Businesses of all sizes know how important it is to align their workforce plan with their labor budget.

Strategic workforce planning involves analyzing current and future needs to achieve business objectives—and sustain competitive advantage. Once you have that information, you can create a realistic labor budget considering all that data.

But the planning process doesn’t come without its challenges. Fluctuating market demands and evolving skill requirements make it difficult to find the right balance, and traditional workforce management approaches often fall short.

Sophisticated technology like Legion Workforce Management software (WFM) provides the tools and capabilities modern businesses need.

Key Summary

• Strategic workforce planning and labor budgeting are imperative for large enterprises seeking to thrive in today’s business environment.
• Legion WFM empowers organizations to overcome challenges, drive collaboration, and optimize resource allocation effectively.
• With Legion Labor Budgeting, you can leverage ML-powered forecast and operation labor models to create labor budgets up to 18 months out

Legion WFM for Strategic Workforce Planning

Businesses that focus on strategic workforce planning can better adapt to changing market dynamics, seize opportunities, and mitigate risks.

From planning stages to execution, Legion WFM software guides businesses of all sizes through all parts of workforce management.

However, large enterprises, in particular, often have more needs than smaller businesses due to their scale, diverse workforce, and multiple locations. Legion WFM offers solutions that help manage labor budgeting, demand forecasting, and collaborative planning.

Labor Budgeting and Forecasting

Labor budgeting involves creating precise plans for labor usage over a specific period, typically months or quarters. It serves as a blueprint to guide businesses in resource allocation and cost management.

That’s where Legion Labor Budgeting comes into play. Businesses can input detailed labor models, define scheduling rules, and leverage accurate demand forecasts to create labor budgets.

Pair those capabilities with Legion Demand Forecasting, which analyzes historical data, market trends, and business objectives to predict future workforce needs.

You can easily align labor budgets with demand forecasts to optimize staffing levels and ensure you have the right number of employees at any given time.

Moreover, Legion WFM enables businesses to enforce labor budgets directly within the Automated Scheduling module, so financial goals remain aligned with operational execution.

Long-Range Budget Planning

With Legion Labor Budgeting, businesses can create long-range labor budgets and track execution for annual labor budget planning and ongoing monthly and quarterly forecasting.

Budget planners can create and view labor budgets centrally at HQ or from the bottom-up at the field level. For example, you can enable districts to enter their operating hours, and generate, and submit their budget scenarios. Budget plan durations can be specified as a maximum 12-month planning period and up to 18 months in the future.

Collaborative Planning and Decision-Making

Legion WFM’s unified platform allows stakeholders to access real-time data, share insights, and collaborate on important decisions.

Incorporating stakeholders from different levels and departments when making decisions aligns with corporate strategy and operations.

This bottom-up or top-down collaboration empowers frontline staff by listening to their input and allowing them to contribute.

Staffing Models and Labor Models

Legion WFM also helps integrate your staffing and labor models.

The staffing model outlines the overall workforce strategy: that means knowing how many employees (and what types) you’ll need to meet your goals. It’s a high-level view of workforce composition and deployment.

On the other hand, the labor model looks at the specifics of scheduling each employee based on availability, skills, and workload. It’s how you create actionable plans for day-to-day operations.

By marrying these two models, organizations can be sure that their workforce planning decisions are grounded in reality and tailored to each location’s specific needs.

Scenario Planning and What-If Analysis

Labor Budgeting also facilitates scenario planning and what-if analysis, allowing businesses to evaluate different workforce scenarios and their impact on key performance metrics.

Labor Budgeting makes it easy to perform short-term and long-term labor planning to help you identify profit-optimized ‘best bet’ labor decisions that balance costs and revenue impacts. You can model what-if scenarios by explicitly adjusting the inputs, such as sales, traffic, channel mix, and location variables, and directly modifying the total budget hours. Whether opening new channels, expanding offerings, or adjusting staffing levels during peak seasons, Legion WFM helps businesses make informed decisions.

Optimizing Resource Allocation

Legion Workforce Management Software (WFM) optimizes resource allocation by aligning staffing levels with demand.

Labor Optimization empowers you to anticipate workload fluctuations so you always deploy the right number of employees, minimizing understaffing and overstaffing scenarios.

Legion WFM can even spot opportunities for further optimization and suggest flexible scheduling options based on your organization’s needs. Whether you want to implement part-time shifts, variable hours, or remote work arrangements, you can shift your strategy as things change.

You can even integrate contingent workforce strategies, making it easy to leverage temporary or seasonal employees as needed.

When you pair the abilities of Labor Optimization with Labor Budgeting, you see how it’s possible to deliver optimal service levels while reducing labor costs simultaneously.

Unlocking the Benefits of Strategic Workforce Planning with Legion WFM

Workforce planning and budgeting with Legion WFM do much more than improve efficiency. You’ll experience cost savings, enhanced collaboration, employee engagement, and better adaptability as a business.

As organizations continue to navigate workforce management, Legion WFM remains a trusted partner. We’ll help you achieve your objectives and maximize the value of your business.

Schedule a demo to see how our products combine to create a streamlined workforce management experience.