From Four Hours to Forty Minutes: How Birchwood Transformed L&D Reporting with HR4
Birchwood Auto Group’s Learning & Development team turned a frustrating, time-consuming reporting process into a streamlined engine for insight and strategic growth—with help from HR4’s Reports & Analytics app.
Meet Birchwood’s L&D Team
The Learning & Development team at Birchwood is committed to more than just compliance, they’re cultivating growth. Through their in-house initiative, Birchwood University, the team empowers employees to understand their roles, develop key competencies, and thrive across the organization’s 25+ locations.
With a blended approach that includes both in-person and digital training, they support over 1,200 employees and manage a catalog of over 90 courses, ranging from topics on health & safety, onboarding, upskilling, and leadership development.
"We're in the care business, not just the car business. Learning is how we live that out."
Manual reporting was slow, frustrating, and time-intensive
When Birchwood launched their Service Academy as part of the Birchwood University, the team needed to track completion rates for over 240 employees across 10 learning modules. All being sent to different General Managers once completed.
But reporting wasn’t simple.
The team had to:
- Pull completion data from the existing reports app on Learn and Rustici reports.
- Double-check progress in each employee’s profile
- Color-code Excel spreadsheets and manually calculate % completion
The Bottleneck
This process took 3-4 hours per report, and they were delivering it every week for 3 months. The pressure was constant.
A smarter, faster, more insightful way to report on learning
HR4’s newly released Reports & Analytics app was purpose-built with feedback from clients like Birchwood. Designed to surface insights, not just raw data, it gave Jessica and the L&D team a way to track learning at scale, without losing hours to formatting and cross-referencing.
Key Features:
- App-specific dashboards with graphs and visual progress snapshots
- Suggestions & Insights: a new reporting layer that helps teams interpret the “why” behind the
- numbers
- Pre-built reports that can be pinned to dashboards and delivered automatically
- 3–8 smart snapshots per report, surfacing the most critical metrics
- Custom report-builder for flexible, focused data pulls
- Scheduled report delivery via email, no need to log in
"It's a nice way to see what's going on quickly, especially at a glance."
Real results that free up time and drive smarter decisions
80% Reduction in Time
Reports that used to take 3–4 hours now take just 30–45 minutes.
The team now spends less time gathering data and more time analyzing it. With saved filters and centralized access, the L&D team can find what they needs without jumping between systems or fixing formatting in Excel.
Better Visibility for Leaders
Reports are shared with GMs, VPs, and the CHRO, and are easier to understand.
The new structure and filtering allow Birchwood’s leadership to see exactly where each dealership and department stands.
Strategic Repositioning
The team can now focus on program design and career development.
By eliminating manual reporting, Birchwood’s L&D team is reclaiming time to support the company’s long-term learning strategy, including competency mapping, visual learning roadmaps, and succession planning.
From manual work to strategic impact, and they're just getting started
A once time-consuming reporting routine has evolved into a streamlined, insight-rich process that now saves Birchwood’s L&D team hours every week. By replacing spreadsheets and cross-referencing with smart filters, visual dashboards, and automated delivery, HR4’s Reports & Analytics app helped them shift from reactive data collection to proactive decision-making.
But this isn’t the finish line, it’s a foundation. Birchwood’s team is now exploring the next chapter: forecasting completions, enabling self-serve access for managers, and building visual learning roadmaps that align with career development. With HR4 as a partner, they’re confident in the tools, the relationship, and the innovation behind it all.
They chose HR4 because it listened. They continue with HR4 because it delivers.
"This shift means we can actually plan learning, not just report on it."
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