WorkForce Planning

What is WorkForce Planning?

Workforce Planning aligns HR needs with business needs to ensure your company can execute its business strategy. HR, Finance, and hiring managers work together to establish budgets, roles, and priorities across the organization by examining total headcount costs to make sure the right number of people are hired at the right time without exceeding the budget.

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting brings financial, payroll, and HR data together so you can plan headcount, salary, bonus, and payroll taxes using actuals from your business. This allows you to quickly build models and plans without having to rekey or reassemble workforce information in a spreadsheet.

Workforce Planning Benefits:

• Improve collaboration between HR and Finance
• Plan your workforce with flexible models that align to how you run your business
• Drill down into what skills and competencies are needed for long-term organizational success
• Predict costs and effectiveness of organizational changes
• Get a complete view of your headcount across your entire organization.

Below are best practices for conquering your workforce planning process:

Gain visibility into your current workforce - Capturing a comprehensive picture of the current and future state of your headcount is difficult due to the dynamic nature of the data. People will get hired and roles will change. And if you try to use spreadsheets, the data will likely be out-of-date by the time you finish your analysis. Your HRMS system won't have all the data you need. Decision-makers need more, such as financial information and contingent labor. Without it, you won't be able to develop a dependable workforce planning model. For many HR practitioners, having a real-time view of their headcount KPIs is a major benefit.

Implement a continuous workforce planning process - Workforce planning needs to be continuous if you want it to be successful. Once you have built your workforce strategy and started implementing it, the job isn't done. A lot of organizations fail because they complete this exercise on an annual basis, rather than frequently updating the plan. Your workforce will change over time, regardless of what you do. People will leave, others will get promoted or retire.

Integrate workforce planning with your corporate strategy - Integrated workforce planning, where finance, HR, and other business unit leaders all share one source of data, is most powerful with an integrated hiring and recruiting plan. Confusion begins when it's done in spreadsheets. And unless you have direct links from your workforce gap analysis to your approved hiring plan, and specific headcount plans for recruiters, it quickly becomes a difficult task to keep all key stakeholders aligned on who needs to be recruited/hired, and when.

Integrated workforce planning removes much of that confusion and frustration for HR leaders by allowing them to plan their workforce in sync with all other business plans - corporate strategy, financials, operations, departmental budgets, and forecasts.

For NetSuite customers, finance teams often start the process alongside the HR teams, which supplies finance with critical information on the entire workforce. The workforce plan, integrated with the budget, revenue forecasts, and corporate financial plan, helps finance determine where to expand next and when, how to staff new locations, and what practice areas to grow.

Harness the power of scenario planning - All organizations need to plan for major changes and be able to react to changing market conditions. Scenario planning allows HR and finance leaders to model various what-if scenarios based on an array of potential outcomes. The types of workforce planning scenarios can range from modeling immediate needs to understanding the long-term implications of hiring, outsourcing, supporting remote workers, and more.

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting for Workforce Planning brings HR, payroll, and finance together in one solution, modeling headcount, and related expenses, and providing a reliable source of real-time information about workforce expenses.

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