Driving Workforce Transformation: A New Era in HR Tech

[0:00:27] Kathleen Lewis: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. As you come in, feel free to put in the chat where you're joining from. It's always exciting to see all the different time zones and geographies. I'm here in Washington, D.C., and Florian is joining us from Bremen, right? Or are you in London?

[0:00:53] Florian Fleischmann: No. Back in Bremen. I just got back from London yesterday.

[0:00:58] Kathleen Lewis: Wonderful. I know you're traveling. Thanks, everyone. Welcome. I'll give it just another minute or so. Look at all those locations all over the world. Alright, let's get started.

Welcome, everyone, to our session today focused on driving workforce transformation, a new era in HR tech. Before we dive deeper, let me orient you to the functionality of this meeting room. On the right side of your screen, you'll find the chat and Q&A. You can download the presentation slides as well as our recent blog post. Feel free to expand your screen for a better viewing experience. You can submit questions using the Q&A feature, which we'll address during the dedicated Q&A session. Chime in anytime with questions or comments.

Now, for some quick practice using the chat functionality, please go there. On a scale of one to five maturity, one being the lowest and five being highly sophisticated, how would you rate your workforce planning process today? One being lowest, two and a half, four. OK. Five being highly sophisticated. Great. Keep adding that in the chat. It looks like the vast majority of you are in that middle to lower range of self-diagnosed maturity. You're not alone, and we'll touch on that later.

Let's keep going. My name is Kathleen Lewis, and I'm a Leader Within our Account Management team. I'm joined today by Julius Barr, our Head of Solution Consulting, and Florian Fleischmann, our Managing Director of Strategic Workforce Planning.

Now, let's review the plan for the next 40 or so minutes. We'll first take a step back and discuss the forces driving change in workforce planning and the fresh approach critical to organizational success. Then, we'll experience the solution through a live demo featuring TalentNeuron's latest end-to-end strategic workforce planning platform, designed to simplify and scale this fresh approach. Finally, we'll answer any lingering questions through an open Q&A.

We're all feeling shifts in today's talent landscape. Taking a look at the bottom left of the screen, business and HR leaders are facing major challenges, including how automation and AI are transforming jobs, the retirement of experienced workers driving talent shortages, and gaps in critical areas. The gig economy is expanding. Skills are evolving rapidly. Nearly half of workers' skills will be disrupted in the next five years, and businesses must now optimize a distributed global workforce.

On the bottom right, business leaders like the CEO of Microsoft recognize these shifts are majorly impacting how work gets done. He highlights that it's not just about tech; it's also about new management practices and sensibilities in the workplace.


In our very own TalentNeuron survey conducted this year, 67% of HR leaders rated strategic workforce planning as very to extremely important, and 83% of TalentNeuron clients rated SWP [stretegic workforce planning] as very to extremely important. We also asked those HR leaders to identify the areas most critical to their business success and rate their ability to execute those initiatives. The results uncovered three key gaps where priorities outpace readiness:

• Assessing current and future talent landscapes

• Demand planning

• Skills analysis.

A shift of this magnitude calls for a new transformative approach toward workforce management. So, how are HR leaders navigating all this ambiguity today? Manually. In our conversations with more than three dozen clients, we heard over and over again that as HR leaders respond to these major shifts, they're working out of Excel spreadsheets, often tapping into disparate data sources in varying formats. Assessing the potential for automation or shifting to a skills-based model, for example, is extremely complex without a centralized approach or scalable framework in place.

TalentNeuron has always excelled in contextualizing the external talent market. We've supported elements of strategic workforce planning such as location analysis, hiring difficulty diagnosis, and EVP benchmarking. If we now think bigger and imagine this entire talent planning lifecycle as a puzzle, there are three core components. Within those three are many individual activities informing a much greater workflow.

Your market and competitive intelligence is first and foundational, informing your overall understanding of the talent landscape and providing a clear picture of the external forces shaping your workforce needs. This includes understanding external talent, skills, and competitive landscapes.

Strategic workforce planning is the engine that powers your process and ensures you're equipped with the data and tools needed to design a workforce aligned with your business strategy. This group of actions includes job architecture analysis, understanding internal talent and skill gaps, demand planning and scenario modeling, build-buy-borrow-break-bounce strategies, and location analysis and planning.

Workforce transformation is the third component, where you take the plan and bring it to life through implementation. Within this group, you'll roll out talent calibration, upskilling, reskilling, career pathing, and predicting and shifting the most optimal tasks for automation. This is where you turn your plans into measurable outcomes, taking strategy creation to strategy execution.

As all these pieces fit together, TalentNeuron is now the industry's first workforce transformation suite, helping organizations navigate the future of work.

I'm now going to turn the screen over to Julius, who will guide us through a live experience of the solution.

[0:08:22] Julius Bahr: Hi there. Great to be here with all of you today. I'm calling you from Munich, Germany. Great to see that you're spread across the world and that SWP is becoming relevant globally.

Just following up on what Kathleen just shared, let's put some joint understanding to the buzzword of strategic workforce planning. We have our understanding, and we always want to ensure it aligns with what our customers understand about strategic workforce planning. We think about it in three basic steps.

The first piece is that we want to help our customers understand (that's what you see on the left bottom). We want to help our customers understand how their environment is changing. That's where we bring in our vast external market data. We incorporate major forecasts and insights from TalentNeuron, now joining forces with us, providing extensive insights on the external labor market. This helps you understand which competitor is recruiting in which location for which roles, with which skills, salaries, and benefits, guiding your recruiting and learning and development strategy.

We can help you understand which new roles are evolving in the market and which new skill requirements are emerging within existing roles. All of that can help you inform decisions on how to update and maintain your job architecture, where to develop your existing workforce, and where competitors are moving ahead of you, or you're leading the market.

After learning how the external labor market is evolving and how it might impact your business and workforce, you move into planning, essentially, strategic workforce planning by the book. This involves analyzing how many people you will need in which roles at which time to support your business strategy.

If we're talking about strategic planning, there are two key differentiators compared to operative planning. First, we need to talk about scenarios. Scenarios get relevant when facing ambiguity. Second, strategic forecasting typically looks five to ten years ahead, sometimes even further. Some energy companies, for example, forecast their workforce needs until 2040. When looking that far into the future, you need to plan for different scenarios: best case, worst case, or anything in between.

The typical outcome of these tasks is workforce gaps: surpluses and shortages. You then identify suitable actions to close those gaps: build, borrow, or buy, as Kathleen just mentioned. Leveraging external market data helps make informed decisions, which you then turn into action when transforming your workforce. At the individual employee level, this informs decisions about skills and talent management, recommending suitable training programs to close workforce gaps and support business transformation.

These are the three main steps we follow as a guideline. Now, diving into our demo for today, Kathleen, if you want to stop sharing your screen, I can take over.

What we're looking at right now is the backbone of our solution. I think it's coming up... perfect. So, what do we see here? Again, it's a backbone. This is where our customers maintain their job architecture. Why start with this seemingly basic piece? Because it is critical for making strategic workforce planning work in real life. You will need a well-maintained job architecture and an understanding of which roles are relevant to your company, assigning individual employees to those roles, and defining skill requirements for each role. This supports key use cases like comparing employee skills against role requirements and analyzing skill gaps from a strategic perspective informed by skills information maintained in your job architecture.

The good news is no customer has ever said, "Top drawer! This is my job architecture that is always work to be done." We can support you in doing so by helping you update and, pretty much, pressure test your job architecture, making sure that we consolidate whatever has organically grown apart. So, having different roles that cover the same topics, we can make sure that we add those new roles, which are evolving in the market, and provide you with job names that also speak to Gen-Z out there.

The outcome is typically a job architect architecture as we see it here. We have some job families, job sub-families, and job names. Over here, we have 49 jobs, depending on your complexity, that might range between 50 to 500 different jobs for the biggest companies we service, such as Volkswagen, out here, as an example.
Now, for each and every role, you want to make sure that you are actually maintaining your current understanding of the role. So that's where we would input your current job descriptions. Our skill intelligence will automatically extract skills based on our very own skills taxonomy. So you will be able to see your current understanding of skills reflected over here.

And you want to make sure that these are up to date based on what's going on in the market, so you want to go ahead and connect that to our market data. In that case, connect it to the recruiter profile, and you want to go ahead and load that market data.

So, best practice job descriptions, duties, skill insights, and automation potential; it's a one-click effort over here to make sure that you get those market recommendations.

You can have your current skill set benchmarked against market recommendations and, just by a click, update your individual skill requirements.

Now, let's think about how that will impact your process of maintaining your job architecture, which is very tedious and requires these huge projects. We can now bring you into a mode where, instead of running these huge projects to update your whole job architecture, you (and our customers would typically do that once or twice a year) just look into the system and see what has been updated from a market perspective. Are there new skills being added? Are there proficiency levels that should change? And, obviously, not everything is going to change, so you're only going to be looking at the 10% of roles that have actually changed. Within those roles, you're only going to be looking at the 5% of skills that have changed, reducing your maintenance efforts for your job architecture by a lot, leveraging our external market data.



In addition to that, you might also be interested in any insights around automation, and that is pretty much a standalone solution you will be seeing in the market right now.  

Based on our external market data, analyzing patents and scientific white papers to understand the impact of technologies, we can now provide you with insights down to a task level, showing which technologies are impacting tasks within your workforce.

Obviously, if you think further, you can take these insights to inform your decisions around expectations for saving potential from automation and identify the top technologies to invest in to drive automation across a broad part of your workforce.

I'm just quickly looking at the chat to see if we already have some questions. I don't think we do yet. Feel free to keep those questions coming. I'm happy to take them throughout the demo, but we can also answer them at the end of the session.

So yeah.

Kathleen.

[0:17:18] Kathleen Lewis: Julius, I was just going to say; that it looks like there's a question about whether there's a solution that produces dynamic org charts and team networks.

[0:17:28] Julius Bahr: Yes, it does. We'll look at that in a minute. That's part of ours, the planning piece, the strategic workforce planning piece. So, if you want to start pushing around different parts of your organization and reorganizing them, yes, we can do that.

Anything else we should take as a question right on the spot? Then I would say, let's move ahead. So what we've done now is your job architecture, just informing that directly, integrating that directly from your core HR system.

• We've connected it to our market data.

• We've helped you update your skill requirements and keep them updated in the future.

• We informed information and insights around automation.
  

And even if you want to go down to a single skill level, you can understand the skill worth of each and every skill within your skill requirements. That's going to come in handy later on as well.

Let's switch to the second bubble, if you remember, of that Venn diagram, which was about planning. Now we want to go ahead and plan our future workforce, and that's what we can do over here.

Picking up that question, this is also where you can start looking into org modeling. So what you see over here is coming directly from your core HR system, whether that's Workday, SAP, Oracle, or whatever you're working with. The data displayed over here is all related and connected to your core HR system, so you don't need to maintain stuff twice. You only maintain everything in your core HR system, and it's going to be displayed over here.

So for this demo company, we have 290,6 FTEs [full-time employees], and they are split across these five departments and these five planning units. Now, the way you plan is completely up to you, right? Our customers typically plan on a department level, as we see it over here, though we also have some customers who do planning on a global level. Instead of departments, you would be seeing countries over here. Again, it's completely up to you.

And if you want to start thinking about organizational development or org-redesign, this is pretty much the piece where you can now go ahead.

If, for whatever reason, you want to join your tech and data department with your product marketing and sales department, then just go ahead and put in a name over here. We'll just call it "New Department," and you've got that new entity set up over here. So just like that, you can start pushing around departments to see how that will impact your workforce structure.

Everything around integrating new companies after M&A [Mergers and Acquisitions] transactions, joining departments to increase efficiency, whatever that is, it's just a couple of clicks away in the solution.

Now, let's go ahead and move into planning for a single department. If we go into product marketing and sales, as I just said, all of this data is pulled from your core HR system. So a lot of that is already prefilled for you, and you don't need to think about it. We have two sides we need to bring together for workforce planning: supply and demand.

Supply planning: This pretty much tells you how many people you have today in which roles and how that number will diminish over time due to retirement, contracts running out, or attrition. Retirement data and contract end dates are typically already maintained in your core HR system, so we're just going to feed it over here, and it will be automatically integrated as employees leave throughout the next five years, ten years, or until 2040.

For something like attrition, our customers typically want to simulate different attrition scenarios, so called keyword scenarios. Technically, you can go ahead and say, "You know what, I have an average attrition of 5% across all roles," right? But maybe you want to go ahead and say, "In a high attrition scenario, I expect that to increase to 6% or 7% later on." Having different scenarios helps compare and model your future workforce.

Maybe you want to go ahead and say, "Actually, my attrition differs wildly." In marketing, I have 6% attrition, in product management, I have 5%, and in sales, I have 3%, but I expect that to increase to 5%. This is where we get into simulation. You can do everything manually, but you can also provide your historical attrition data to us, and we'll do that for you. We'll correlate your internal historical attrition data with our market data and provide an outlook on how attrition might change for your workforce.

Supply planning: Directly connected to your core HR system, pulling everything we can get on retirement, contracts, and more, directly into the system, prepopulating it, and giving you the opportunity to simulate. We just looked at attrition, but you can also simulate different retirement scenarios. If you expect 20% of employees to retire at 63, 50% at 64, and the remaining at 65 or 66, that's a simulation you can run here.

Now, getting into demand planning, this is an interesting piece. We want to ensure that your strategic workforce planning supports your strategic business planning. You want to make sure that's directly connected and we do this by providing you with a driver-based model.

For example:

• Today, you have 10 production operators, and they produce 100 units.

• And you take a business decision to expand your business in Asia, maybe your production volume will increase to 120 units.

• That's going to have a direct impact on the number of employees you have.

• At the same time, you take the business decision to put some robots on those production lines, which will have a counteracting effect.

And remember, quantifying the impact of automation, why don't you just go ahead and leverage our external market data, giving you some insights on the automation potential on a role basis?

Now, identifying these drivers, we help you do that because it is very individual to every company. So, production volume will always impact the number of production operators you need. The number of customers will always impact the number of account managers you need. The number of employees will always impact the number of HR business partners you need. Whatever department it is, based on our experience, we've already run through the exercise with other customers. We'll help you identify these drivers and combine them in driver models to assess the impact of several drivers on single roles. This way, we can understand how quantifying those drivers or your future production volume will impact your future workforce demand in different scenarios.

We help you identify these drivers. Once those drivers are identified and set up as driver models, these models are very robust because your production volume is always going to have an impact on your production operators. So the drivers themselves are very robust, and you only need to look into how the quantification of the production volume itself has changed on a yearly basis. But those figures are easily available for your business leads; that's what they're dealing with every day.


Outcomes are gaps. We can understand how many people are leaving in the next five years and how many people you will need to support your business growth in this scenario.


We can look at different scenarios and how that will differentiate across different scenarios, deep dive into demand analytics, see how that fills out across those different years, and deep dive into supply analysis as well.

The interesting piece is when we get into the question of, well, now we have gaps, what do we want to do about them?  


That's where we look into gap closing, and that's where your individual gap-closing tools come into play. Talking about build, borrow, buy, or whatever "B's" you want to implement while sticking to a few common ones.

If you talk about building talent, that's where we focus on upskilling people in and out of roles. Buying talent means recruiting. Bots — this is where you might bring in robotic process automation to replace existing tasks.

And well, now there are different ways to go about this. Either you bring in your different stakeholders from learning and development, recruitment, and so on, and for the first time ever, they have transparency on these gaps from different departments. You can go ahead and define that yourselves, or you can leverage the intelligence in our tool in two different ways: either by prioritizing gap-closing activities and saying, "You know what? We want to make the best use of our existing workforce," so we prioritize moving people around and reskilling them, and the solution will automatically suggest the best way to move people around and close those gaps according to your prioritized HR interventions.

The other option is to leverage our external market data — using insights on local time to hire and local salary levels to inform decisions about where it makes sense to recruit talent and in which locations recruitment would be most effective. So, leveraging the intelligence in the tool to inform gap-closing decisions.

Final piece, and then I'll take some questions if we have any. Right now, we're only looking at gaps on a role level. Maybe you also want to dive into future skill planning. Based on the skill profiles maintained in the back end, these are available for planning here.

So maybe you want to say, "You know what? In the future, our digital marketing specialists, apart from the 38 skills they need to be aware of today, may need additional skills in data analytics, perhaps database analysis, for whatever reason." We take that as an advanced level and add it here.

You can also leverage our external data insights to support that strategic planning. That’s crucial to making skills planning relevant to your stakeholders because the generic skills profiles maintained here will typically not be relevant enough for business leads engaged in strategic planning. That’s where you want to give them the flexibility to adapt skills requirements for their department’s specific needs.

I’d suggest a short stop here on what we’ve covered regarding planning and org development. Are there any questions? Maybe, Kathleen, you have a good overview; are there any critical ones we should address right now?

[0:29:52] Kathleen Lewis: Yes. We have a whole bunch of questions. Florian, I know some are more on the technical side. Do you want to start there?

[0:30:03] Florian Fleischmann: Yeah. Sure. So there were a couple of questions. So, how many different underlying HR systems can you have? Can you pull it from different HR systems?

So there's the possibility to decide, with the open API connectors, from which systems you want to pull in the data. There's also the next module that Julius will show you, which will help you pull in even scale data, training data, etc., to create a really holistic view of the workforce. And yeah. So, there are also a couple of questions regarding cost. So, based on the time, you didn't see it, but there's a whole cost module. Basically, all the demand you have planned is directly translated into workforce cost. Workforce cost can also be simulated depending on your prediction of how it will change, like base salaries, etc. So that's one aspect of it.

The second aspect of understanding the cost is looking into what kind of transformational measures you have planned. How much does recruiting cost you? How much does reskilling cost you? So that's the second part where this application, the simulation, helps to give transparency on.

[0:31:18] Julius Bahr: Maybe just scrolling through a couple of other questions. So this is completely customizable. Whatever attributes are relevant to you and maintained in your core HR system, whether it's country, department, gender, or anything else, we just integrate that from your core HR system.

Over here, we've done yearly planning [examples explained above by Julius]. You can also go down to monthly or quarterly planning. We also talk about the integration of AI. So everything around gap-closing recommendations is where we bring our skills and intelligence.

If we talk about closing gaps via reskilling, our intelligence looks at skill profiles from roles in shortage versus roles in surplus. If those skill profiles are very similar, it will recommend reskilling. Otherwise, it won’t. That’s where our skills and intelligence come into play to support gap-closing activities.

And to take one more question: how many skills are appropriate to require for a particular role? Typically, we see somewhere between 20 and 30 skills maintained at a role level for a job architecture, but that can also vary significantly between our customers.

Looking at the time, what I suggest is let's go ahead. Obviously, we're happy to take all of those questions at the end as well as in any follow-up discussions.

Right now, we've defined our skill requirements and job architecture in the back end. We've planned our future workforce requirements, including skill requirements, over here. We've defined gap-closing activities. Now, we want to go ahead and close those gaps on an individual employee level.

First, let's assume for a minute that we've brought your employees to the platform, and they have shared their individual skill sets. We can talk about how that can be done in a minute.

When you have this information, skills transparency on your employees' skills, you can now go ahead and say, "you know what? These are my direct reports." Every user information, again, is directly fed from your core HR system, including the whole reporting structure, who reports to whom. Everything is automatically maintained and pulled from your core HR system.

So let's assume that James, currently in the role of a technical sales specialist, has maintained his individual skill set. Benchmarking that against skill requirements from what you maintain in the back end, we can see that James fulfills 62% of the skill requirements.

Now, we want to go ahead and help that employee, as the good team leader I am, to close that skill gap. So let's take a look at his profile. Looking at his role, we see that 62% isn't that bad—he fulfills a lot of skills, but there are also some skills he's missing or maybe not at the right level.

As part of a yearly development review, which we can also integrate here, you can set those development targets. Moving forward, we can get an overview of the skills he needs to develop. Now, as James might ask, "How can I close that gap, and how is the system going to help me do that?"

There are different ways to go about that. Think about 70-20-10. Typically, you want to receive suitable training suggestions. That's where we directly integrate with your learning management systems or learning experience platforms if you have any in place. We directly pull training data from those platforms and integrate it here.

We already have LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Coursera, and so on maintained. Now, an individual employee, instead of digging through huge training libraries to find the right training, gets a recommendation right away, specified to their individual gap and proficiency level. That's the 10% of 70-20-10.

The other percentages are more connected to personal growth. "How can others support me in doing so?" That's where I might want to find suitable mentors. Maybe I want to develop Python as a skill — something I've always been interested in — and my manager supports me in doing so.

That's where I can find suitable candidates who are open to being visible as private profiles, showing available mentors who can guide me in developing my Python skills.

So it's all about skill transparency. Skill transparency as a manager on the skill profiles of my employees, skill transparency for employees benchmarking against the skill requirements of their role, and skill transparency regarding which skills are covered by which training programs.

Now, to make this relevant for your team leads because they'll always say that the skill requirements maintained in your job architecture are too generic, you need to give them flexibility. In their teams, they may need to specify skills further.

It's crucial to make such a platform work and ensure team leads engage with it. That's why they should have the ability to say, "You know what? Everyone in the role of a controller within my team, all my direct reports, needs more than just the 23 skills from the job architecture. They also need to be experts in Microsoft Excel and have strong financial literacy."

So now I can go ahead and alter those rather generic requirements that HR needs to report on and make them relevant for each team. This is super important to actually make this system work in your company.

Looking at the time, I would suggest highlighting one or two more use cases. It's all about skills intelligence, and we just looked at individual employees.

Talking about job postings, this is where I might also want to fill internal vacancies. If the outcome of my strategic workforce planning is that I want to move people around and find suitable candidates, I can integrate this information directly from the applicant tracking system.

Again, we can go ahead and find suitable candidates for each job posting.

Looking at these individual use cases, we want to help employees develop and close vacancies efficiently.

We can also take it to a higher level, looking into high-level analytics to identify skill gaps at the department level or for a specific location. Moving away from individual gap-closing, we now look at it from an L&D perspective, aiming to understand the major skill gaps where we need to set up full upskilling campaigns, whether around communication skills, soft skills, or IT. For example, maybe I need to upskill people in data reporting and Excel. Right? It's all about gaining skill transparency and using that to inform processes, from strategic workforce planning down to the individual employee level.

There's more to see here. We can explore how we integrate market data to support decision-making on whether to recruit internally or externally. We can also look at how to integrate HR processes with regular development reviews. I can guide that depending on your questions.

Just as a takeaway here.

Bringing employees; there are different ways to bring skill information into the tool. Employees can maintain their skill profiles themselves by uploading their CVs or LinkedIn profiles, where skills are going to be automatically extracted.

Another approach, which may be more relevant for blue-collar workers who don’t have regular access to a laptop, is replicating their skills based on data maintained in SAP SuccessFactors, Workday SkillCloud, or any other system storing employee skills information. This could include records from previous training sessions. In this case, we would feed that data into the system, and their manager would review their skill profile once a year during performance evaluations, ensuring at least an annual update on blue-collar workers' skill profiles.


Lastly, we're looking at a front end over here. Right? We, as a solution, can take different roles within a company. We can be the fancy solution that everybody accesses, but we can also be the hidden intelligence in the background. So users only interact with Workday or SAP, and we do all the intelligence around skills matching, job posting matching, and training matching in the background, feeding that back to the systems that you want to be user-facing. Different ways to set this up.

We want to make sure that we augment your solutions. We don't need to be the fifth solution your employee needs to open in the morning. We're happy to be, but we don't have to be to make life as easy as possible for your users.

I would stop over there. I'm going to stop sharing my screen and pull up whatever is relevant to answer any open questions right now. Maybe, Kathleen, you can guide me toward some of those questions.

[0:42:12] Kathleen Lewis: Yeah. Sure. Let me also just start with a question that came through as to whether we offer a solution, whether we offer not just the platform solution but also consulting, and the answer is yes. So it's not just one or the other. It's a full end-to-end service that gives you support, consulting, and advice from practitioners and experts, as well as the use of the platform to get the work done. With that, Florian, maybe I'll turn it back to you to pull out some of the other technical questions.

[0:42:48] Florian Fleischmann: Yeah. Julius, one of the questions was, do you need your own skills taxonomy, or is there something already that can be used?

[0:42:51] Julius Bahr: So we bring our own skills taxonomy, which we update regularly based on our market data. So we make sure that all those new evolving programming languages are maintained over there, and our customers would typically also use our skills taxonomy since we maintain it for them. It might only be in rare cases where they have some very individual IT systems, which they've developed by themselves, and they would maintain that by themselves.

So if you don't have anything in place, you can just take what we have. We'll update that for you. If you have something in place, that is also fine. You can work with your own skill taxonomy in the tool as well. So, there are different ways to go about that.

[0:43:42] Kathleen Lewis: Looks like we have some questions about the data visualization and dashboard capability if they can be designed for leadership at different levels.

[0:43:54] Julius Bahr: Yep. So generally, we have predefined dashboards available in the tool, which typically suffice for a lot of original use cases and also for management reporting. That being said, we also have APIs available to feed data into the system, user information, and so on, but also to feed data out of the system. So, at any point in time, you can just pull data, snapshot data, or have a regular data feed coming out of the tool, feeding into your Power BI dashboards. So whenever you have your dedicated management dashboards and need data from the tool, that's not a manual effort. That can also be automated for you. And if you have your Power BI dashboards, we can also just embed them in our solution so you have everything in one place and don't need to switch between different programs.

[0:44:50] Kathleen Lewis: Great. We have another one, and I think many of our customers have asked some of these types of questions about how we support and show trends in workforce dynamics like the gig economy. So, for gig workers or even hybrid work models.

[0:45:14] Florian Fleischmann: Yep. So basically, in the strategic workforce planning part, if you think of it from that perspective, if you look into how many people you need and what kind of scenarios you have, you'll begin to understand where you have uncertainty. So there's one point where you can already start planning that's a kind of gig economy in terms of where you should build it into the workforce, where it makes sense, and where it also makes sense based on salary availability in the market to give you that kind of flexibility.

On the operational side and the skill management part, you can also integrate the whole external labor force you have and use it as a base for understanding what kind of knowledge you have and leveraging that knowledge within the organization.

[0:46:05] Kathleen Lewis: Great. Let's see. We have some other questions about the level of support and training provided for the implementation of the tool to make sure that it's effectively implemented.

[0:46:19] Julius Bahr: That differs pretty much from what we're talking about. If we were talking about what we looked at in the end, so the skill and talent management piece, that's where, once we've set up technical integrations and thought-critical use cases and how we want to reflect that in roles and access rights, the initial implementation happens.

Training for individual employees, since we have tens of thousands of employees joining the platform, is where our self-service help center comes in. It guides users easily through these processes. We have onboarding wizards, so the first time they access the platform, it guides them through setting up their profile and navigating different parts of the solution. Of course, we can support with training as well, but in our experience, training is mainly required for management and HR professionals who handle analytics, such as skill gap analysis.

For the strategic workforce planning piece, where we looked at different scenarios, it's typically a much smaller user group. You’re not going to have tens of thousands of people joining the platform there it’s mainly business leads and some HR VPs supporting planning. Since it’s a small user group, we train those users accordingly. We guide them through the first planning cycle, shadow them during the second, and remain available for any questions. Typically, it's a smooth handover to our customers' core SWP team.

[0:48:16] Kathleen Lewis: That's great. I think there are a few other questions we can keep going with, but also, everyone should know that following up from today's session, any questions that haven't been answered, we'll make sure to reach out and do so. So you can expect answers if we don't get to all of the questions.

I think some other questions we had are around the org chart and org design, so we'll make sure to get you all that information.

A couple of other notes before the session ends: We will go right from here to a survey, so we're asking you all to please fill it out to help us make these sessions better and more engaging for you. We really appreciate your feedback.

Also, let me point out that you can select "Request a demo," which is at the top of your screen. That will trigger us to follow up with you, so feel free to click on that.

Florian, is there anything else you want to mention that we haven't covered yet?

[0:49:23] Florian Fleischmann: No. I guess, from the questions, we covered the biggest categories, but we'll come back to you on the individual answers. But basically, in total, what it allows you to do is establish one language that allows you to connect all the different systems and dots in the company, from the LMS system to the ATS systems. It also helps you gather information from the market about future skills, future jobs, etc., and competitors, what they are doing, and how you can use that to plan your future workforce. Ultimately, it helps every single employee and team lead the transition into a future-oriented workforce with relevant knowledge.

[0:50:11] Kathleen Lewis: Wonderful. Julius, anything else before we wrap up?

[0:50:17] Julius Bahr: I think that was a wonderful ending from Flo. Thanks for all the questions. It's always great to have these very active sessions. That's most fun for us, especially in these remote settings.

Looking forward to connecting with, hopefully, a lot of people individually.

[0:50:35] Kathleen Lewis: Absolutely. Thank you everyone for your time today. We'll look forward to connecting for lots of follow-up, and we'll see you next time.

[0:50:46] Florian Fleischmann: Thanks. Bye-bye.