What is workforce planning required for?

Workforce planning deals with the optimal allocation of employees in the creation of work schedules. It is part of overall business planning and typically located within a company’s HR department.

Workforce planning addresses the question of which employee needs to be where and when. Ideally, it considers each employee’s skills and qualifications, possible vacation or sick leave, as well as general workload and task distribution. The goal is to create a perfectly coordinated personnel strategy that not only ensures smooth operations, but also provides the best possible deployment of all staff.

To achieve this, many companies now rely on professional workforce management systems instead of Excel spreadsheets. Solutions like EPG | WFM offer industry-specific workforce planning for logistics. These systems provide companies with a cross-departmental overview of resources and become indispensable from a certain company size onward. With automated, AI-based solutions, a lot of time can be saved, and transparency increased. Workforce planning systems also prove useful when analyzing historical data. Potential sick leaves can be predicted with a certain probability, employee competency profiles can be stored, and work hour preferences can be considered. Companies that prioritize workforce planning should therefore invest in an appropriate software solution.