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Workforce planning is essential to ensuring that businesses have the human capital to meet current and future goals. Headcount planning plays a foundational role in this process by involving financial teams so budget allocation is done in a manner consistent with strategic plans.
While workforce and headcount planning used to be tedious, cloud-based technology has streamlined this process in recent years. As the business world moves much quicker than it used to, business data also decays quickly. Working with outdated data can slow business growth and hinder an organization’s ability to achieve its goals.
Fortunately, real-time data and insights gained through Workday Adaptive Planning can help.
Access to real-time adaptive planning insights is vital as employers engage in headcount planning. Not only does real-time data lead to reduced costs, but it also augments both efficiency and effectiveness in the process.
Why Real-Time Insights Matter for Headcount Planning
Real-time insights are essential for headcount planning because they enable businesses to make informed decisions about their workforce in real-time.
Real-Time Insights Enable Businesses to Optimize Monitoring and Planning
Developing a headcount planning strategy is about having the right people with applicable skills in the roles in which they can make the most impact. Real-time data helps a company operate strategically, monitoring the organization to help teams make workforce choices aligned with growth plans.
Learn more about how headcount planning software can optimize your business.
Monitor Employee Performance
Real-time employee performance insights help businesses consider role requirements in light of their strategic goals, identify skills gaps in their workforce, and make quick decisions about how to close them through retraining, talent acquisition, or automation.
Monitor Headcount Costs
Access to real-time data helps you effectively budget for retraining current employees and plan for all hiring costs, including recruitment, onboarding, benefits, and real estate. Proper monitoring allows sales teams to set up clear, accurate commission plans.
Optimize Workforce Planning
Real-time data leads to better collaboration between HR, finance, and executive teams. It allows each team to effectively model hiring, restructuring, and compensation plans using driver-based assumptions so the organization always has access to the talent it needs.
How Workday Adaptive Planning Does Real-Time Insights
Workday Adaptive Planning provides the entire organization with the necessary tools for effective headcount planning. In addition to making integration easy, it accelerates reporting and planning cycles, increasing productivity by leaps and bounds.
Real-Time Data Integration
Spreadsheets are great for organizing data, but they aren’t a sustainable data collection or distribution method for enterprises. Workforce Adaptive Planning easily integrates data from a diverse range of source systems, including:
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
- HR management
- Marketing tools
Some of Workday’s integration partners include Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, and Sage Intacct. Workforce Adaptive Planning can also be integrated with custom data sources.
Offering much-needed flexibility, the platform allows organizations to choose Workday’s embedded integration, use manual integration with flat file import and export, or go with a third-party solution.
Dashboards and Reports
Collecting data and formatting reports has traditionally been a cumbersome task. However, Workday Adaptive Planning’s robust dashboards and reporting features make it much less stressful for executives and their teams.
The platform integrates with Microsoft Office, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and more, making it easy to create full-featured reports from existing data sources. The drag-and-drop report builder makes reporting quick for everyone.
Once reports have been generated, Workday’s user-friendly dashboard allows teams to drill down into transaction-level data to pinpoint the right details. The ad-hoc analysis feature enables teams to slice data in any way to facilitate adaptive planning insights.
Because data is provided in real-time, it’s updated whenever the dashboard is refreshed, so executives can always be sure that the insights they receive are based on up-to-the-minute information.
Scenario Planning
Nothing in business is predictable. Situations sometimes arise that are outside anyone’s control, including changing economic and cultural forces, such as rising inflation and evolving work demands. Scenario planning is essential for all enterprise teams because it helps businesses prepare for contingencies if and when goals and plans shift.
Scenario planning is what turns a last-minute change in plans from an unwelcome surprise into an opportunity to move in a new direction.
Workday Adaptive Planning’s scenario planning resources allow a team to explore “what if” scenarios, including terminating or adding new personnel. Organizations can compare solutions based on key business and value drivers — all before anything takes place.
Once various scenarios have been explored, teams can evaluate possible outcomes and consequences, such as the effect of personnel changes on facility expenses or the ability to meet strategic goals. This scenario planning capability is much more accurate thanks to integrations and real-time data.
Benefits of Real-Time Insights for Headcount Planning
Real-time insights for headcount planning with Workday Adaptive Planning provide many benefits, including better decision-making, increased efficiency, and enhanced visibility across the organization.
How Real-Time Data Improves, Increases, and Enhances Workforce Strategy
Real-time data is essential in business, especially for those at the enterprise level. It allows for accurate headcount planning, which can save businesses money and help teams take their productivity to the next level.
When headcount planning is prioritized, workforce management becomes a much more manageable task. Not only does good workforce management contribute to a business’s bottom line, but it acts as the very foundation of its strategic planning.
When the right people with the right skills are in place, the whole organization becomes aligned in terms of key strategic goals, and everyone moves forward together.
In turn, businesses become more collaborative, more agile, and better able to respond to opportunities, allowing them to expand and compete in the fast-moving enterprise world.
Improved Decision-Making
Workday Adaptive Planning is a cloud-based platform offering a single source of truth for the entire organization. This gives executives a bird’s eye view of their data in real-time rather than working in silos. The more information a team has, the better their decisions will be.
The Workday financial planning features included in the platform also reduce errors across the organization. When executives have continual access to updated data, it prevents businesses and teams from making decisions based on outdated or erroneous information.
Similarly, integration ensures that personnel details such as employee salary, benefits, tax rates, and job titles are brought into Workday Adaptive Planning in real-time. This improves the accuracy of personnel expense forecasts as employees change roles, earn raises, and shift benefit plans.
Integrated connections between adaptive and personnel requisition data allow for streamlined personnel reconciliation and improved accuracy, as individuals aren’t double-counted. Similarly, these connections consider new hires when providing personnel expense forecasts, ensuring high levels of accuracy across the board.
With the real-time data in the Workday Adaptive Planning platform, businesses can base their decisions on accurate models, not their assumptions of what might happen.
Financial teams can expect faster forecast cycles due to the automatic import of actuals. These features provide yet another layer of safety in the decision-making process, making it possible for teams to better predict and prepare for outcomes.
Increased Efficiency
Using Workday Adaptive Planning helps teams run much more efficiently. The platform allows self-service access to real-time data, which means less reliance on IT teams for help and less time spent waiting for other teams to produce necessary data. It also facilitates accelerated reporting, further increasing productivity and efficiency.
This efficient collaboration using real-time data makes organizations more agile. Because executive teams can make decisions quickly, even enterprise-level businesses can turn a large ship quickly, avoiding breakdowns and missed opportunities due to a lack of access to current data.
Because Workday Adaptive Planning embraces model-based decision-making, executive teams reduce mistakes and avoid surprise outcomes. Less pivoting also contributes to greater efficiency within the organization.
Enhanced Visibility
In today’s business world, collaboration is the key to success. Not only does it keep personnel engaged, but statistically speaking, it leads to better performance, increased productivity, more significant innovation, and a boost in an organization’s bottom line. This is excellent news for those using Workday Adaptive Planning.
Workday adds real-time collaborative financial planning abilities to an organization, giving teams the benefit of enhanced visibility across the board. No longer forcing your team to work in silos means better overall project management and quicker action on critical tasks.
Furthermore, executives and their teams can stay in sync even when plans pivot, reducing the likelihood that information will go missed and increasing the team’s chances of success when moving into a new venture or direction.
QBIX Delivers Real-Time Results
When it comes right down to it, real-time data allows businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively.
Instead of wasting time hunting down information and waiting for teams to respond, QBIX’s use of Workday Adaptive Planning makes accessing data a self-service task, saving time and allowing a team to focus on making the moves that truly matter for growth and expansion.
Real-time data access ensures that businesses have the correct number of people in place and gives teams confidence that the right personnel is in the right roles for their skillset. Over-hiring becomes a thing of the past, and organizations can bring budgets in line with their strategic goals.
By optimizing their workforce planning based on up-to-date information, businesses can reduce headcount costs while maintaining productivity, leading to increased efficiency and profitability. QBIX makes this all possible with Workday Adaptive Planning’s real-time insights.
Let Your Company Thrive with Adaptive Planning
QBIX real-time insights for developing a headcount planning strategy with Workday Adaptive Planning are essential for businesses that want to optimize their workforce strategy. They provide companies with the tools to make informed decisions about headcount planning in real-time, improving efficiency and enhancing data visibility.
If you aren’t already using Workday Adaptive Planning, it’s time to consider making the switch. Contact us today to learn more about how QBIX employs Workday’s Adaptive Planning platform to help businesses thrive in an ever-changing environment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Real-time insights in Workday Adaptive Planning provide the chance to analyze and monitor the most recent data surrounding the performance of your workforce, including headcount costs and other key metrics. These helpful insights allow businesses to make educated decisions about their strategies in real-time.
Real-time insights can provide numerous benefits to your organization, displaying the most pertinent information about your company and permitting you to make informed decisions about your strategies. Over time, this can improve efficiency, provide greater clarity surrounding your workforce, and enhance your decision-making process.
Real-time insights work to reduce headcount costs by highlighting specific areas in which you can lower your headcount while optimizing your workforce strategy. Over time, this can improve your efficiency and profitability.
Workday Adaptive Planning lets organizations access and analyze the most recent data concerning their workforce in real-time. You can examine custom-tailored dashboards, reports, and visuals that give you a clearer view of your workforce from one day to the next.
Real-time insights in Workday Adaptive Planning are fully customizable, allowing you to meet your specific needs. Workday Adaptive Planning provides custom-designed dashboards, visualizations, and reports.