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When Adam Ante first arrived at Paycor in 2017, the seasoned finance executive was tasked with prodding Paycor management to begin monitoring daily performance metrics.

\u201cAt first, it was about building the relationship with the executive team so that they understood how important it was to understand how the company was performing on a daily basis,\u201d explains Ante, who equates his task with shortening the distance between management and the company\u2019s data.

\u201cAt the time, we were just piling a set of numbers and metrics into Excel spreadsheets daily and distributing them,\u201d continues Ante, who upon his arrival was given the title of vice president of analytics.

\u201cWe didn\u2019t know where all of the data was, and we didn\u2019t know always what it meant,\u201d reports Ante, who notes that sometimes one manager might be sharing certain data that contradicted numbers being disseminated by another.

For Paycor, the solution was to adopt a new data management framework, a process that began with first clarifying what the company wanted to know about its performance and then identifying which metrics would best reveal this information.

According to Ante, \u201cYou begin by asking, \u2018What should this metric really show?\u2019 And then you say, \u2018Okay, now, where does this data come from? How do we access this data?\u2019\u2019\u201d

Back in 2017, Ante recalls, most of Paycor\u2019s data resided within a single SQL server.

\u201cAt every turn, this meant that somebody had to go in and figure out how to write SQL queries and pull the needed data together,\u201d remembers Ante, who adds that the company subsequently upgraded its data infrastructure. \xa0

\u201cThe most important thing is the ability to bring the data together into a place where people can access it and measure it and put the right level of governance around it,\u201d comments Ante, who observes that as more managers have gained confidence in the data and grown to better understand the information being provided, they\u2019ve also grown accustomed to monitoring the metrics daily.

Says Ante: \u201cIt can take a long time\u2014it\u2019s a cultural shift.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0