Adaptive Insights, a cloud business planning and analytics software provider that was bought earlier this year by Workday, has added strategic workforce planning to its Business Planning Cloud product.
The move aims to create a collaborative platform for finance departments to work together with HR and operations. The product may suit firm clients looking for a more comprehensive way to manage the finance, operations and HR functions within their organization.
The new workforce planning capability allows companies to model their workforce with no limits on dimensions or number of scenarios. Adaptive Insights’ platform provides real-time, workforce-related data including salary, skills, diversity, locations and more from enterprise resource planning, financial management, human capital management systems and other operational systems. Users can compare multiple driver-based, what-if scenarios and assess the impacts of potential changes to the workforce across the organization.
“We are ensuring that in addition to Adaptive Insights for sales, finance, and so on, we now have it for workforce planning,” Grace Kim, director of product marketing, told Accounting Today. “The software is meant to help companies plan, analyze and adjust not just the current but the future workforce as well. It really allows HR, finance and business leaders to work together; come together on a cohesive plan to optimize the workforce.”
Some key features of strategic workforce planning include:
Headcount planning: Model hiring, retention, attrition, and restructuring plans by location, department and project, as well as the associated cost of workforce. For large enterprises, the scale of the Business Planning Cloud enables a single workforce model to be maintained, even if business units have different business and revenue models, according to Adaptive Insights.
Organizational restructuring: Create and compare driver-based, what-if scenarios to choose the optimal organization structure. For example, users can explore M&A, divestiture or relocation by modeling and analyzing organizational impact as well as by drilling down into compensation, benefits, taxes, relocation costs and more.
Skills-based planning: Model skills by location, ramp time, cost of workforce and more to meet current and long-term business goals. Business users can compare actual versus planned skill and resource capacity to better align with finance and HR. Managers can keep workforce skills up to date with learning and development plans as well as support succession plans.
“The goal is to allow everyone in a organization to be able to plan,” said Nate Skelton, senior product manager at Aadptive Insights. “People who are close to the business are able to give more perspective, finance being the orchestrator, allowing other departments to model different plans and connect it all to the corporate plan.”
Customers who have bought Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud will automatically have access to the strategic workforce planning capability. For more information, visit
