Rethinking workforce planning: How Anaplan bridges the HR-finance divide

Talent strategy has never just been an HR concern — it's always been a critical driver of organizational performance. Recent research backs this up, revealing that headcount and skills shortages are a significant threat to overall sales and growth — ahead of rising interest rates, trade and tariff wars, and energy prices. That's a wakeup call to any organization with siloed, disconnected HR and finance functions. 

The alarm sounds like this: If your organization can’t align hiring with financial budgets and strategic priorities you risk falling behind. So, what silences this alarm? A next-generation workforce planning solution that connects your HR and finance in ways that drive smarter, faster, and more collaborative decision-making.    

In a recent analyst report, S&P Global’s 451 Research recognizes Anaplan for the launch of our Operational Workforce Planning (OWP) application, highlighting how our application is designed to align hiring strategies with business and budget goals while empowering HR leaders to act as strategic advisors. Let’s dive further into that report and how Anaplan is helping businesses transform their workforce planning with tools and next-gen technologies they need to support HR and finance teams working in tandem. 

A strategic leap forward: HR and finance need to plan together

For years, HR and finance have worked toward the same goals — business growth, and financial and workforce stability — but often in isolation. HR tackles recruiting, skills development, engagement and retention; finance is focused on headcount budget and costs. But without a shared version of the truth whereby teams can operate from the same data, a disconnect occurs that can lead to missed hiring targets, budget overspend, inefficient use of internal talent, and missed growth opportunities. 

When you get workforce plans wrong, you put your business at risk, yet many organizations don't effectively use data to inform their workforce planning decisions.

Instead of relying on sloths of spreadsheets or reactive hiring, HR, and talent acquisition teams need to rally around tools that enable them to model scenarios, identify gaps, and align hiring with strategies and initiatives in real-time — all while maintaining a connection to finance. The report highlights this vision, stating, "As business leaders begin to narrow their focus on headcount, HR personnel will be forced to answer for the organization's talent strategy and be able to quickly scenario model new pathways to growth and productivity." Anaplan’s Operational Workforce Planning application is, “built with these skills in mind, supporting the kinds of outputs and outcomes that HR needs in a generative AI world."

The power of real-time, position-level planning

Anaplan enables organizations with real-time, position-level planning, enabling teams to adjust workforce plans instantly — from immediate staffing needs to long-term talent strategy — all within a connected, continuously updated model. This ability to dynamically adjust position plans in real time is a game-changer in today’s fast-moving market, where change is constant. Effective position-level planning brings discipline, governance, and transparency to workforce management by ensuring every position aligns with business strategies, approved budgets, and organizational priorities. It also adds essential scrutiny when roles open, helping you hire for the skills of the future at the right level — keeping your workforce agile, future-ready, and strategically aligned.

The Anaplan Operational Workforce Planning application provides granular position planning capabilities to support your plan-to-hire process. It integrates with your organization's human capital management (HCM) and talent acquisition systems to ensure data is always current and in sync. With this, your HR team can plan, and monitor open positions, while finance maintains approval and visibility into how those plans impact budget and forecasting, and talent acquisition gets early insights into planned positions to ensure the appropriate recruiting capacity to meet hiring targets.

The result is a fully connected, agile hiring process where every position decision is informed, timely, and aligned with both operational needs and long-term business strategy. 

Mapping strategies and skills

The report suggests that the most valuable strategic capabilities of Anaplan's platform include, "Mapping employees to strategies, initiatives, projects, and technical and relationship skills with the ability to identify future skill shortages and more." 

With the Anaplan Operational Workforce Planning application, you can model future impact on headcount changes or operating expenses. You can further leverage the Anaplan platform to model how well you can deliver customer projects based on skills or available headcount. Insights are shared in real time for cross-organizational collaboration among HR, finance, and operations teams. This level of detail helps connect workforce planning directly to business execution and potential revenue impact.

This isn’t just about keeping up with today’s needs — it’s about gearing up for the next decade of innovation and growth.

Translating talent strategy into financial outcomes

The ultimate value of operational planning and scenario modeling for your workforce is to recognize the potential impacts of talent strategy to your business, especially in financial terms. Perhaps the biggest differentiator is Anaplan’s ability to align business demand with HR-driven talent strategy and translate that into financial terms that resonate with the C-suite and business executives. S&P Global’s 451 Research notes that, "While HR-centric analytics vendors must partner with an FP&A provider to translate their insights, Anaplan can natively "translate" the outcome of these talent plans into terms that the C-suite will understand. This takes the weight off of HR to perform this translation and boosts its ability to speak to the corporate needs that company executives care about." 

Whether it’s modeling the cost impact of a new hiring wave or projecting how skill gaps could delay project delivery, Anaplan’s platform allows you to map people to strategy in a financially meaningful way. 

But this isn’t just about operational efficiency — it’s about strategic enablement for key business functions:

• For HR and talent acquisition: Plan-to-hire functionality, automated position and requisition management, and visibility into attrition, transfers, and internal mobility — all in real-time. 
• For finance: Accurate, dynamic forecasts of personnel costs, tied directly to workforce movements and hiring tactics. 
• For the business: Agile, collaborative decision-making that aligns the right people with the right roles, at the right time — driving execution and growth. 

Future-proofing your workforce starts now 

By connecting your people strategy with your organization's financial outcomes, HR and finance can collaborate in real time, with shared insight and a common purpose. What started as a wake-up call becomes an opportunity — to plan smarter, respond faster, and build a workforce strategy that drives the business forward.