Corporate planning is essential for success in today’s fast-paced business environment. However, planning often occurs in silos, with various departments pursuing objectives that do not align with or serve the company’s broader goals and strategies.
Silos significantly impact corporate planning by hampering productivity and eroding trust within an organisation. When departments operate in isolation, collaboration becomes difficult, leading to inefficiencies and duplicated efforts. This lack of coordination can result in inconsistent and inaccurate data, further complicating decision-making processes. Additionally, silos create barriers to effective communication and information-sharing, which are essential for aligning departmental goals with the company’s overall strategy.
This no doubt undermines the efficacy of a collaborative organisation. Eliminating silos is pivotal to fostering the right and ideal environment where trust is built, productivity is maximised, and the organisation can achieve its strategic goals efficiently.
Using Technology to Eliminate Silos and Enhance Agility
To avoid being encumbered by silos, companies should focus on ensuring agility by uniting teams across departments and supporting everyone in working towards the same goal. This involves fostering a clear vision and effective communication in a way that enables seamless collaboration between cross-functional teams.
By continuously improving processes and empowering employees to innovate, organisations can build a strong, inclusive culture that promotes trust, teamwork, and resilience to remain competitive in a rapidly changing market. Companies that fail to do so in this competitive environment will risk losing existing and prospective businesses to their competitors. Staying agile allows companies to make strategic decisions and capitalise on opportunities.
While overcoming silos may seem like a particularly daunting task, organisations today can leverage AI to overcome the heavy lifting required to integrate various priorities and capacities across departments.
With the right technology platform, organisations can tap advanced algorithms to analyse vast amounts of data and extract actionable insights. These insights, ranging from customer preferences to market trends, can be shared seamlessly across departments, fostering a deeper understanding and alignment of objectives.
Furthermore, AI-driven automation streamlines processes, freeing teams from manual tasks to concentrate on strategic initiatives. AI’s predictive capabilities empower organisations to foresee challenges and opportunities, facilitating proactive decision-making and agile responses.
Achieving agility and strategic decision-making with Workday Adaptive Planning
Consider a finance leader tasked with enhancing organisational agility. While they understand the numerous external factors affecting their business, it can be highly challenging to strategically manage all these factors while ensuring internal teams are aligned and prepared for the tasks at hand. With AI, finance leaders can analyse vast data sets to detect patterns, predict future outcomes, and improve forecast accuracy. Simultaneously, AI helps optimise internal resources, enhancing overall efficiency.
Workday Adaptive Planning offers organisations real-time insights, agile processes, and an enhanced user experience. Specifically, within the finance department, the platform provides access to real-time financial insights, allowing for flexible modelling of functional planning and easy scenario planning. With a focus on digital agility, multiple spreadsheets are now consolidated with financial data in one report while version control and errors have been largely eliminated, vastly improving overall productivity.
With Workday AI embedded at the core, the platform also improves consolidation processes, strengthens internal controls and auditability, and ensures consistency across financial operations. As a result, finance teams are empowered to make informed decisions swiftly and effectively.
Moreover, Workday Adaptive Planning extends its benefits beyond finance, seamlessly integrating with HR functions to enhance workforce planning, talent management, and strategic decision-making. HR teams can accurately forecast staffing needs and better align resources with business objectives. Enhanced visibility into employee skills and performance data enables them to identify and nurture top talent within the organisation.
How Air Liquide streamlined data access to empower better insights, agility, and decision-making
Air Liquide, an industry leader in gases, technologies, and services with a presence in 72 countries and 67,800 employees globally, was transitioning from outdated legacy systems to overcome challenges related to decentralised HR processes. Across Asia, the company leveraged Workday Adaptive Planning for workforce planning in major cities including Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. This enabled access to real-time insights into workforce capacity and demand, enabling the organisation to become more agile and adaptable to changing needs, particularly in the workplace.
According to Yee Lin Chong, Head of HR Digital Solutions, Centre of Excellence, APAC at Air Liquide, accelerating change in the workplace, intensified by macro trends as well as the evolving nature of work, has made it particularly important for global organisations such as Air Liquide to anticipate and respond to workforce trends so that the company can future-proof its programs and stay relevant in the years ahead.
“Taking our diverse workforce as an example, with a large proportion of frontline workers out in the field and specialised skills needed, the APAC teams are able to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for workforce planning needs. From having a better understanding of workforce composition and geographic distribution backed by the ability to analyse HR, financial, and hiring forecast data from a single source of truth – the Workday platform, we are in a better position to benefit from much more informed, timely and insightful decision-making. In turn, this helps the organisation to better plan for and respond to evolving business demands and effectively prepare for the new future of work,” added Chong.
Today, workforce planning has become an essential capability for organisational flexibility and adaptability. Technology, such as AI-driven solutions, plays a pivotal role in this endeavour. By enabling data analysis, prediction, and automation, processes can be refined for greater departmental collaboration, empowering organisations to navigate complexities and achieve business success.
Find out more about how Workday Adaptive Planning can help boost agility in your organisation today.
Vince Randall is the Vice President, Adaptive Planning (APAC) at Workday.