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Planning for Profitability to Support Growing Customer Demand
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Human Resources
Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
The organization needed to match staffing levels with growing demand from customers, including both employees and contract staff around the globe. It had been using spreadsheets to build people strategy and workforce plans. However, planning with spreadsheets made it difficult to establish a consistent process, keep track of versions, and ultimately, ensure the workforce could meet its new goals as it evolved. Workforce planning was driven largely by the Finance department. Analysts in Finance partnered with business groups, which in turn had their own processes, calculations, and timelines for creating plans. When the organization tried to create a consolidated plan, the results were chaotic—due to differences in data, manual errors, and version control issues. The organization wanted to do monthly forecasting, but it proved to be too difficult.
About The Customer
The customer is a large financial services company with 50,000 employees. The company operates globally and employs a mix of full-time employees and contractors to maintain profitability. The organization faced challenges in workforce planning due to the use of spreadsheets, which led to inconsistencies, manual errors, and difficulties in version control. The Finance department primarily drove workforce planning, partnering with various business groups that had their own processes and timelines. The company aimed to match staffing levels with growing customer demand and sought to implement a more efficient and accurate workforce planning process.
The Solution
The organization hired a director to lead capacity planning and people strategy and decided to implement Visier Workforce Planning. The company already used Visier Workforce Analytics to provide leaders with self-service workforce analytics, offering a unified view of data from multiple workforce data sources. The new planning director saw the value of integrating a planning solution with the workforce analytics solution. The company used Visier to implement a workforce planning process with the right level of governance and rigor. The planning director built relationships with Finance leaders and connected larger groups into the consolidated planning environment within Visier. Using Visier as the single source of truth for workforce information, the director worked with each group to refine their headcount plans each month. More than 100 vice presidents, directors, and managers throughout the organization now use Visier Workforce Planning to capture their headcount needs. The planning director creates a top-level plan in collaboration with each vice president, who then delegates further sub-planning to several directors, who in turn assign managers in their reporting line to refine the plan even more. This layered process of refinement increases the accuracy of the workforce plan exponentially as information is collected from deeper and deeper levels of the business.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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