The last year showed us just how important agility is to the survival and the success of a business. Overnight, organizations were forced to remotely redeploy and retrain significant portions of their workforce in order to continue operations during the pandemic.
In these constantly changing circumstances, leaders need to rely on more than gut instinct or intuition. They need to be able to forecast the impact of their business decisions and have real-time insights across the enterprise that they can trust to make fast, informed decisions that allow both their business and their people to thrive.
Business leaders make thousands of decisions, from setting top-level strategy to organizational changes to recruiting decisions, and each of these decisions has a direct impact on their workforce. Given the scale of workforce disruption that enterprises faced last year — and will continue to face as workplaces evolve — we are pleased to introduce new capabilities that integrate people data from SAP SuccessFactors software into SAP Analytics Cloud.
With the vast amount of data available across the enterprise, the challenge businesses face is making sense of the various data sources to derive actionable and trusted insights. As part of SAP’s vision to embed planning capabilities across our solutions and power real-time, insight-driven planning and analysis, the new operational workforce planning and analytics capability delivers pre-built content to integrate and visualize data from SAP SuccessFactors solutions and SAP S/4HANA via SAP Analytics Cloud. Announced today at SAPPHIRE NOW, the new capability is expected to be available in the third quarter of 2021.
By combining people, financial, and operational data in one place so that leaders can discover, visualize, plan, predict, and ultimately make unbiased and data-driven decisions, the new capability allows leaders to:
- Combine finance data and predictive forecasts to explore areas of high sales and adjust hiring accordingly
- Align employee skills with the needs of the business by assessing growth opportunities based on pipeline and market opportunities
- Combine experience data with performance and trends to glean insights into projected levels of employee attrition and simulate the business impact
With this capability, leaders can better understand what makes employees thrive, spot risks, and create a workforce strategy that is reflective of employee needs and supports ongoing business transformation.
The need to put people first has never been more important. Embracing a data-driven approach will help businesses as they face multifaceted challenges, such as hiring, reskilling and retaining talent, improving diversity, equity and inclusion, and driving cultural change to support ongoing transformation.
Employees have to be at the center of every business decision because people are what drives innovation, creativity, and the success of the business. With advanced and comprehensive workforce planning and analytics, organizations can improve their agility and adaptability while delivering the human-centric experiences needed for sustainable long-term success.
Learn more about the operational workforce planning and analytics capability from SAP in the following sessions at SAPPHIRE NOW:
Irfan Khan is president of SAP HANA Database and Analytics at SAP.
Jill Popelka is president of SAP SuccessFactors.