General Discussions

I am looking to changing how we do our personnel planning.  I would like to solicit other users experience/advice.  Separate model or in your single model?  How do you use 'Account', 'Employee', 'Measure' dimensions to create your personnel planning.  Thanks.

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David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
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Hey David! We use a separate data model. For Account, we have it pretty in line with what you'd expect in your Budgeting model, but we just included the personnel expense accounts, with a few extra statistical accounts. For Employee, we have everyone listed by their employee ID with their name in the alias so it's easier for us to consume. And for Measure, we have the standard value, but also description fields like job title, hire date, etc.



There is a great Workforce Planning Package and that's what we've used ourselves internally. I'd highly recommend checking that out!

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Olivia MacDonald
Manager, Financial Systems and Operations
PwC
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 11:25
From: David Cornfield
Subject: Personnel planning

I am looking to changing how we do our personnel planning.  I would like to solicit other users experience/advice.  Separate model or in your single model?  How do you use 'Account', 'Employee', 'Measure' dimensions to create your personnel planning.  Thanks.

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------

Thanks Olivia.  Very helpful.  Looks good.  We had looked at the Vena personnel planning template, but ended up doing our own thing.  I would love to hear from other Vena users and if they have similar set ups.

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 01-19-2023 09:31
From: Olivia MacDonald
Subject: Personnel planning

Hey David! We use a separate data model. For Account, we have it pretty in line with what you'd expect in your Budgeting model, but we just included the personnel expense accounts, with a few extra statistical accounts. For Employee, we have everyone listed by their employee ID with their name in the alias so it's easier for us to consume. And for Measure, we have the standard value, but also description fields like job title, hire date, etc.



There is a great Workforce Planning Package and that's what we've used ourselves internally. I'd highly recommend checking that out!

------------------------------
Olivia MacDonald
Manager, Financial Systems and Operations
PwC

Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 11:25
From: David Cornfield
Subject: Personnel planning

I am looking to changing how we do our personnel planning.  I would like to solicit other users experience/advice.  Separate model or in your single model?  How do you use 'Account', 'Employee', 'Measure' dimensions to create your personnel planning.  Thanks.

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------

Hi David, I've seen that many organizations start with a single finance model for the overall budget/forecast, eventually branching out with other models dedicated to specific planning processes such as sales, COGS, or HR. These new models will typically involve new sets of dimensions that aren't relevant to the rest of the general finance model, which I've found is also a good criterion for deciding when a new model is needed.

Regarding model design, I've found identifying specific gaps/enhancements a great way to kickstart design ideas. For example, are we trying to automate away a tedious sales-based bonus calculation, or are we trying to standardize how all our teams calculate benefits, or are we looking for an efficient way to track and forecast a mix of full-time/part-time/contract resources? A well-defined set of goals also guides the build process and ensures each step moves us in the right direction as we build out the dimensions, data sources, data pipelines, templates, and workflows.

Let me know if you have any specific challenges or new capabilities in mind. I'd be happy to share some design ideas on them.

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Qin Chen
Senior Architect
KCM Solutions
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 11:25
From: David Cornfield
Subject: Personnel planning

I am looking to changing how we do our personnel planning.  I would like to solicit other users experience/advice.  Separate model or in your single model?  How do you use 'Account', 'Employee', 'Measure' dimensions to create your personnel planning.  Thanks.

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------

hi David,

We (like you, a non-profit) do have a separate Staffing Model. The only additional dimension in that is Employee, which enables us to budget at employee level (for around 1000 staff). We actually do this at a 'job code' level, i.e. for every role, rather than for specific named individuals, although where individuals are in post, we separately associate them with the job code. This supports us in budgeting for unfilled roles.

There are also lots of account code members in our Account dimension in that model (FTE, First name, last name, salary, allowance info etc etc), that are input against for each employee.
We do also have a couple of members of the Measure dimension ('value' and 'adjustment value' which roll up into 'Total Value') as a way to manage some of the aspects of staff planning.

The two models are setup sufficiently well so that there's lots of automation between them & little ongoing work required..

We also as part of this setup have a bespoke piece which enables us to do our recharges across all of our programmes/projects.
There's more to it than I can reasonably write down fast - happy to discuss further if useful.

Josh

------------------------------
Josh Weinberg
Head of Financial Systems & Change
Citizens Advice
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 11:25
From: David Cornfield
Subject: Personnel planning

I am looking to changing how we do our personnel planning.  I would like to solicit other users experience/advice.  Separate model or in your single model?  How do you use 'Account', 'Employee', 'Measure' dimensions to create your personnel planning.  Thanks.

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------

@Josh Weinberg I know I'm very late to this thread, but I'd be very interested in seeing how you budget at a Job Code level rather specific employees. This is something we've been talking about internally a bit, but don't really know where to start. Conceptually, I think our biggest hang up is that we have employees who have to be allocated across multiple Grant codes and I think the worry with pursuing a Job Code rather than Employee Code is that it might be harder to ensure that an actual employee is allocated 100%.

I'm thinking of something like what I've drafted below where you'd plan by Position/Job title/code and then you'd plan units and need a mechanism to ensure each position added up to 100% (or some factor thereof), but I'm struggling to think through how I could then assign actual employees to these positions, consider turnover/transfers across a period of time, and ultimately get the information formatted in a way to into our accounting system's monthly payroll reconciliation and splitting of actual employees allocation which are sometimes dependent on the amount of actual effort tracked through timesheets. Sorry, throwing a number of challenges out in that sentence, but these ideas all feel so related.

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Brendan Eger
Assoc. Dir. of Information Systems and Analytics
Partners In Health
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 01-23-2023 07:43
From: Josh Weinberg
Subject: Personnel planning

hi David,

We (like you, a non-profit) do have a separate Staffing Model. The only additional dimension in that is Employee, which enables us to budget at employee level (for around 1000 staff). We actually do this at a 'job code' level, i.e. for every role, rather than for specific named individuals, although where individuals are in post, we separately associate them with the job code. This supports us in budgeting for unfilled roles.

There are also lots of account code members in our Account dimension in that model (FTE, First name, last name, salary, allowance info etc etc), that are input against for each employee.
We do also have a couple of members of the Measure dimension ('value' and 'adjustment value' which roll up into 'Total Value') as a way to manage some of the aspects of staff planning.

The two models are setup sufficiently well so that there's lots of automation between them & little ongoing work required..

We also as part of this setup have a bespoke piece which enables us to do our recharges across all of our programmes/projects.
There's more to it than I can reasonably write down fast - happy to discuss further if useful.

Josh

------------------------------
Josh Weinberg
Head of Financial Systems & Change
Citizens Advice

Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 11:25
From: David Cornfield
Subject: Personnel planning

I am looking to changing how we do our personnel planning.  I would like to solicit other users experience/advice.  Separate model or in your single model?  How do you use 'Account', 'Employee', 'Measure' dimensions to create your personnel planning.  Thanks.

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------

hi @Brendan Eger not sure I can distill what we do meaningfully to a post - but more than happy to talk through what we do (time zone permitting). Ultimately we have a couple of different staffing planning spreadsheets that ensure each job code is allocated 100% - essentially there is a home 'project' where their costs go by default, and then costs get taken out to to any places they are recharged to.

This is mirrored in the payroll workings - and probably slightly duplicated. I'm glad we don't have timesheets! There's significant monthly Finance Business Partner effort that goes into the processes.

------------------------------
Josh Weinberg
Head of Financial Systems & Change
Citizens Advice
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 09-25-2023 16:52
From: Brendan Eger
Subject: Personnel planning

@Josh Weinberg I know I'm very late to this thread, but I'd be very interested in seeing how you budget at a Job Code level rather specific employees. This is something we've been talking about internally a bit, but don't really know where to start. Conceptually, I think our biggest hang up is that we have employees who have to be allocated across multiple Grant codes and I think the worry with pursuing a Job Code rather than Employee Code is that it might be harder to ensure that an actual employee is allocated 100%.

I'm thinking of something like what I've drafted below where you'd plan by Position/Job title/code and then you'd plan units and need a mechanism to ensure each position added up to 100% (or some factor thereof), but I'm struggling to think through how I could then assign actual employees to these positions, consider turnover/transfers across a period of time, and ultimately get the information formatted in a way to into our accounting system's monthly payroll reconciliation and splitting of actual employees allocation which are sometimes dependent on the amount of actual effort tracked through timesheets. Sorry, throwing a number of challenges out in that sentence, but these ideas all feel so related.

------------------------------
Brendan Eger
Assoc. Dir. of Information Systems and Analytics
Partners In Health

Original Message:
Sent: 01-23-2023 07:43
From: Josh Weinberg
Subject: Personnel planning

hi David,

We (like you, a non-profit) do have a separate Staffing Model. The only additional dimension in that is Employee, which enables us to budget at employee level (for around 1000 staff). We actually do this at a 'job code' level, i.e. for every role, rather than for specific named individuals, although where individuals are in post, we separately associate them with the job code. This supports us in budgeting for unfilled roles.

There are also lots of account code members in our Account dimension in that model (FTE, First name, last name, salary, allowance info etc etc), that are input against for each employee.
We do also have a couple of members of the Measure dimension ('value' and 'adjustment value' which roll up into 'Total Value') as a way to manage some of the aspects of staff planning.

The two models are setup sufficiently well so that there's lots of automation between them & little ongoing work required..

We also as part of this setup have a bespoke piece which enables us to do our recharges across all of our programmes/projects.
There's more to it than I can reasonably write down fast - happy to discuss further if useful.

Josh

------------------------------
Josh Weinberg
Head of Financial Systems & Change
Citizens Advice

Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 11:25
From: David Cornfield
Subject: Personnel planning

I am looking to changing how we do our personnel planning.  I would like to solicit other users experience/advice.  Separate model or in your single model?  How do you use 'Account', 'Employee', 'Measure' dimensions to create your personnel planning.  Thanks.

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------

It is interesting to see that some people use 'account' for employee details, whereas others use 'measure'.  I guess that is a design choice and important to stick with one or the other.

A couple more questions - do people associate employees with a year or 'no year'?  How do you sort past, present, vacancies, and potential/future planned employees?  Do you group them within the 'employee' dimension, use a 'status' marker [active, inactive, vacant, etc], or  some other method?

Josh, when you say automation between separate models, what do you mean by that?  For example, changes in departments.  With a separate model would you have to duplicate the change in each model or is there a way to automatically update one model from the other? ​​

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 11:25
From: David Cornfield
Subject: Personnel planning

I am looking to changing how we do our personnel planning.  I would like to solicit other users experience/advice.  Separate model or in your single model?  How do you use 'Account', 'Employee', 'Measure' dimensions to create your personnel planning.  Thanks.

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------

Hi all - we use the out-of-the-box Vena Foundation Model Workforce.  It's a bit too complex for our needs and very slow, but the more I dive in to understand it I think the resolution is a few 'simple' templates for the average user.  I would then keep the out-of-box complex template for the modelers only.

We have an additional dimension for employees with the employee id as the member and name as the alias.  This has caused problems though as our HR will re-hire temps under the same ID and the current workflow does not handle that well.

I'm working to turn on more features like allocation and transfer.

The employees are loaded to the various scenarios and have a separate process variable HRIS load period to monitor historical counts for FTE, HC, etc.

Lastly, there is an ETL job that does a cube-to-cube transformation and adds the necessary data to a measure in the Finance model called 'Workforce_Value'.

I can share more as I dissect and re-model to fit our needs.

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Jessica Parker
FP&A
Orthodontic Partners
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 01-18-2023 11:25
From: David Cornfield
Subject: Personnel planning

I am looking to changing how we do our personnel planning.  I would like to solicit other users experience/advice.  Separate model or in your single model?  How do you use 'Account', 'Employee', 'Measure' dimensions to create your personnel planning.  Thanks.

------------------------------
David Cornfield
SVP, Finance
WWF-Canada
------------------------------