ORBIS: Aligning people and strategy for better business outcomes with integrated workforce planning
Explore the ORBIS journey with SAP
The employees of ORBIS SE underpin the company’s mission to transform diverse organizations. Using SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, the software and business consultancy enables robust workforce planning that puts these talented “ORBISians” at the center of decision-making.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Professional services | Saarbrücken, Germany | >900 employees |
faster workforce planning.
increase in process accuracy.
fewer people involved in the planning process.
Head of Operational Excellence, ORBIS SE
Digitalizing workforce planning for greater transparency and speed
Founded nearly 40 years ago to help organizations optimize their business strategies, processes, and software implementations, ORBIS SE operates in 21 locations across three continents. The company has completed more than 2,500 projects for around 800 customers in industries from automotive and industrial manufacturing to travel and transportation and consumer products.
More than 900 employees accompany these customers through their digital transformation journeys. From graduate trainees to long-standing ORBISians, these individuals are the lifeblood of a company that prides itself on “evolving innovative minds.” Yet, ORBIS lacked an efficient approach to planning its workforce needs and aligning people with company strategy.
Laura Merkl, the company’s head of operational excellence, explains. “The relationship between our employees and what we do is very, very strong. But, as with many companies, we were using Microsoft Excel for our workforce planning. It was a very long and drawn out process to consolidate spreadsheets and HR data for 900 employees across multiple subsidiaries. In addition, human error is an issue when teams are copying and pasting spreadsheets, so ensuring data was both accurate and up-to-date was a challenge.”
ORBIS needed a solution that would provide not only a clear overview of the current workforce but also a sound basis for better planning. Laura Merkl says, “We found it hard to analyze important KPIs such as turnover per employee or to plan for personnel costs and future employment needs. So, we made the strategic decision to consolidate our financial and HR data in one tool to enable digitalized processes. One key aim of the project was to create a connection between the structure of employees and our overall HR costs.”
Competence Center Manager for SAP Business Analytics, ORBIS SE
Consolidating and standardizing workforce planning processes
ORBIS uses SAP S/4HANA as its ERP system and is implementing diverse SAP SuccessFactors solutions for its HR needs. Having deployed the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution, ORBIS already had accurate employee master data and organizational data at its fingertips.
As an SAP partner, the company understood what the next logical step was. Dirk Burgdörfer, ORBIS’s competence center manager for SAP business analytics, says, “We knew the SAP Analytics Cloud solution offered reporting and planning capabilities that would fit our needs. Plus, we were already operating an SAP software environment, so SAP Analytics Cloud made perfect sense.”
ORBIS decided to implement SAP Analytics Cloud for planning to support comprehensive, accurate workforce planning. This capability helps smoothly integrate people, plans, and mission-critical business data by connecting those plans with SAP software applications. For example, with workforce planning, you can analyze forecasts and assess workforce supply and demand to improve personnel allocation. By consolidating workforce, financial, and other plans, you can create one unified plan spanning different lines of business.
In ORBIS’s case, multiple sources provide HR and financial data for workforce planning. Alongside core data sourced from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP Analytics Cloud consolidates financials, including cost center data from SAP S/4HANA and transactional data from Excel.
After a pilot involving controlling and financial reporting, ORBIS launched its workforce planning project. Support from its own experts in SAP SuccessFactors solutions and SAP Analytics Cloud as well as the use of standardized content without significant customization enabled a swift implementation.
ORBIS created two main reports, or stories, in SAP Analytics Cloud. The first provides management teams with detailed, high-level employee information they can use to inform strategic planning. The second story, from analytics to manufacturing, lets HR teams swiftly access workforce plans categorized by company codes and organizational units to develop personal measures.
Management Team IT – Applications, ORBIS SE
Reinventing workforce planning based on one source of accurate data
Having implemented its new software, ORBIS benefits from a clear overview of personnel costs and faster, more-streamlined workforce planning processes. According to Laura Merkl, “The end-to-end process of business planning is quicker because we’ve got what we need in the system. We import from SAP SuccessFactors solutions, and everything’s there. We can add new positions according to organizational needs and calculate the planning data for the next year. It’s a standardized process rather than everyone doing what they think is right. As a result, we probably have 80% fewer people involved in the planning process.”
The data these planners work with is more accurate, with Laura Merkl estimating the company experiences fewer errors during the planning process. And standardization of both data and processes dramatically increases transparency. As Laura Merkl explains, “Because everyone has the same way of working, it’s now much easier for management to compare over time how the business is developing.”
Aided by the stories functionality of SAP Analytics Cloud, HR teams can observe real-time information such as headcount, cost-center changes, promotions, and absences.
Dirk Burgdörfer explains the significance of the new planning approach as follows. “If we see we have a specific number of consultants at each job level, along with their daily consulting rate, we can derive the target revenue that can be reached with this staff. Then, on the demand side, we can look at opportunities in the market and compare these leads and ongoing projects with that staff capacity. By looking at these two aspects, we can identify a clear planned revenue.”
Competence Center Manager for SAP Business Analytics, ORBIS SE
Tapping into the potential of workforce planning to support growth
Equipped with reliable, comprehensive data on personnel costs, ORBIS is continuing its workforce planning journey. The company has already introduced basic revenue planning as part of the workforce planning project. It now wants to refine this tool so it can more intuitively identify how much turnover it will achieve in the next year based on the employee composition of each organizational unit.
According to Laura Merkl “The next step is to include current salary information from SAP SuccessFactors Compensation so we can more accurately compare personnel costs with turnover. This is a key KPI for the service provision side and a major indicator of how successful we’re going to be in the next year.”
Another planned initiative is to investigate how the company can integrate the SAP Datasphere solution in the new workforce planning system to unleash further value from its data.
On the overall picture, Dirk Burgdörfer notes, “We are already on a good path, having moved beyond workforce planning to revenue planning. A later step could be to extend our processes further, for example to include financial planning.”
Laura Merkl explains how versioning the new planning process allows for greater flexibility. “Our annual planning process starts in July, but of course things change throughout the year. Employees leave; we buy a new company; or we restructure departments. As a result, management teams need more than static annual planning. Better versioning will let us see what happened when and help keep our business moving.”
While future events remain uncertain, ORBIS knows SAP Analytics Cloud for planning can provide the agility and performance it needs to plan more intelligently and seize opportunities as they emerge.