Why can Excel no longer be your staffing tool in 2024?
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Estelle
Content manager
November 16, 2020
7 min
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Too many staffing managers and managers in service companies still manage the staffing of their employees on a daily basis on Excel files. 🤦
If, when creating a service company, the choice of Excel to manage staffing is almost natural - since it is a simple tool, mastered by the greatest number and free - It cannot be registered for the long term like your Staffing tool.
When a service company exceeds thirty employees, the use of Excel damages its performance and underoptimizes its staffing: loss of time, risk of errors, rigidities, impossible data intersections... In this article, we return to all the limits of Excel that you may not be aware of and that degrade your performance.
Before going back point by point to the weaknesses of Excel, it is worth recalling that as a service company grows, it will be structured and equipped with tools for the management of precise “administrative” processes: an ERP for time recording and invoicing, an HRIS for managing the HR Core and leave, a CRM to support its prospecting activities and the follow-up of its customers. These tools, which are often disconnected from each other, are also disconnected from the Excel file, although they hold extremely valuable information for staffing. Staffing is at the heart of the reactor of a service company, which is why the organization and transmission of staffing data are major challenges for these companies..
Optimize your workload plan and the allocation of your resources to carry out more projects.
Since the data that impacts staffing is split between different tools (ERP, SIRH, CRM), the direct consequence is that it will be necessary to make a large number of double entries between these tools and the Excel staffing file.
Here are some examples of information to include in the staffing file :
• The business opportunities, project/client information and associated staffing needs from the CRM;
• The Information on the entrances/exits of employees as well as their leave from the SIRH;
• The time entered on a project in the ERP to determine whether the project is at a loss or not and whether it is possible to extend the mission by a few days.
This lack of centralization and these double entries have the following consequences :
📈 Considerable increase in the risk of errors And ofheterogeneity of data between the staffing file and third-party software: naturally, the more employees to manage increases, the more the volume of double entries increases.
📉 Process slowdown and underperformance : beyond the very time-consuming aspect of double entry for a staffing manager (5 hours per week on average for a service company with a hundred employees), how can you ensure that the data is up to date in the staffing file if it is not automatically centralized? Returning to your HRIS for each staffing choice in order to verify that the employees envisaged are not on vacation during the period concerned by the staffing is almost inhuman. At best this results in a significant loss of time for the staffing manager, at worst it causes scheduling conflicts for consultants.
In addition to not being centralized, the data relating to your staffing process are not updated automatically. Several consequences of this:
⏱ Each modification to the staffing file (validation of an assignment, change of intervention periods, change of system...) involves notifying the employees concerned, manual intervention very time consuming for managers and staffing managers (if it is done at all) that we should be able to automate. The time saved could be used much more effectively on tasks with high added value: staffing trade-offs or the forecasting of future training or recruitment needs, for example.
🔀 A mismatch between staffing data and the field. For example, if an employee is finally available in advance because his project ended earlier than expected, the staffing manager is not quickly brought up to speed, which underoptimizes the structure's staffing rate since the collaborator could have been staffed on another project in the process. It is all too common to find out several weeks after the actual end of a project that the actual end date (entered in the ERP) was not in line with the theoretical one indicated in the staffing Excel.
An optimal process to streamline the response to planning needs.
Many service companies continue to manage the skills of their employees on the one hand and the staffing on the other. Generally via CVs and skills files stored on the company's server, at best on an Excel file with the employees online and the company's skills in columns, crosses indicating whether the employee has the competence or not. This Excel lives “next to” the staffing Excel and is rarely updated, often after the employee's annual performance interview.
However, when it is necessary to choose the most appropriate consultant for a mission, the ideal for a staffing manager is to be able to instantly cross a maximum of employee data between them (availability, geographical location, seniority, seniority, CJM, skills, aspirations...). By doing so, the staffing manager will improve:
• The Rate of conversion of propals into missions won by proposing more relevant profiles and therefore the future turnover of the structure;
• The quality of the mission delivered : positioning the most specialized employees on a given subject can only increase the value created for the customer;
• Theemployee commitment since those for whom the mission corresponds to the expectations/aspirations will, in the end, have the best chance of being mobilized on it.
Skills must be put to the benefit of the implementation of projects, the development of employees and the performance of the company.
With around thirty employees, Excel files tend to become heavy, saturated with information, and even illegible. However, as we have indicated, optimizing your staffing means above all making trade-offs, and this on the basis of up-to-date data. Naturally, the more data there is, the more difficult it is to keep it up to date manually. In particular, it is impossible to know on an Excel file when the data was updated and therefore to know if they really are... A tip would be to associate each piece of information with its last updated date, for example the last date of update of the staffing information for a given project.
This solution is a first step, but It is inconceivable to believe that this can be achieved at the level of all the staffing data manually on an Excel.
Your staffing information is always consolidated.
It is very common to observe service companies in which the management of staffing is ensured at the level of a department or branch by a dedicated staffing manager.
When the question of the autonomy of staffing between departments was decided, the instructions given by management to the various staffing managers were nevertheless clear:”for staffing, we will keep the Excel file that we used until then. I ask you not to change it”.
However, as the company grows, staffing becomes more and more complex and priorities change. The initial staffing file is no longer enough, and staffing managers are starting to modify their staffing Excel so that they fit perfectly with the needs of the department (formulas, format, data organization, etc.). After a few months, the Excel staffing files between all departments differ and the reconciliation between the documents to manage the macro staffing rate of the structure and anticipate activity becomes An ordeal for management, or is even flawed.
On Excel, it is not possible to configure different reading and editing rights, changes made by hand cannot be subject to a validation process: a modified cell can irretrievably distort the reading of the future staffing rate.
This prevents collaborative management of an Excel from Staffing, it is necessary to designate a person who will be responsible for it.
Faced with this situation, it is difficult - even impossible - to have several staffing managers or managers collaborate on the same Excel file without exposing yourself to the risk of errors or version conflicts.
Everyone therefore works on a file that is their own and that they do not share. Two consequences of this:
⛔ The The flow of information on current and upcoming projects is blocked for employees who discover their staffing at the last moment and have the feeling that it is completely opaque.
🕶 The Staffing managers do not have visibility on the staffing of other managers and therefore, do not know the availability of employees from another department/BU. This underoptimizes the company's performance because projects can be refused at the level of a department due to lack of resources (which were actually available in another team). Moreover, this trend of decompartmentalization is accentuated with the use of teleworking, which abolishes staffing organizations built around a geographical logic.
Staffing is the nerve center of a service company. Information on collaborators and projects is combined there. It is often made of the security of data stored on an ERP or an HRIS, this same logic should apply for staffing data.
Or the Excel security being weak - or almost zero - the data stored on this type of file is exposed and not protected. Formerly, the staffing Excel could be saved on a server dedicated to the company and accessible only in case of physical presence in the offices or via a VPN when the manager was occasionally at his client's house or on the go. With the use of teleworking, the Excel for staffing must be accessible simply and from everywhere and the reality is that it is often no longer protected... A problem that needs to be answered immediately.
We went through the main problems associated with using an Excel for staffing.
As you can see, Excel is no longer adapted to Staffing management of a service company.
Before taking the plunge definitively, you should know that getting out of a staffing Excel is not trivial. You will have to find the ideal replacement solution, configure it, connect it, and train your managers and employees so that everyone can use it perfectly. This transition lasts an average of 3 to 6 weeks.
Opt for a solution designed and dedicated to Staffing management is however the best way to optimize staffing at the level of an organization in the medium/long term: optimizing the occupancy rate, saving time for staffing managers and managers, increasing the commitment of employees to their missions and, therefore, improving performance.
Do you want to go deeper into the subject? We have lots of resources at your disposal to help you go further.
In addition to this subject, find our white paper “Staffing management: 4 processes deciphered”.
Also discover our guides, templates and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
To find out how Napta can smoothly replace your Excel staffing system, and discover all the associated benefits, ask to speak with one of our experts.
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