ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions builds strategic workforce planning solution with Power Platform

Founded in 1948, ManpowerGroup is a leading global workforce solutions company. It is made up of three global brands, including Talent Solutions, which focuses on talent acquisition, development, and retention. Talent Solutions also offers workforce planning, which helps organizations identify current and future talent needs—and stay ahead of skills gaps.  

One of the challenges with workforce planning is pulling all relevant data together. This often includes data from multiple systems, from internal HR and budgeting systems to external sources for job market data. It can take months to assemble the data, which is often outdated by the time a plan is constructed. Talent Solutions wanted to deliver faster, more impactful planning services to its customers. For that, a more advanced process using workforce planning software would be required.

Creating a low-cost alternative to traditional SWP solutions

There are many strategic workforce planning (SWP) software products available off the shelf but none that fit Talent Solutions’ needs. “We wanted a solution that was more customizable, because we know each customer has their own way of looking at HR data,” says Kevin Palop, Director of Operations for the Data and Digital Factory, ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions France—the team that created the solution.

Palop, who had worked on similar software at other companies, knew that customized SWP software can take months, even years, to develop. Talent Solutions wanted a solution faster and at lower cost without having to engage external software development resources. To help meet this challenge, the team turned to Microsoft Power Platform. As Palop says, “We aren’t a software company, so we have to adapt, using the technologies we have at hand. We were already using Power Platform and, as we quickly discovered, we could cover all the functionalities we needed to build an effective workforce planning solution.” Ultimately, the SWP solution was built by five developers on the Data & Digital Factory (D2F) team in France. Created to provide digital solutions using Power Platform, D2F completed the solution in just two months.

From data structuring to AI-driven analysis

The SWP solution developed by the company streamlines the entire planning process, providing greater visibility and hands-on planning options to all users. Customers start by loading data into SharePoint. Power Platform dataflows—self-service, cloud-based data preparation technology—are then used to ingest, transform, and load data into Microsoft Dataverse environments. Romain Chamot, Head of Data and Digital Factory, ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions France, says, “What we love about the Power Platform solution is that, no matter what the data source, we can use dataflows to extract a diverse set of data, and then we can structure it in for analysis.”

Structuring data often involves adding missing elements to complete a record. In many cases, for example, customers will list job roles required but not include the related skills. To add this missing data, the system is connected to baseline references (for example, the ROME job reference in France). Interoperation with Azure OpenAI Service then matches skills with the jobs listing to augment customer data and provide a more complete picture of a customer’s HR requirements. This is done using similarity-embedding models in Azure OpenAI, which capture semantic similarity between text pieces.

Along with customer data, the system brings together job market and regulatory data (such as new employment laws), along with ManpowerGroup’s own market intelligence to enable projections on job demand and supply, attrition rates, and other data trends needed for benchmarking and planning. Integration across HR and finance systems enables budget forecasting against predefined strategies.

To build out planning scenarios, consultants and customers use a model-driven app built with Microsoft Power Apps and interoperable with Dataverse. This app also enables users to update or change planning objectives and modify information in Dataverse. The impact of these changes is displayed in Power BI. Customers can also easily layer on data to see how a plan is progressing against original objectives. Localized apps enable operational HR managers to visualize the impact a central strategy has on their teams and create their action plan. For users who prefer to work with the data in Excel, a Power Automate flow exports the data into a spreadsheet and can also import it back into Dataverse.

The SWP solution also takes advantage of powerful AI capabilities. Using data analysis and Azure OpenAI embeddings, the system can calculate the percentage of employees that can be deployed to other jobs in a company, based on their specific skill set. Similarly, AI is used to match employees with job opportunities outside the company. In this way, the platform has helped expand the services offered by Talent Solutions to include individual career coaching during downsizing and other career-shifting scenarios.

Preparing competency reports for this type of coaching used to take hours. With the SWP system, these same reports can be generated in a fraction of the time. “In five minutes, our SWP system can generate a competency report, which can be very helpful for an employee to find a new job. With faster reports, our Power Platform–based SWP system also enables our consultants to devote more time to one-on-one coaching and career planning,” says Alix Baissac, HR Project Manager at ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions France.

The solution is also benefiting Talent Solutions directly. With faster and deeper analysis, both the number and length of engagements with existing and new clients have increased.

Originally created for the French market, the SWP solution is now set to be used globally across the ManpowerGroup network. At the same time, the D2F team is fielding requests for other Power Platform solutions for other divisions, including low-code add-ons for other Microsoft systems used by the company, such as Dynamics 365 CRM. “Our Power Platform development practice has grown much faster than we originally anticipated—and that’s a great thing for the business,” says Chamot.