In today’s fast-evolving business environment, organizations must anticipate workforce needs proactively to maintain agility, control costs, and drive growth. Strategic workforce planning (SWP) enables companies to align their workforce capabilities with business goals, ensuring the right talent is available at the right time. SAP Fieldglass, with its powerful analytics capabilities, provides a robust platform to manage strategic workforce planning effectively, particularly for contingent labor and services.
Strategic workforce planning is the continuous process of analyzing, forecasting, and planning workforce requirements to meet an organization’s long-term objectives. It involves assessing current workforce capabilities, predicting future needs, identifying skill gaps, and making informed decisions on hiring, development, and sourcing.
For companies relying heavily on external workforce and services, SWP becomes more complex but also more critical. Managing contingent workers, service providers, and multi-tier suppliers requires deep insights and predictive analytics to optimize resource allocation and costs.
SAP Fieldglass aggregates extensive data across the entire external workforce ecosystem — including contingent labor, services procurement, and supplier performance. Its analytics capabilities transform this data into actionable insights that empower strategic workforce planning:
Fieldglass provides real-time visibility into the composition, cost, and utilization of the extended workforce. Key data points include worker demographics, skills, tenure, assignment durations, and supplier engagement. This comprehensive view helps workforce planners understand current resource availability and usage patterns.
Cost management is a cornerstone of SWP. Fieldglass analytics track spend by worker type, job category, supplier, location, and project. These insights enable organizations to identify cost drivers, optimize supplier mix, and forecast future budget needs with greater accuracy.
By analyzing historical workforce data, Fieldglass can identify seasonal trends, skill demand shifts, and project lifecycle patterns. This predictive capability allows organizations to anticipate hiring surges or reductions, align sourcing strategies, and reduce downtime or bottlenecks.
Fieldglass captures supplier performance data, including delivery timelines, quality ratings, compliance adherence, and cost effectiveness. Integrating these metrics into workforce planning supports strategic decisions about which suppliers to engage for future needs, balancing cost and quality.
Using detailed profiles of contingent workers and services, Fieldglass helps identify skill shortages or redundancies. Workforce planners can then develop targeted sourcing or training plans to fill gaps, ensuring the workforce has the necessary capabilities.
Advanced analytics in Fieldglass support scenario planning, enabling organizations to model the impact of various workforce strategies — such as increasing contractor headcount, shifting supplier allocations, or adjusting contract terms — before implementation.
Managing strategic workforce planning in today’s dynamic environment requires data-driven insights and agile decision-making. SAP Fieldglass Analytics offers the tools and capabilities to provide deep visibility, predictive insights, and performance metrics essential for effective SWP — especially in organizations reliant on contingent labor and service procurement. By leveraging Fieldglass analytics, companies can optimize workforce costs, close skill gaps, and align external workforce strategies with their long-term business objectives, ultimately gaining a competitive edge.