Sapient Insights Group’s HR Systems Survey Spotlights the advantages Anaplan brings to Workforce Planning

According to the Sapient Insights Group’s 25th Annual HR Systems Survey, over 90% of organizations report they still use Excel at some level for data cleaning, data analysis, and data visualization. At the same time, only 11% of organizations are confident their primary HR analytics and planning solutions are meeting all of their business needs.

That sends a pretty clear message to you if you’re still trying to do your workforce planning with spreadsheets and brute force: you are not alone. The research (download your free copy directly here) provides a telling snapshot of the state of HR technology and, more specifically, HR adoption. The research captures extensive voice of the customer data on topics such as core HR, service delivery, time management, talent management, HR analytics and planning, and emerging technology. And according to this latest study, workforce planning is grabbing attention for several reasons. First, workforce planning gives your organization the power to anticipate and prepare for future workforce needs. In a rapidly changing business environment, you need to quickly adapt to new challenges and opportunities – something rarely possible with spreadsheets where the process is typically very manual and time-consuming. Second, workforce planning enables you to understand where and how your business is evolving, and helps you identify and address capacity and skills gaps within your workforce by considering different scenarios and the cost impact of each. By identifying areas where your organization may need additional resources with new skills, or further training and development, you can ensure that your workforce and leaders have the skills and knowledge they need to meet current and future business needs.

Finally, workforce planning can help you improve employee hiring and retention and in turn reduce costs and improve brand image. If you identify and address potential workforce issues and risks proactively, you can create a more positive work environment that encourages employees to stay with the company and contribute to its long-term success.

With this growing need, you’d think that a host of vendors would be improving their products to satisfy a growing demand. But page 146 of the Sapient Insights Group report – and the users it spoke to – tells a different story. The average scores for vendors in the HR Analytics and Planning categories slumped, with both user experience (UX) and vendor satisfaction (VS) coming in 12% lower than last year’s averages. "This is the largest drop in UX and VS ratings across all categories, showing the frustration buyers are feeling with this category,” the report explains.

That isn’t consistent across every vendor, however. “Achieving the second highest UX and VS ratings this year is a newcomer to our dataset specializing in planning, Anaplan,” the report says. According to Sapient Insights Group, Anaplan is “starting to tailor (its) solution for HR needs and has recently brought in experienced talent from the HR product space to support this shift.”

Anaplan stands out from the crowd by giving you the flexibility to address a wide range of workforce planning use cases, including integration with your operations systems for workforce capacity planning and optimization, integration with finance for headcount planning and budgeting (integrated budget to hire), and long-term strategic workforce planning. Anaplan enables you to source your data from a plethora of HR, finance, sales, and operations systems, segment your workforce based on various dimension and criteria, and model different scenarios to assess the impact on your workforce needs, including costs. This helps you identify and plan for talent gaps and opportunities; it allows you to react faster, justify decisions, and tie workforce planning to your business drivers and the objectives of your organization.

Sapient Insights Group isn’t the only observer to have noticed our focus on our customers’ workforce planning experiences. Anaplan has received positive reviews on software review sites such as G2 and Capterra from customers who have used its workforce planning solutions.

Organizations like yours are already successfully using Anaplan's platform for workforce planning – organizations as large and varied as South Central Ambulance Services, Fresenius, and Queensland Rail. How could it make a difference for your organization? A good place to find out is our Workforce Planning page.