Executive Summary

Workforce Planning

Planning software aims to refine and expedite the budgeting process, boosting the productivity of the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) group, while also enabling executives to set objectives and allocate resources in alignment with an enterprise’s strategy.

In most enterprises, headcount is the one of the top three costs, often the largest, so it is essential to plan and budget for it accurately. Workforce planning software, an integral part of enterprise planning and budgeting, enables FP&A, business unit managers and HR departments to improve their planning processes. The right software can reduce the time managers spend projecting headcount costs, improve accuracy, and give HR departments greater visibility into future hiring needs.

To increase the value of time spent on planning and budgeting, FP&A organizations need to model and measure the resources budget owners use to achieve their business objectives, rather than just assessing their monetary value. When budget owners plan and budget, they typically think in terms of the resources needed to run their part of the business, such as headcount, advertising campaigns, facilities, laptops and other items. The budgeting system must be able to translate this list of resources into accounting line items simultaneously, allowing the system to aggregate the financial data into a company-wide budget and financial forecast.

Starting with a list of resources simplifies the process for budget owners. It is a user-friendly approach that allows them to think about their business in terms of the resources they need. This method enables budget owners to quickly and accurately translate their list into a financial budget to address the needs of the finance department. Although it is a simple idea, making it feasible requires the right technology.

Headcount is a good example of how this works. For instance, a department head plans to keep their existing personnel but adds a couple more during the year to meet the growth plan outlined by the senior leadership team. Rather than searching for the right number, the department head builds a headcount plan from the list of existing employees. The budget owner connects this list to the related cost data, such as salaries and benefit costs, and then adds two other hires in generic roles. Pay and benefit data supplied by human resources instantly transforms that headcount plan into a headcount budget.

Taking this approach to headcount planning, when it comes time to negotiate the department’s budget, the discussion is not just about abstract numbers in a spreadsheet. It is about whether the department needs to add people to handle the increased workload, if it can manage without adding one of those positions, or if it could wait until late in the year to add that individual. At that point in time, in evaluating the performance of that business unit manager, if they were allocated budget to add a resource that they never hired, they should have to explain why, since that resource might have been used productively elsewhere.

Workforce planning takes headcount planning a step further by making the process more detailed and aligned with business strategy. The objective is to improve planning accuracy while increasing its value as a business tool. ISG Research defines workforce planning as including the modeling of hiring, transfers, and retention, and skills capacity by location, ramp time and workforce costs. When integrated with overall business planning, workforce planning enables more accurate forecasts of headcount needs and adapts easily to rapid scenario planning, providing managers and HR professionals greater agility. Embedded dashboards and reports in the software provide performance insights and ensure that future workforce composition aligns with strategy and objectives.

The requirements for effective workforce planning have multiplied in the past decade. ISG Research asserts that by 2026, one-third of enterprises utilizing compensation planning tools will require them to support complex (salary increase and bonus) budget allocation modeling scenarios, rules and guidelines, by both P&L and talent segments.

Planning the resources needed to achieve business objectives alongside the required budget increases the business value of the process and shifts the discussion between executives and budget owners away from abstract financial numbers and toward the resources needed to achieve their objectives. This approach distinguishes between the elements the budget owner can control and those they cannot. For example, displaying resource requirements in the budget alongside costs focuses discussions on business issues, not just spending caps. Questions arise, such as the rationale behind cutting the department’s budget or whether it is requesting too many people relative to the work that needs to be done. Workforce planning software can facilitate that discussion by providing readily available facts and performance data.

Enterprises that want to make workforce planning an integral part of their financial budgeting process will find that they need dedicated software to handle the complexities associated with this strategy. Using spreadsheets to manage workforce planning is ineffective and can be problematic when trying to achieve optimal outcomes. Spreadsheets are two-dimensional constructs, while planning, analyzing and reporting an enterprise’s workforce is all inherently multidimensional. These dimensions include geographies, employment status and currencies, among others. Spreadsheets are not well equipped to manage the data needed to plan the complexities of today’s workforce, comply with related laws and regulations or measure performance toward goals and targets. They typically produce scattered and inconsistent information, which serves as a major impediment to enterprise-wide planning. Spreadsheets also cannot scale well enough to support an enterprise as it grows.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Revenue Planning evaluates products based on how well the software facilitates the creation and updating of headcount forecasts, models the employee lifecycle, supports hiring and retention plans, aligns skills with requirements and promotes agility through scenario planning. It includes embedded workforce analytics that improve performance and assesses the depth and breadth of specific embedded AI to improve the timeliness and accuracy of headcount planning. In addition, the guide assesses support for executives, participants and administrators, advanced planning techniques, reporting and dashboards, as well as the impact of investments made by the provider in this area.

To focus on the specific needs of workforce planners, this buyers guide excludes our evaluation of the providers’ capabilities for integrated business planning, other departmental and functional planning and enterprise budgeting. The applications evaluated in this workforce planning buyers guide are those that broadly facilitate business planning. We therefore do not include software providers that do not have support for financial planning and, thus, did not consider providers that focus mainly or exclusively on workforce planning.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of workforce planning as we define it: Anaplan, Board, IBM, Jedox, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Vena Solutions, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Workforce Planning is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for workforce planning software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for workforce planning to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of workforce planning technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of workforce planning software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating workforce planning systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds OneStream atop the list, followed by Oracle and Anaplan. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. OneStream has done so in six categories, Anaplan and Oracle in five, IBM and SAP in two and Board in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Anaplan, Board, IBM, OneStream and Oracle.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: SAP and Workday.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Prophix and Vena Solutions.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Wolters Kluwer, Jedox, Pigment and Planful.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle workforce planning, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (15%), Capability (25%), Reliability (15%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan were designated Product Experience Leaders.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Anaplan, OneStream and Board. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for Workforce Planning in 2024, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the past 12 months.

The software must have the ability to support workforce planning, including support for headcount, compensation, hiring, staffing scenarios, skills and forms of workforce-specific planning, embedded analytics, embedded AI, reporting and dashboards, and advanced planning techniques. The product must also support executives, participants and administration.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant workforce planning products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”