The days might be feeling shorter and the forecast might be looking gloomy—but cheer up, it’s labor planning season!
For many of us, labor budgeting means spending days and weeks manually pulling together and collating data from across our organizations. That leaves little time for analysis to support key decision-making. It also often means staying up late or waking up early. All that just to try to make sense of it all before your 9am meeting with leadership. As if the gloomy weather wasn’t enough.
But there’s good news! Axsium has just introduced a significant new Planara update. Planara, Axsium’s labor planning and analytics platform, is now even more integrated, more automated, and better poised to accelerate your labor planning process. The full list of enhancements is available in our news article on the update. But let’s take a quick look at some of the most exciting features.
More Integrations
Last year, we integrated Planara with UKG Pro Workforce Management. The series of eight API-based imports spanned effective-dated business structure and volume/labor metrics. This year, we’ve closed the labor planning data loop for Planara’s users with four new export integrations:
- Labor hours plans
- Labor cost plans
- Volume driver plans
- Custom driver plans
These new integrations do even more to support our customers’ desire for single-source-of-truth configurations and data. They also greatly accelerate the process of preparing and publishing your labor budgets. And that provides users with far more room to analyze results in Planara’s embedded PowerBI reports and deliver more proactive, value-added insights.
More Automations
Planara’s capacity to push and pull data from other systems is unmatched. But that’s only one dimension of how it can accelerate your planning process. We have continued to expand Planara’s ability to schedule key functions to occur or recur automatically.
For instance, our new integrations further enhance importing key planning metrics. It doesn’t matter whether these metrics come from your WFM system at a very granular level or from a Finance business partner in the form of full-year or quarterly KPI targets. Planara can automatically source detailed metrics for bottom-up planning, allocate high-level metrics for top-down planning—and everything in between.
Beyond data loads, Planara users can also schedule when to run planning scenarios and refresh PowerBI results. For example, you can automate the preparation of the prior week’s actual/earned results and the current week’s forecast simultaneously. Planara isn’t just a hub for iterative labor budgeting—it allows you to manage in the moment with just-in-time performance reporting and analysis.
More Labor Planning Analysis
Planara’s new integrations complete the labor planning cycle for UKG Pro Workforce Management users and its many automations mean less frustrating rote work. But for me, the most important thing about Planara is its capacity to compare results along all the important cross-sections of your business.
When time is limited, it’s tempting to bury all your updates in a single iteration of your budget. But this makes it hard to effectively trace the impact of each competing or cooperating adjustment. Planara supports all the adjustments you need in one scenario. It also lets you iteratively add them across different versions so you can easily spot the impact of each change.
For example, one scenario might include adjustments to top-down KPIs, the next might account for key labor model updates, and the next might contain wage rates changes. Planara is the place for managing and comparing budget iterations. But this functionality is not just restricted to budgeting season. Whether it’s monthly forecasts, quarterly planning updates, or ad hoc what-if scenario analysis, Planara is the gift that keeps on iterating—all year round!
Modernize Your Labor Planning with Planara
The nights are getting darker and the weather is growing colder. Don’t get weighed down with the same old labor budgeting process.
Let Planara do the heavy lifting. Planara works 24/7—whether on a scheduled or ad hoc basis, or from the bottom-up or top-down perspective. And now Axsium has expanded on our industry-leading set of UKG Pro Workforce Management integrations. Streamline your configurations, update planning metrics, and publish your budget outputs. Planara makes labor planning easy!
Join the growing list of enterprise Planara customers and gain all the benefits of our Axsium OPS labor management suite. Want to learn more? Get in touch with our team to talk about what Planara can do for you!
