In the media

This award is for technology that had a significant and measurable impact on HR/business success and ROI for a client.

Through creative ways of analysing internal and/or external data, the winner will have demonstrated repeated success in one or more areas of HR.

Workforce decisions are one of the most difficult management tasks. Farsighted planning, which ensures the right employee portfolio for the implementation of the corporate strategy, has not only been necessary since the discussion about selective shortages of skilled workers and in connection with demographic change.

Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and uncertainty (“VUCA world”) are persistent characteristics of today’s corporate world. This increases the challenges for HR work. With strategic workforce planning as bandwidth planning, guidelines for long-term – qualitative and quantitative – development of the workforce are set to ensure the strategic goals.

The article deals with the use of simulation tools to support strategic workforce planning. For this purpose, the challenges of strategic workforce planning in the recording and consideration of complex human resource relationships are first worked out. In particular, the importance of strategic workforce planning in the context of proactive demographic management is also discussed. Practical recommendations for the creation and use of simulation models in strategic workforce planning are also given, and concrete application examples are supplemented with the Dynaplan Smia simulation tool.

Business planning games already belong to the set of proven learning environments. However, the question how to operationalize the learnings from the planning simulation in the real-world business situation, often remains unanswered. It is certainly an option to process the outputs from the planning game in different ways. Still, bridging the simulated game plan and the actual business plan together, can require substantial effort along a vaguely defined process, leading up to an end-result with unclear validity. This is where situation-specific management games can make a great contribution. The idea is that the simulation model within the planning game reflects the concrete challenges and opportunities faced by the players in their own work. It can be challenges relating to volatility in commodity prices and exchange rates, or it can be risks and possibilities relating to an aging workforce, all of which can be studied based on scenarios fed with real business data. In addition to the immediate learnings gained from experiencing alternative futures within the simulated environment, a close connection between the simulated business and the real business generates immediate additional value in the form of concrete decision support.

By delivering various combinations of domain expertise and higher levels of automation, this year's vendors improve the analytic accuracy, adoption and productivity of organizations. Our analysis shows IT leaders what these vendors can offer their organizations.

Dynaplan at Radøy is a small company, but their customer list includes are among others Haukeland University Hospital, BMW, Bayer and Deutsche Bank.

From the main office at the attic on Helland, Dynaplan serves several large international companies. - It’s a really crazy story, smiles Magne Myrtveit, Yngve Mellingen and Frank Kolden. The small Radøy company has developed a unique technology for, among other things, workforce planning in large companies.

The megatrend “Demographic Change” presents companies with a wide range of challenges: How can we continue to attract and retain enough skilled workers in the future? How do you create human-friendly jobs and corporate cultures that enable healthy aging at work? How do you secure the knowledge of the service providers before they leave the company? How do you weld old and young as well as people of different nationalities into successful teams? In times of demographic change, strategic workforce planning has to master a conflict of goals: On the one hand, companies must remain flexible in order to be able to react quickly to changing market conditions. On the other hand, they have to start developing and securing human resources for the future. The experiences and solutions from business practice compiled in this first ddn specialist book result without exception from the multi-year, committed work of the ddn working group “Strategic Workforce Planning” under the direction of Dr. Kai Berendes.

The “Managing Demograhics” study was developed as part of the FOKUS 50plus project initiated by APRIORI – business solutions AG. It explains how a company is currently responding to demographic developments and what measures are being taken to bring about the upcoming changes.