Workforce Management - Definition

Definition

In many markets and industries, workforce management is all about assigning the right employees with the right skills to the right job at the right time. The term is differentiated from traditional staff scheduling because staff scheduling is rooted to time management and simply manages the administration of past and future working times.

This traditional approach has since evolved into the more integrated, demand-oriented workforce management, which includes changes in personnel requirements and objectives when optimising the scheduling of staff. Besides the two core aspects of demand-orientation and optimisation, workforce management may also incorporate:

• forecasting of workload and required staff
• integration of employees into the scheduling process
• management of working times and accounts
• analysis and monitoring of the entire process.

The market for workforce management (WFM) is still quite young. In the eighties and nineties, entrepreneurs mainly focused on topics such as SCM (Supply Chain Management) or PPS (production planning systems) and, in recent years, on ERP (enterprise resource planning). As cost pressures have increased, managers have increasingly turned their attention towards HR issues. In all personnel-intensive industries, workforce management has become an important strategic element in corporate management.