Rocket Software Modernizes Finance and Workforce Planning With Planful

Rocket Software helps customers solve their most complex IT challenges, across infrastructure, data, and applications. Its 2,600 employees work to modernize mission critical technologies for over 10,000 customers around the world. It’s a human capital-intensive organization, which puts pressure on both the Office of the CFO and Human Resources. But, once it upgraded from spreadsheets to Planful, including the Planful Predict suite of artificial intelligence solutions, the company’s workforce planning challenges faded away.

Thousands of companies worldwide depend on Rocket Software to solve their most complex IT challenges with solutions that simplify the modernization journey. Its customer list includes 46 of the Fortune 50, and it relies on its 2,600 workers to keep those and the rest of its 10,000 customers happy.

“We’re a human capital-intensive organization, so we need a way for our business users to plan and think about their headcount,” recalled Luis Martinez Luna, Sr. Manager, FP&A, at Rocket Software. “But we had no source of truth for our headcount plan and that led to budget overruns, too many idle workers, misaligned hiring cycles, and more. We had to create a better workforce strategy and have a technology foundation to execute it.”

Rocket Software was using a legacy ERP system and relying on spreadsheets to turn poorly-formatted raw data into usable analysis, but that had become unsustainable. The frustrations common to spreadsheets also created unforced errors, such as not adding worker benefits costs to fully-burdened costs, incorrectly prorating merit salary increases, and more.

“It was the typical Excel drudgery,” said Luis. “We had systems in place that were intended to solve that, but we had challenges with user support and administration, and were heavily reliant on IT. We had to modernize our tech stack.”

On the recruitment side, if hiring cycles didn’t align with forecasted needs or if forecasts were inaccurate, workers were either idle or overworked, leading to turnover. Inaccurate forecasting could also lead to too many managers who couldn’t execute without staff or too many workers who couldn’t scale without leadership in place.

It was up to the finance team to solve those challenges while building closer relationships with the human resources team and hiring managers across the business. But Luis also saw the chance to redefine how the Office of the CFO worked by deploying a platform that would empower finance, HR, and the business while improving how the company managed its global workforce.

Luis created a list of requirements and set out in search of a workforce management platform. Rocket Software wanted a single source of financial information with robust reporting, modern financial forecasting to create a more proactive instead of reactive finance function, and easy integration with its existing Workday for HRIS data, Snowflake data cloud for combined financial and operational metrics, and the company’s legacy Oracle ERP system for GL data.

“We wanted to stop handing spreadsheets to the business and give them more visualizations that spoke to their business needs,” Luis said. “Once we saw how Planful could set up merit increase scenarios, span of control, and people costs by layer, we knew we wanted Planful’s workforce planning solution.”

In just a bit over three months, Rocket Software was live on Planful, which it integrated with its legacy ERP system to create the desired single source of truth. From there, it then quickly moved to create forecasting templates and focus on its workforce planning efforts.

As it deployed Planful, Rocket Software benchmarked its workforce strategy against its peers and created target ratios, costs, and expenses. These targets would then help the company prepare for potential future market, worker, and customer scenarios, and let the finance and accounting teams collaborate more effectively with the business. 

“Planful lets us slice our data side-by-side with our business partners so we can partner on headcount planning,” Luis added. “Planful helps us make finance relevant to operations so we’re speaking the same language and can focus more on the workforce strategy. What’s really exciting is how Planful lets our business users get on the platform with no technical knowledge needed.”

Planful’s business user experience is key to bringing the Office of the CFO closer to the business. Planning, task management, forecasting, reporting, and more are all centralized so finance and non-finance users can collaborate in a one-stop experience. It also connects finance users with non-finance users in an AI-driven process to create more accurate forecasts in the shortest possible time. The combination of Planful’s deep workforce planning capabilities and its ease of use for business users now gives Rocket Software a platform for businesswide workforce planning collaboration.