How process orchestration helps to support strategic workforce planning and build organisational resilience

Unpredictable market conditions, skills shortages, demographic shifts, and rapid technological progress have combined in recent times to make workforce planning more important – and more complex – than ever. Unsurprisingly, when Gartner surveyed 1,400 HR leaders about their key priorities for 2025, strategic workforce planning ranked among their top five.

With the right strategy and solutions, workforce planning enables HR functions to align their hiring and talent management policies with wider corporate objectives. Ultimately, recruiting the right people with the right skills in the right places at the right time helps drive business growth and long-term organisational resilience.

However, many HR functions struggle to implement an effective approach. In the same Gartner survey, 61% of HR leaders said their workforce planning extended no further than one year into the future, and only 15% stated they had the capabilities to plan for the next two years and beyond.

A new concept, process orchestration, can help to optimise workforce planning, allowing organisations to look beyond immediate staffing needs towards building long-term resilience. Linking tasks and workflows, process orchestration enables HR teams to gain a unified overview of their operations that helps them plan for the future and stay a step ahead of the competition.

What are the key challenges in workforce planning?

A standard workforce planning framework consists of multiple steps, starting with establishing key corporate goals for the next three to five years, followed by talent supply, demand analysis and forecasting future skills needs. The process enables HR teams to understand current workforce capabilities, forecast trends such as employee attrition, evaluate future needs, identify skills gaps, and plan solutions to attract new talent.

Naturally, the value and accuracy of the analysis and forecasting depend on the quality of HR data available. This covers a broad sweep: while data on industry trends and emerging competition is typically available from research firms, effective workforce planning also requires detailed HR technology data on headcount, demographics, employee attrition, compensation, recruitment and training costs, and much more.

This is where HR functions often encounter significant stumbling blocks during the workforce planning cycle. In many cases, key data is scattered across a complex patchwork of poorly integrated systems, from core HRIS platforms and recruitment applications to document archives, payroll and accounting solutions, learning and development tools, and legacy file servers.

The result is that it takes significant time and effort to locate, merge, and then analyse this data, leaving HR waiting too long for crucial insights to guide decision-making. There is also a risk that HR ends up working with incomplete, inaccurate, or out-of-date information, hindering the effectiveness of workforce planning initiatives. This is a common problem: according to Gartner research, 67% of HR organisations believe that they are not using data effectively in their workforce planning.

The key principle behind process orchestration is integration. The latest platforms use APIs, webhooks, and other methods to exchange data seamlessly between different HR applications, workplace analytics software, document archives, and even legacy systems. Many solutions also feature intuitive design tools that enable HR users to configure workflows, without the need for specialist knowledge or training.

By deploying process orchestration, you can extract integrated data from your HRIS, recruitment software, payroll systems, and learning and development platforms, before harnessing workplace analytics software to uncover headcount, demographic, and attrition trends, create forecasts for the next three to five years, and identify potential skills, talent, and capability gaps.

The strategic impact of orchestration on workforce planning

With the insights acquired from the analysis stage, you can develop and implement new talent acquisition and management policies to ensure you have the right people in your organisation at the right time. You can also incorporate data on evolving employment laws into the picture, helping to maintain compliance in planning initiatives. And as process orchestration provides integrated HR data, you can track the impact of new strategies, continually refining and optimising to drive stronger results.

For example, process orchestration followed by workplace analytics can help you to identify the specialist technical and digital skills you need to stay competitive over the next five years. Based on this insight, you can adapt your recruitment strategy to focus on identifying candidates with the right background or experience or creating attractive career paths for graduates with specific knowledge and skills.

Similarly, you can use the integrated HR data available through process orchestration and analytics solutions to identify knowledge gaps and guide internal training and learning and development programs to upskill or reskill your employee base. This approach will not only enhance the capabilities within your organisation but also reduce recruitment costs and workloads.

Furthermore, process orchestration provides the ability to collate internal and external salary data and employee performance metrics. This can help you determine whether you are offering competitive rewards, or whether you will need to reshape your compensation policies to foster satisfaction, minimise turnover, and avoid losing talent.

Workforce planning is now a critical strategic exercise for HR, vital for helping organisations to survive and thrive in increasingly challenging conditions. Process orchestration enables you to future-proof your business, using data-driven methods to minimise risk caused by skills shortages and maintain and boost performance.