TVH embraces strategic workforce planning to build a future-ready organization

TVH is a global supplier of parts and accessories for industrial vehicles, and agricultural and construction equipment. The company started in Belgium as a family business in 1969 to maintain and sell agricultural machines and forklifts. Today, it has around 5,300 employees and 90 branches offering 47 million items in 182 countries.

Over time, TVH’s rapid growth has created a more complex and sophisticated organizational structure than its systems and processes could adequately support. So, they began a transformation project in 2021 to introduce scalable processes into the business.

Building a future-ready organization with strategic workforce planning

To achieve this, TVH has committed to creating a five-year strategic workforce plan to understand the impact of strategic initiatives on its future workforce. From an HR perspective, the aim is to identify gaps between TVH’s future workforce needs and its available workforce today. The longer-term outlook is to build a center of excellence that will make the workforce planning process sustainable.

Working initially to a financial plan, the project team, comprising HR and business stakeholders, focused on the size, shape, and location of the future workforce. TVH chose Orgvue for this work, since the complexity involved would have been too onerous and time consuming to tackle using conventional planning tools such as spreadsheets.

Demand drivers, supply forecasting, and scenario modelling

TVH used Orgvue to follow a five-step planning process to align its workforce demand to the business strategy and assess any gaps in future demand.

The team identified a number of workforce demand drivers, which they then used to create three scenarios to model and prepare for future developments. These were a business-as-usual growth plan without digital transformation, a stronger growth plan with digital transformation, and introducing a new head office in Asia in addition to this.

Organizing the current workforce into role clusters

TVH began by building a supply baseline by mapping all employees to the role categories they’d defined earlier, whichenabled a qualitative assessment of roles as well as quantitative. They used Orgvue to validate the data, so that refinements could be made and role clusters slimmed down.

The team then used Orgvue to visualize workforce data, so they could see how employees were distributed across the organization by country, business unit, tenure, and age.

Aligning future workforce demand with business strategy

Using the three business scenarios, TVH was able to adjust its demand planning to account for increases or decreases in the number of full-time employees within affected role clusters. They could also see whether a role cluster would be affected by more than one strategic initiative at a time. And they were able to introduce new role clusters in Orgvue to prepare for future skills not identified today.

Orgvue’s demand planning supports different methods that can be combined flexibly. For example, TVH was able to associate selected role clusters with volume drivers to simulate how its workforce would evolve with business growth. They could then see which roles would be affected longer term and where growth was likely to occur.

Comparing workforce supply with demand planning scenarios

In working out any gaps in future workforce demand, TVH used Orgvue to forecast its supply, showing how the rate of attrition through voluntary leavers and retirement would shrink the workforce over time.

With demand assumptions and supply forecast tested through scenario simulations, the team was able to combine these to produce a gap analysis, revealing where there was a surplus or deficit. Then, using a heatmap visualization in Orgvue across each workforce segment, TVH could consider ways to address any gaps, whether through reskilling, recruitment, or reducing demand by moving work to contract staff.

TVH also used Orgvue’s simulation engine to visualize the impact of gap analysis by role cluster, business unit, and location at the same time. They were also able to breakdown the impact on workforce demand of strategic initiatives, such as the third head office, digital initiatives, and operational alignment.

A clearer, organizationally aligned view of the future

Since embracing a data-driven, continuous approach, TVH is now able to make better strategic decisions concerning its future workforce. This new approach has already revealed short-term optimization opportunities that don’t undermine longer-term planning.

The company now has an in-house capability for strategic workforce planning and has begun to build its center of excellence to support workforce transformation. It has also begun to establish governance around its workforce planning processes to ensure they integrate well with other HR and finance processes. And different stakeholders across the business now share the same assumptions concerning the future workforce.

TVH is now working on an action plan to prepare for initiatives such as automation in priority areas of the business. The business transformation is set to continue for several years, with regular updates to the company’s strategic workforce planning being made as the work progresses.