Strengthening humanitarian operations through strategic workforce planning

How Anaplan supports the ICRC in aligning talent with mission-critical needs.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) operates in more than 90 countries, providing impartial humanitarian assistance to individuals and communities affected by armed conflict and other forms of violence. With a global workforce of over 18,000, the organization’s ability to deliver timely and effective aid is directly tied to its capacity to plan, allocate, and manage human resources with precision and foresight.

At the center of this work is the ICRC’s workforce: over 18,000 individuals deployed across diverse functions, from health services and logistics to diplomacy, engineering, and emergency response. To meet evolving humanitarian needs with agility and effectiveness, the organization needed to ensure that its talent is aligned with its mission

This imperative elevated workforce planning to a strategic function within the ICRC, one that integrates operational forecasting, human resources management, and organizational risk mitigation. To deliver this function with speed and precision, the ICRC turned to Anaplan.

Why Anaplan was selected

Anaplan was selected as the ICRC’s workforce planning platform of choice based on a comprehensive combination of strategic, operational, and organizational factors. The ICRC had confidence and familiarity with Anaplan, which has already proved significant value to its finance function. Importantly, Anaplan demonstrated a strong understanding of the ICRC’s unique operational needs, offering a collaborative approach and dedicating expert resources to support the initial proof of concept and long-term success.

Unlike some pre-configured solutions, Anaplan can be fully customized. ICRC has built tailored workforce models from the ground up, using blueprint templates only as reference points. This ensures the resulting solution is purpose-built to reflect the complexities of humanitarian operations rather than conforming to commercial defaults. Additionally, Anaplan supports integration across multiple departments and data sources, including human resources, finance, and supply, enabling true cross-functional collaboration within a single planning environment.

Equally important is Anaplan’s support for decentralized ownership. The ICRC is now building and maintaining its own planning models internally, thanks to its team of trained model builders. This promotes autonomy, scalability, and iterative improvement over time. Finally, the platform’s robust data integration capabilities allow the ICRC to pull in information from numerous sources and systems of record, while supporting secure data extraction for downstream analysis and stakeholder reporting. Taken together, these capabilities made Anaplan the ideal partner for a planning function as critical and complex as workforce planning and management at the ICRC.

Realizing organizational impact

Using Anaplan, the ICRC is able to unlock meaningful strategic and operational benefits across the organization. By enabling the organization to anticipate and address workforce gaps with greater accuracy, the ICRC ensures that qualified personnel are sourced and deployed more quickly and efficiently, ultimately strengthening their ability to respond to humanitarian needs on the ground.

In addition, we support:

• Evidence-based decision-making: By providing a single source of truth for workforce data and enabling scenario modeling at both strategic and tactical levels. This not only improves internal governance but also bolsters transparency and accountability when engaging with external stakeholders such as donors and partner societies.

• Improved visibility: By encouraging internal career opportunities, talent development, and mobility within the organization. By making workforce needs more transparent, employees can make informed decisions about their career paths while helping leadership plan for succession and development.

• Strengthened collaboration: With a unified view that spans human resources, finance, and operations, the ICRC can now coordinate more effectively and make integrated decisions that reflect the complexity of its global mission.

• Measurable efficiency gains: Particularly in operational workforce planning, by automating previously manual processes and streamlining cross-functional planning activities. 

Using Anaplan, the ICRC can not only meet today’s challenges but enables it to proactively prepare for the demands of tomorrow’s humanitarian landscape.