Workforce Planning: A Critical Success Factor for XP&A

After the unprecedented changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations worldwide are still striving to adapt. One particular area of impact has been to the most valuable resource of any organization – the workforce. Why? Because, as organizations recast their forecasts to align with the changing economic landscape, effective workforce planning is critical to fuel growth plans and mitigate risk.

Accordingly, a modern approach to that planning is not only desirable but also a necessity.

XP&A, A Modern Planning Approach

Planning, budgeting and forecasting, including human capital planning, can no longer succeed as siloed exercises. Sophisticated organizations have realized that maintaining forward momentum demands workforce planning that’s agile, adaptable and aligned with both top-level organizational strategy and business unit requirements. As organizations rise to meet the challenges presented by the current economic environment, we’re witnessing an acceleration in the movement toward an increasingly more sophisticated and comprehensive planning approach.

Gartner calls this eXtended Planning & Analysis (XP&A) and describes it as planning that’s unified across all functions of the organization to ensure top-level strategic goals are the focus of business unit planning. The Office of Finance, HR and business unit leaders must therefore all be empowered to develop and manage plans that collectively work toward organizational goals – something that legacy solutions just can’t deliver.

Legacy Solutions Limit Progress

Simple connected planning applications or fragmented spreadsheets are no longer adequate to meet modern workforce planning requirements. Legacy solutions simply can’t address the pace of change or the current complexity. Not surprisingly, these approaches frustrate Finance teams, who are forced to waste time managing data instead of focusing on how to add value.

In fact, in the white paper titled Accessible Analytics Improve Operational Performance, Ventana Research reveals that the two most common impediments to compensation management are information scattered across files and systems and a lack of integration. Finance leaders instead require a more intelligent corporate performance management (CPM) solution that empowers planning for all human capital elements in conjunction with all other planning functions.

Lead at Speed with OneStream People Planning

The OneStream Intelligent Finance Platform empowers Finance teams to lead at speed by unifying people planning with core CPM processes – such as planning, budgeting and forecasting; financial consolidation; reporting; and financial data quality – in a single, unified platform. The OneStream MarketPlace provides more than 50 business and productivity solutions customers can download, configure and deploy to quickly address additional requirements, without adding complexity to the application.

Here are just a few of the key capabilities of the OneStream People Planning solution for XP&A (see Figure 1):

• Import existing employee information from leading HCM systems
• Easily add new hires and update existing employees
• Leverage pre-built tax and benefit calculations that vary from country to country
• Speed up data-entry with pre-built data entry forms, rules, calculations, reports and dashboards
• Integrate with other OneStream specialty planning solutions, including Cash Planning

The OneStream People Planning solution empowers Finance teams at organizations such as The Carlyle Group and Cleaver-Brooks to lead at speed by aligning people plans with financial plans. The benefits these organizations have realized show the impact of using People Planning to make hiring and compensation decisions in real-time and to enable agility in decision-making.

Additional benefits include the following capabilities:

• Empower users to create new plans, new hires and T&E scenarios without IT
• Understand what impact hiring and staffing decisions have on financial results
• Leverage pre-built global drivers for salary, benefits and payroll taxes by title, geography and salary band for real-time, dynamic planning
• Collaborate with business partners across the organization with dashboards

These are just some of the reasons that highlight how, in today’s unchartered and constantly evolving world, workforce planning is a critical success factor for XP&A.

 Learn More

To learn more about how organizations are conquering the complexity in their workforce planning, view our interactive solution brief: “Conquering Complexity in People Planning.” Ready to transform your planning, budgeting and forecasting processes, and increase alignment between Finance and Operations? Contact us today for a demonstration!