Two prominent and respected thought leaders in the field of human resources have written about workforce planning in the last several weeks. John Sullivan in ERE and John Sumser in the ERN.
In other words, workforce planning is hot.
And it's about to become a pretty good business for suppliers offering workforce planning solutions. But surprisingly, there are not that many at the moment - at least ones who's primary business focus is workforce planning.
One such company is Aruspex who likes to distinguish between workforce planning and strategic workforce planning. For a lot of us, including me before I was properly educated on the subject, workforce planning meant predicting headcount needs - wrong. Anyway, if you have not heard of Aruspex, you will - they hail from Australia and have a very interesting software product called CAPTure. I also found their recent research report titled "The Gap Between Needing and Doing: A Survey on Why Some Companies Don’t Act on Strategic Workforce Planning Needs, and How Successful Companies Do" interesting.
Some other suppliers of note in the workforce planning space include WisdomNet (recently acquired by Watson Wyatt), The Newman Group and Infohrm. All have useful white papers and webcasts on the subject of workforce planning.
It is too early to predict who will emerge as the leader in this field but in this blogger's opinion, it's also irrelevant - considering the potential demand for workforce planning services and the few suppliers in the marketplace, these early entrants will have no trouble closing business.
Posted by Mark WillamanLabels: supplier outlook, workforce planning