Using the Advanced Workforce Planning application

You can use the Advanced Workforce Planning application to plan for changes in the workforce.

The application accepts data such as employee information, assumptions, incentives, and driver data to produce a detailed information about the workforce costs. When the results are finalized, users can export them and use in other Planning Analytics models or applications.

With the Advanced Workforce Planning application, you can plan for active or future employees and specify many data points, such as:
  • Hire date
  • Employee ID
  • Name
  • Job description
  • Pay type (hourly or salary)
  • Merit information (date, month, percentage increase)
  • Bonus information (date, month, percentage increase)
  • Medical plan
  • Incentives the employee is eligible for

You can enter this data manually or use a bulk load process.

Assumptions

Assumptions are taxes and benefit items that are constant for all employees. For example other payroll tax %, computer and software, employee medical costs, seminars, and conferences.

You can enter assumptions as a percent of the salary, a one-time amount, or as a recurring amount. They also include a blanket merit increase % assumption so that you do not have to manually enter it for each employee.

Incentives

Incentives are flexible compensation calculations that rely on other data sources to calculate costs. You can use them to plan for employee costs.

To set up a new incentive, you need to provide the following information: incentive name, driver, frequency, type, and level. The application uses all of these details to calculate the incentive cost.

The drivers define which cube the data is pulled from and you can set them as corporate or employee. You also need to specify whether the incentive frequency is monthly, quarterly or annually. To set the incentive type, you must choose between a percentage or amount. To determine on which level an incentive is calculated, you must select one of the following options: detailed, summary, or regional.

When you set up an incentive, you also need to enter targets for each incentive. Each incentive can have up to three targets amounts to achieve. The target amount can be specified as a percentage or amount.

Drivers

Drivers include the data that defines the incentive cost. There are two types of drivers: corporate and employee.

Corporate drivers hold financial information, such as set income or operating income for management incentives. You usually use corporate drivers together with data from the summary level.

Employee drivers contain data that is specific to an individual employee, for example the sales revenue for the sales force. You can enter this data manually or use a bulk load process.

When the application loads all the data, it shows a complete picture of the workforce cost at different levels.