Igniting Data Literacy and HR Operations at Southwire 

Southwire, North America’s leading wire and cable company for more than 75 years, values data intrinsically. However, when it came to workforce analytics, they faced some significant challenges.  

With a mission to deliver power responsibly, Southwire aspired to enhance its HR operations to support ambitious short—and long—term goals. The company’s journey with people analytics and adoption of Crunchr shows how using new technology can lead to strategic success.

🏢 Maturing HR Management Practices

As the chief people and culture officer at Southwire, Fernando Esquivel provides his team with the right solutions to continue building a culture of trust, empowerment, and inclusion. “At Southwire, we’re on a mission to electrify America and in some cases, the world,” Esquivel stated.  

He also emphasizes the importance of maintaining consistency in systems and processes across the business and within the people operations. Achieving this mission, however, meant overcoming some significant hurdles in workforce management and data analytics.  

Esquivel’s team faced several critical challenges: 

• Scattered and unreliable data.
• Limited access to real-time insights.
• Operational inefficiency and slow manual reporting.
• Maintaining consistent people analytics reports.

🔍 Fast Track to Immediate Impact

In search of a solution, Esquivel evaluated Crunchr for its potential to transform the team’s HR analytics capabilities. He reflected, ”We learned that we needed a solution that was out of the box for us to achieve what we needed to achieve as fast as we needed to, and that’s when Crunchr came in”. Ultimately, their decision to partner with Crunchr was driven by a need to make complex people decisions rooted in data.   

Around the same time, Southwire’s People & Culture Technology team stepped in to lead the formal evaluation and oversee implementation. While they initially had concerns about how easily Crunchr would integrate with their existing systems, those doubts quickly disappeared. The team had anticipated long mapping meetings and extensive test cycles, but were surprised by how smooth and fast the integration turned out to be.

The implementation of Crunchr was swift and effective. The platform was integrated within a month, significantly faster than what Southwire’s BI team quoted for an internal build.  Southwire’s senior people and culture analyst, Richard Robertson, elaborated on this, citing a need for faster insights: ”We talked internally with our BI team about potentially building something in existing systems to provide the metrics we were looking for. They estimated that it would take six months to a year to develop the data model and six more months to create some core reports. That timeline just wasn’t going to cut it.”

🧠 Driving Decisions with Data 

For Robertson, getting the numbers he needs in real-time is extremely valuable. He went on to describe an example of this, citing a recent meeting with Southwire’s Vice President of Total Rewards:  

”I received a notification from the compensation team asking me to join a discussion about pay equity analysis. I joined the meeting with little context, but about an hour or two into it, we started discussing potential metrics they were interested in. I quickly began creating a story (in Crunchr). After about 40 minutes of discussion, they asked me how long it would take to gather the necessary data. I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve already got it built for you; here you go.’ Instead of spending weeks gathering data, we could immediately move into a conversation about what to do with the information. It’s just extremely efficient.’‘ 

Thanks to new automated data processes and his partnership with Crunchr, Robertson reduced the average time required to deliver insights from days to mere seconds. This capability helps Robertson quickly answer critical questions from leadership, enhancing strategic discussions. And it doesn’t go unnoticed. “It’s a much more efficient conversation,” Esquivel adds. 

🎯 A Cultural Shift  

The adoption of Crunchr contributed to a cultural shift at Southwire, emphasizing the importance of data accuracy and accountability among HR and people leaders.  A big part of this is thanks to Robertson’s commitment to creating a smooth internal launch while helping train non-technical users on the tool. He made a ten-question scenario template to help gauge proficiency and see if users could get answers to the needed questions without his help. According to Robertson, “It’s the second step after they go through the initial eLearning, and it gives me an idea of how adept someone is at navigating Crunchr.”   

This shift improves data quality and empowers HR to focus on strategic opportunities, such as workforce planning, talent development, and most importantly, reducing turnover. “Crunchr allows us to quickly identify and monitor key areas of improvement regarding turnover, which has been extremely difficult to do in the past. The ability to filter the population down to any subset of team members and receive instant results is extremely powerful” explains Robertson.    

These capabilities have given Southwire the tools to chip away at its 90-day retention and tackle future HR challenges effectively, emphasizing continuous improvement and innovation. By addressing data challenges and empowering employees to make informed decisions, Southwire has positioned itself for strategic growth.   

Southwire’s experience with Crunchr stands out not only for the cultural shift it helped enable, but also for how smoothly the technology was implemented. For the first time in over two decades, the People & Culture Technology team found a tool that delivered on its promise, went live within two months, integrated easily on top of their HCM, and was fully adopted by users.