked hours vs Planned hours
   
2. Organisational Chart – this Widget allows you to view the hierarchy of your organisation, viewing drill-down charts of things like Departments, Managers and Employees.
   
3. HR  - this contains Widgets that are useful to get useful HR data about your organisation, such as Employee turnover.
   

Clicking the Time and Attendance Analytics or the HR Analytics Dashboard tab will show useful MF Analytics Widgets. These Tabs each contain a series of subsequent Tabs that correlate to different sets of Widgets, each of which provides analytical data of the Employees and Departments that a Supervisor has access to. 

There are five Tabs in the Analytics section:

1. Worked hours, which provides analytics on Planned hours vs Worked hours
   
2. Additional hours, which gives an overview of any Additional hours accrued by Departments or individual Employees
   
3. Planned absence is used for analysing the Planned absences of Employees, and its impact on Planned hours
   
4. Unplanned absence is used for analysing the Unplanned absences of Employees, and its impact on Planned hours
   
5. Annual leave gives the Supervisor a view of how much Holiday entitlement has been taken, planned and remains. It also provides quick visualisations on which Employees have remaining Entitlement, as well as burn down visualisations for Entitlement
   

Similarly, the HR Analytics Tab contains three Tabs:

1. Employee Turnover, which provides visualisations of past and present Employees, providing breakdowns of active vs inactive employees, starters, leavers and various information related to Employees’ service
   
2. Gender Analysis can be used to view important analytical data between genders, showing gender split, pay differences and age data
   
3. Skills, Training & Quals provides an overview of the skills, training and qualifications of your Employees. It also shows any actions that are required for Employee qualifications
   

The final Tab available in MF Analytics is the Organisational chart. This chart can be used to show a breakdown of the hierarchy of your organisation, choosing between Employees, Managers and Departments. 

Employee security settings

Supervisors will only see analytical data available to them elsewhere in TMS. For example, a Supervisor in TMS that only has access to the Sales Department will only be able to view the Sales Department when using MF Analytics. 

Note: there is an exception to this rule when using the Organisational chart, users will be able to see everyone on the TMS system, but will not be able to see any of that Employee’s data aside from their name and Employee ID.

Using the filters

This will open the Filter menu, which uses drop-down menus that allow you to choose what information is displayed. In each of these drop-down menus, you can select individual options, or hold down CTRL to choose multiple:

Once you have used the drop-down menus to make your selection, click on the arrow to save your selection and close the filter. Your chosen selection will persist across all the widgets within the Analytics tab.

Date Range

The Tabs also have a date-picker that you can use to filter the information to a set period. There are three boxes that can be used to filter the dates:

1. The first box allows you to choose between This, Next and Last, and modifies how the third box is used. This uses the current period that is defined in the third box, Next uses the following period, and Last uses the previous period
   
2. The second box allows you to enter a number. This modified the number of periods that are counted forwards or backwards, depending on the choice made in the first box. This box is disabled when using This in the first box
   
3. The third box allows you to choose which period to use, for example use years, months or weeks
   

For instance, if you were in September 2020, some example configurations could be:

1. ‘Next 3 years’ – this would limit data to data between September 2020 and September 2023.
   
2. ‘Last 2 months’ – this would limit data to data between July 2020 and September 2020
   
3. ‘This week’ – this would limit data to the current week (Sunday to Saturday)
   

Use the drop-down menus to make your selection.

Filtering in Widgets

You can view what Filters are affecting a particular Widget. To view this, hover over the header of a Widget (the grey bar displaying the Widget’s name), and click on the Filter icon:

 

Once clicked, the Widget will display a popup displaying what Filters are affecting it:

Sort by

Most Widgets also give you the option to sort by… on them. You can choose a few options:

1. Sort ascending – this will show you the data ordered from the lowest value(s) to the highest
   
2. Sort descending – this will show you the data ordered from the highest values(s) to the lowest
   
3. Sort by… - this will give you different options depending on the Widget. For example, the Planned hours vs Worked hours Widget allows you to Sort by Department, Total Rostered hours, total planned hours, total work hours, or % difference
   

The Sort ascending/descending can be combined with the Sort by… options. For example, you could sort by Departments (alphabetically), and have it either Ascending (A-Z) or Descending (Z-A). Your currently selected options will have a small yellow indicator on them.

To sort a Widget, click the Menu button (the three dots) on the Widget, and click Sort by… and choose the desired method:

Tooltips

Some Widgets have a ‘?’ tooltip on them. Hover your mouse cursor over these tooltips to get an explanation on what you are seeing in the Widget. This can provide you with more information, such as telling you what Hours codes are included in the total.

Focusing data

On each Tab the data displayed in Widgets will be inherited from the overall Filter. However, you can interact with Widgets to filter data on the fly. For example, when looking at the Planned hours and Worked hours Widget, you could click on one of the data points (such as a particular quarter), and filter all Widgets on the tab to only include the data from that data point.

To focus data, simply click on a data point. In the following example, we are looking at the Planned Absence Tab, and are interested in seeing how much “Holiday” absence our Employee takes. Without clicking on the data point, the Tab is currently filtered to show us the impact of all Planned absences:

As you can see, the Widgets on the left-hand side are showing totals of all Absences. If we click the “Holiday” data point in the Planned absence by employee Widget, those totals change:

The Planned absence Widget has altered, because the other Planned absences have been filtered out by focusing only on “Holiday”. 

Drilling down & hierarchy

Some Widgets allow you to Drill down through a hierarchy. For example, the Planned hours and Worked hours widget on the Worked hours tab allows you to Drill down from a yearly view, to a quarterly view, to a monthly view, then to a daily view. This yearly, quarterly, monthly and daily structure is referred to as a Hierarchy.

If you hover over a Widget that supports Drilling down, such as the Planned hours and Worked hours Widget, the Drill Down tools will appear:

The Drill down option allows you to expand aspects of the data to get a closer look at them. Using the previous example of the Planned hours and Worked hours Widget, the data that you can Drill down into are points in time. From left to right, the tools work as follows:

1. Drill up: this tool will bring you one step up in the hierarchy of the data. For example, if you are looking at a daily view, it will ‘zoom out’ to a monthly view.
   
2. Click to turn on Drill down: this is a togglable option to allow you to choose specific areas to Drill down into. It will focus the table into a range surrounding the point you choose, while simultaneously Drilling down. For example, if you are in a yearly view, filtered to show 2018, 2019 and 2020, and you use this option to Drill down into 2019, you will be shown a monthly view of 2019 only, removing 2018 and 2020 from the scope.
   
3. Go to the next level in the hierarchy: This will drill down the entire data view to the next point, for example from year to quarter. If this would cut off data, for example drilling down from yearly to quarterly when viewing 2019 and 2020, it will default to the latest data (e.g. 2020). Use the Drill down toggle to Drill down into a specific year.
   
4. Expand all levels in the hierarchy: this works as the above tool, except it will maintain a view of all data. For instance, it will not cut out 2019 as in the above example.
   

Other Widgets using the Drill down feature will follow a similar logic to the Planned hours and Worked hours Widget for their respective data types. Use the Drill down feature to expand or collapse the desired data and navigate the Hierarchy.

Drill Through

There is also another feature similar to Drilling down. Drill through allows you to select a specific data point in a visualisation and view a page containing a more detailed analysis of that data point, and filters out others. 

For example, you can use the Drill through feature on the Qualifications Widget in the Skills, Training & Quals Tab while using the HR Tab. Using the Drill through feature on a specific qualification brings up a page showing which Employees have achieved the qualification, as well

Spotlight

You can use the Spotlight feature on Widgets to allow you to focus solely on them. Spotlighting a Widget means that it will be highlighted, and other Widgets on the page will fade out and become transparent. This can be useful to focus on one particular set of data.

To Spotlight a Widget, click the Menu button on the Widget (the three dots), and click Spotlight:

Then, the Widget will be Spotlighted:

To dismiss the Spotlight, click anywhere outside the Widget.

Focus mode

You can also click Focus mode on the Widget header bar to expand that Widget into a full screen view:

Show as Table

Another method of getting a closer look at a particular Widget is choosing to Show as a table. This will bring up a larger version of the Widget, and display the information both as a graphic and as a table. For example, the following screenshot is a Planned Hours and Worked Hours Widget transformed into a Table:

To Show as a Table, click the Menu button (the three dots) on the Widget, and click Show as a Table:

Exporting

You can also choose to export data displayed in Widgets as an Excel worksheet (.xlsx) or a .csv file. To export data, click the Menu button on a Widget (the three dots), and click Export data:

Clicking this will bring up a new pop-up window, where you can choose how to export your data. You can choose a few things in this window:

1. Which data would you like to export? Allows you to choose what data is exported – you can choose between a summarized data form, or the underlying data. If you do not have security access to the entire data, you may not be able to choose to export the underlying data, and this option will be greyed out (pictured below)
   
2. File Format allows you to choose between a .xlsx file or a .csv by using a drop-down menu
   

Once you have made your selections, click Export. Please note that any currently active Filter will apply to the exported data:

Organisation Chart

The Organisation chart is another tool available with MF Analytics. This chart can be used to get a high-level view of the hierarchy of your organisation. This chart can be used to show a breakdown of Employees, their Managers and their Departments, and the resulting relationships between the three.

This flow is customisable, and can be used to achieve a number of different relationship paths. For example, you could view Managers as the point of entry, then see which of them are connected to a specific Department, and then see individual Employees of that department. This relationship is conditional, for example Employees will not appear in the third column if they have a different Manager or Department. For example: 

You can also right-click on data points to Exclude them from the Organisation chart. This will remove that data point from the selection, separate to the Filter.

Right-clicking and clicking Include will isolate that data point from all other data, giving you only connected points.

Note: to restore Excluded data, you will need to navigate to a different Tab and return to the Organisation chart.

As with other Widgets, you can also right-click and select Show as a table to view the data as a table rather than a visualisation.

Creating an Organisation chart

To create an Organisation chart, first you can set up a set of Filters, like in other areas of MF Analytics. This can filter by Employees or Managers:

You can then begin to construct your Organisation chart. If you want to clear the previous chart, you can remove columns from the chart by clicking the X button on the column:

You can then build the actual Chart by clicking the + on the Number of Employees ‘branch’ of the Organisation chart. A pop-up will appear, where you can choose the next column, choosing between Employees, Managers and Departments:

Once clicked, they will add a new column of the chosen category. Then, repeat the process for subsequent columns:

Once your Organisational chart is complete, you can either add and remove columns to alter it, or use the Filter tool to alter the data displayed. 

Troubleshooting

My data is not updating 

User information is checked if a schedule has been set up in the Analytics page of the System preferences. If this has not been set up, please contact your system administrator who may need to get in contact with Mitrefinch Support.

Supervisors cannot see the new dashboard tab

Check that the Supervisor’s User profile is the one that matches the User profile assigned to that tab in the Dashboard maintenance screen.

Supervisors cannot see MF Analytics widgets on their Dashboard

Ensure that the Supervisor has the correct licence applied to them in the Employee licensing screen. The required licence is Analytics.

Supervisors can only see a small amount of data

The data that Supervisors can see is limited by their Employee security. In order to see more data, they will need to be given permissions for extra Employees.

Frequently Asked Questions

General

Can I access MF Analytics from Win TMS?

MF Analytics can only be used on the TMS 8 Web application – there is no functionality present within the Windows application.

Reports

Can I access reports from different devices?

Currently, MF Analytics has been developed with the TMS 8 desktop application in mind. There are plans to provide mobile support in the future.

Can I amend or configure the reports available in MF Analytics?

Users can filter and drill down through reports using the tools provided. However, they are unable to change the data setup.

Can I create my own reports?

No – reports have been developed and deployed by Mitrefinch to provide access to the most commonly accessed information. 

What reports can I see?

There are three separate suites of reports: Time and attendance information, HR information, and the Organisational chart.

Data

MF Analytics is not saving my last data selection – how do I save it?

When they are first opened, the reports use a default data selection so users have access to as much information as possible.

How much data can be displayed in MF Analytics?

You are able to include data up to a maximum of 730 days previous from the current date, and 365 days in the future. This can be configured for your business in the Analytics page of the System preferences.