Workforce Management

If you want to plan according to demand, you need to know the personnel requirements. The so-called personnel requirement calculation is based on business drivers or personnel requirement drivers. For example, this can be the handling volumes in logistics, the expected customers in retail, or airplanes or passengers at the airport. These demand drivers are linked to the corresponding workload. The resulting personnel requirements form the basis for shift planning.

Regardless of whether it is a fixed framework schedule, flexible scheduling, employee participation, etc., planning should always take into account working time laws, collective bargaining agreements, individual working time rules, and all relevant employee data in terms of qualifications, function, employment contract, availability, preferences, restrictions, etc. In addition, there are company-specific target criteria concerning productivity, service level, and employee needs. Modern tools that use algorithms and artificial intelligence make the complexity of scheduling manageable and save work by automatically taking these factors into account and checking them during scheduling.

Working hours and scheduling do not end at the planning stage – they must be recorded, classified, and evaluated without errors together with absences, overtime, and times subject to extra pay. Accurate recording and evaluation are mandatory prerequisites for error-free payroll accounting, for controlling, and for feedback into scheduling.

The information about staff scheduling, shift plans and adjustments, and work assignments must also reach the employees. And that's not all – self-service apps also allow employees to be involved in the scheduling process, for example, requesting shift schedule changes, vacation requests, and shift swaps.

More flexibility is demanded of employees, who in turn require more flexibility in scheduling. Modern forms of employee engagement increase motivation. Wishes or limited availability of the workforce can often be taken into account in advance. The schedule is thereby more stable and more reliable.

For successful planning and control of working time deployment, intelligent and meaningful reporting is essential. Using KPIs, those responsible must be able to directly measure the influencing variables and deviations from assumptions and target states in order to take timely countermeasures, if necessary. Reporting should be tailored to the context and roles addressed.

Workforce management plays a central role in the company and has interfaces to many other areas and systems. Everyone involved needs to receive the necessary information, prepared accordingly. An error-free, smooth data exchange between all participating systems is absolutely essential.

In many places, the planning and linking of the individual sections of workforce management is still done in Excel, but it is being replaced more and more by powerful software due to increasing complexity and the move towards digitalization. This enables a smooth scheduling process, continuity of planning, and, with peripheral systems, the use of intelligent planning procedures and flexibility, especially when planning a larger number of employees.