Workforce planning

Navigating workforce planning manually quickly becomes cumbersome as your business grows. Juggling diverse roles, skill sets, and evolving business needs requires a sophisticated approach. Workforce planning should be part of your planning solution. It makes it easier to manage the complexities of workforce planning and ensure that your organization always has the right talent, at the right time.

The critical role of the workforce

The workforce is at the heart of many organizations’ performance. Efficient use of the workforce is tied to both profitability and employee satisfaction. This makes workforce management and planning a critical process.

Workforce planning quickly becomes complex. Increasing numbers of employees, varying skills and competencies, and other constraints create a huge matrix of choices. Managing this buffet of choices requires some help.

Strategic and tactical layers of workforce planning

Workforce planning has two layers that should be covered, strategic and tactical. Our approach to workforce planning encompasses both dimensions.

Strategic workforce planning:

Strategic workforce planning looks months ahead to ensure that the organization has enough capacity to meet future demand. To do this, it is important to understand workforce demand, and this is where integrating workforce planning with sales and operations (S&OP) planning comes in handy.

Tactical workforce planning:

Tactical workforce planning focuses on the immediate weeks ahead. At this point, it is important to ensure that the organization’s operations are running smoothly with its own workforce and with outside help when needed. Tactical planning goes into detail about who should be working each day, shift, and role. This can then be used as the official work schedule for employees.

Optimization at the heart of planning

Manually planning shifts and roles at the employee level is not only cumbersome, but also inefficient. This task is a very straightforward optimization problem where we have employees who need to meet demand in the most efficient way. The optimization algorithm is given constraints such as when employees are available or what skills they have. Managing employee-level constraints takes less time, and optimization can do the heavy lifting of arranging thousands or hundreds of thousands of combinations into the most efficient patterns.

Workforce planning with IBM Planning Analytics

We utilize IBM Planning Analytics and the IBM CPLEX optimization engine to create practical workforce planning model. This model efficiently processes input data to generate actionable plans that ensure workforce allocation meets demand in the most effective way.

Embrace the future of workforce management and ensure your organization’s success. Contact us to learn how our approach to workforce planning can revolutionize your talent workforce planning!