Real-time personnel planning at the Greenery

Complex workforce planning

Distribution center staff scheduling is complex. "We are open 24/7; not only for inbound and outbound, but also for packing fruits and vegetables," Erwin in 't Veld of The Greenery says of the reason for implementing Anaplan as a workforce scheduling solution. The international company has 1,400 employees.

Predicting scaling staff

The Greenery, together with many growers and suppliers, supplies a daily fresh assortment of vegetables, fruits and mushrooms to European retailers. The company operates in 60 countries and is owned by the Coforta cooperative, which unites more than 500 growers.

"The axing of people is especially difficult to predict," Erwin continues. "Think of questions like 'do we have enough staff,' 'do we need to keep people working longer,' 'do we need to request additional manpower from the temp agency.' "

"For that, you have to pull together a lot of information, for which Excel is ultimately too limited."

When Erwin comes into contact with Anaplan, it seems to him an interesting solution for workforce planning. A Proof of Concept (PoC) together with Finext confirms this: "Especially the real-time insight into the required capacity appealed to me. The PoC went very positively; not only because we could see what Anaplan can do for us, but also because of the click with Finext's consultants. The collaboration went very well for us."

Besides real-time insight, the user-friendliness of Anaplan is another important factor. "Anaplan is very suitable for a co-build or coaching model, where people from the organization do a lot themselves and are therefore able to maintain the solution independently," says Willem van Os, closely involved in the PoC and implementation of Anaplan as a Finext consultant.

This is a big motivation for Erwin: "I'm a big believer in bringing these kinds of competencies within your team. Then you can get more out of the data. It also allows you to be data-driven without being stuck in systems or having to set up procedures with IT or finance. You can get started yourself and see the results immediately."

Real-time staff scheduling per day and per week

The implementation begins with setting up two different types of schedules: a staff scheduling per day and a forecast per week. Erwin: "Before we made the investment in the new solution, we wanted to know how quickly we could recoup the licenses. To do that, we drew up a list of 13 business cases."

The first business case focuses on scheduling workloads throughout the day. "With planning by day, we can make immediate adjustments to the amount of people needed. It gives insight into how we are doing today, and whether we need to take action to get through today and tomorrow."

The second business case revolves around a forecast report on the amount of work each week. "With the week-by-week forecast, we can properly predict the coming week's workload," says Erwin. "We don't want to have too few people, but we certainly don't want to be stuck with too many either."

Saving on personnel costs

Planning in such detail sounds fairly exceptional, but is necessary for companies where staffing requirements vary by the day or even by the hour. "We work with fresh products that can suddenly be in very high demand and whose quality can deteriorate in a short period of time," Erwin explains. "Speed and flexibility are therefore key in our business."

Erwin is positive about the results of the planning solution: "We have better insight for our warehouse into what is coming up. Now that we can see this in real time, we can shift our workforce better. With this tighter and better planning, we can realize savings by setting up just enough manpower."

The new schedules not only provide more insight; they are also a lot easier to create.

"We save time on building reports and schedules, allowing us to plan much more frequently."

Import or create grids in Anaplan

During the implementation of the first two plans, the next business cases on the list have already been taken into account. For example, a conscious decision was made to establish more data connections with the source system at this time.

Another deliberate choice is to create rosters in Anaplan itself. "The alternative is to create staff schedules in Excel and then import them into Anaplan," explains Willem. "Scheduling directly in Anaplan requires a changeover from the users, but at the same time it saves them a lot of time. Also, the roster then provides direct input for other calculations in Anaplan, making it the single source of truth."

"Digital and agile are great terms to mention and are on many companies' wish lists, but the big question is how to do that."

Data-driven and agile

The implementation of the platform is in line with The Greenery's strategy. "We would like to become more digital and more agile. This step fits in well with that," says Erwin.

Yet the desire for the workforce planning solution arose bottom-up: "Digital and agile are great terms to mention and are on many companies' wish lists, but the big question is how to do it," Erwin says. The challenges around agile Workforce Planning are certainly there. "From the supply chain perspective, we started this project bottom-up; obviously it aligns with strategy and contributes to agility. Moreover, we are becoming more data-driven. We hope that Anaplan will now spread like an oil slick and that other departments will start using it as well."

"I had high expectations beforehand, but they have definitely been met," he said.

Linking with the grids

In addition to the current list of 13 points, Erwin is already thinking about additional steps. "A logical next step is to create a link between the HR system and the rosters. That future connection is already in place. Such a link is certainly not a replacement for the HR system, in which people clock in and out, but it does give opportunities to match schedules with vacations."

More ideas are likely to follow from the follow-up steps to utilize Anaplan more broadly within the company. "I had high expectations beforehand, but they have certainly been met," concludes Erwin.