How Siemens Takes HR and Workforce Planning Digital
Workforce planning and HR are some of the biggest challenges facing the field service business today with providers often needing to achieve more with less and make the most of a somewhat dwindling pool of engineers.
As most of you reading this will be aware, like many industries, field service is experiencing a talent crisis and is struggling to attract young people into the business. That fact, combined with many older technicians now reaching retirement age is creating a situation where there simply aren’t enough fresh prospects to fill the roles being vacated.
Thankfully, big technology firms such as Siemens have a host of tools which can be deployed to help HR and admin departments better manage the workforce they do have and ensure maximum effectiveness and efficiency is drawn from skilled workers on the ground.
CrewPlace
To meet the demands of this challenging environment, Siemens has developed a digital platform designed to optimize service provision in the healthcare sector specifically. CrewPlace is the industry’s first mobile on demand combined talent placement platform and workforce optimization system.
CrewPlace allows healthcare providers to better plan their workforce through a number of key benefits:
- Expand clinical capabilities, introduce new pathways, and enter into new markets.
- Automate procuring, dispatching, and tracking of your existing workforce or tap into a supplemental talent pool.
- Improve workforce productivity with technology that supports shift planning and staffing.
- A network of top talent can discover more opportunities, flexibility, and freedom.
"The healthcare workforce is changing,” said Siemens in a white paper. "Smart investments in workforce and technology are critical for organizations on their transformation journey. Without appropriate staffing options, however, provider capabilities decrease, and patient outcomes are directly, negatively impacted.”
FlexForce Coach
Ongoing training and development are a core concern of any workforce planning strategy and providers need to ensure they are offering employees comprehensive development and performance assessment programs if they are to inspire the best results from them.
To meet this need, Siemens developed FlexForce Coach – a comprehensive staff development and performance consulting tool designed from the ground up to be personalized to the individual needs of each provider.
FlexForce Coach Benefits include:
- On-Site expert trainer with modality specific training and experience
- Siemens-certified performance coach training
- Project management training
- Personalized curricula aligned with organization goals
- Quarterly progress reports
- Flexible engagements, from 3 to 6 months to several years
"Siemens partners with you at each step to ensure your organization’s needs are identified, a comprehensive plan is built, and coaching implemented; all the while progress is being tracked and reportedly to key stakeholders to ensure alignment,” says Siemens.
HR IT
With such a massive and unwieldy workforce spread across the globe, Siemens AG was suffering from numerous challenges when it came to effective planning for its people. Outdated manual processes were creating more problems than they solved, and it was time for a change.
"With over 400,000 employees globally, Siemens was suffering the effects of having multiple offices across the globe, but no practical way to manage all of its employees in a cohesive manner. There were HR systems in place for human capital management, but their reach generally didn’t stretch beyond their respective borders. Instead, different Siemens offices resorted to sending Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with employee data to each other. Data-entry fields on those spreadsheets were not standardized, either.”
To meet this need for more effective workforce planning, the corporate giant decided to invest in an HR SaaS solution. Creating a standardized platform which could aggregate data from the entire global organization empowered Siemens to make better workforce planning decisions and manage its people more effectively than ever before.
With these new data capabilities, Siemens has achieved unprecedented insight into its workforce and can now leverage this information to better meet the challenges of filling the talent pipeline and replacing its key retiring staff.
"The most important achievement for us is, for the first time in 160 years, we have all the performance data in one place,” said Head of Employee Development, Juergen Siebel. "Analytics is one of the top things I want to advance for talent search and succession planning. We are looking forward to more collaboration with SuccessFactors on that field.”
Final Thoughts
Digital technology is helping brands meet the workforce planning challenges of the present day. Whether its digital tools enabling greater insights into schedules and staff development, or complete overhauls of HR technology, Siemens is more than aware of the need for innovation in this area.
You can hear Siemens Director of Technical Support, Ren Rice and Director of Field Service, Wayne Creech speak at Field Service Palm Springs 2023, being held in April at the JW Marriott Desert Springs, Palm Springs, CA.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.