Understanding the benefits of SuccessFactors Workforce Planning
Workforce planning is one of the most critical business processes today, but it’s also one of the most difficult.
Unsurprisingly, many of today’s companies have little to no workforce planning strategy in place.
Collecting and shifting through Big Data, bringing the relevant businesses functions including HR and Finance together, and predicting the future needs of the business are just some of the challenges that workforce planners face.
What is workforce planning?
What does workforce planning really entail?
More than simply planning the current and future roles the business needs, workforce planning also needs to factor in costs and risk in line with the overall business goals.
Juggling all these factors takes the input of various business functions as well as mountains of data, both of which can be both time consuming and difficult to pull off.
Additionally, workforce planning needs to consider the short-term current needs of the business (operational) as well as the long-term future demands (strategic).
When done right, however, workforce planning can ensure organisations always have the right people, with the right skills, at the right time and within the cost demands of the business.
This means always having a workforce with a good ROI as well as the right skills to carry the business forward and meet overall goals.
Proper planning significantly reduces the risks associated with executing business strategy, from fewer so-called ‘bad hires’ to minimal skills gaps.
The benefits of workforce planning with SuccessFactors
Because it takes so many components and people to execute workforce planning effectively you need a powerful central system to handle everything.
SuccessFactors Workforce Planning does just this with their industry leading cloud solution, giving all stakeholders access to the important data along with intuitive tools that can help you plan your future workforce for success.
Real-time operational decision making
Because it takes so many components and people to execute workforce planning effectively you need a powerful central system to handle everything.
SuccessFactors Workforce Planning does just this with their industry leading cloud solution, giving all stakeholders access to the important data along with intuitive tools that can help you plan your future workforce for success.
Unfortunately, responsive workforce planning often falls far short of what is needed today with only 23% of organisations indicating their labour budgets are updated continually based on organisational performance. Instead, many still see this as an annual maintenance process.
With SuccessFactors, real-time data is available to all stakeholders including HR and Finance so that ongoing and immediate changes can be made throughout the year for agile decision making. This enables businesses to identify current demands created by demographic shifts, skills gaps and more. By looking at the current talent pool within the business decisions can be made to allocate resources from elsewhere through succession, or to look outside the business.
Long term planning for the future
What about the roles the future business might need? Workforce planners often must do what seems impossible by predicting what skills and roles the business might need in the future as a result of changes today, as well as the roles needed to help it reach long-term goals. Detailed forecasts rely heavily on today’s data but shifting through this information and interpreting it to make these vital decisions is no small feat.
All this data is available with SuccessFactors Workforce Planning along with intuitive forecasting tools that shift through the data and present it in easy to understand graphs. These predictions can be used for impact and cost modelling to help you plan the roles of the future with insight into retention, recruitment, development and productivity.
With a clear view of the most impactful roles in the organisation including the ones that create or destroy disproportionate business value you can plan to phase out, change, adapt and create new roles in the future that are designed to be the most profitable for the business.
Bring the decision makers together with ‘business language’
With so many decision makers involved in the process workforce planning often stalls before it even really gets going. While HR needs to look at vital skills gaps, Finance is more concerned with ROI and lower level managers have their own ideas about the people they need in their teams. All these functions can also have their own language, with some looking at the bare facts while others want a more qualitative approach.
An easy to use platform that is accessible to everyone across devices makes SuccessFactors ideal for bringing these functions together to make cohesive planning decisions. Now everyone can get to grips with workforce planning and leaders can bring to the table the data that matters most to each decision maker. This could be cost modelling, productivity predictions and much more to better explain the impact these decisions currently have and could have on the business in the future. Plus, with a fast and comprehensive system data can be processed in minutes rather than days or even weeks for more efficient decision making.
Make workforce planning effective with SuccessFactors
Unparalleled analytics makes SuccessFactors superior to other workforce planning solutions, but it also makes it a powerful tool to integrate with other important HR processes. With the entire SuccessFactors suite you can unlock even more potential and make future workforce decisions alongside your hiring and performance management strategies for even more effective decision making. To find out more take a look at a complete suite here or contact one of our team today.