Workforce Planning Tool

Part of the worlds-biggest-software-project initiative.

An AI-native, open-source workforce planning platform for headcount, skills, and scenario modeling — built for the mid-market and the AI-displacement era.

The Workforce Planning Tool is a self-hostable platform that helps HR, Finance, and Strategy leaders plan headcount, model skills supply versus demand, and simulate workforce scenarios. It targets the 500–2,000 employee mid-market segment that today is priced out of Anaplan, Visier, Orgvue, and Eightfold, and equips smaller organisations with the same class of planning intelligence that enterprise incumbents reserve for six-figure contracts.

Why Workforce Planning Tool?

The mid-market is unserved. Anaplan ($100K+/yr), Visier ($80K–$200K/yr), Orgvue ($50K–$150K/yr), and Eightfold ($150K–$500K+/yr) are effectively priced out of reach for organisations with 500–2,000 employees, who currently fall back to Excel or HRIS reports.
No credible OSS alternative exists. Every analysed incumbent — Workday Adaptive, Anaplan, Visier, Orgvue, Eightfold, TechWolf, Drivetrain, Abacum, Nakisa — is fully proprietary SaaS with no open-source components.
Skills taxonomy projects take 6–18 months. Existing tools require organisations to bring their own skills data; manual taxonomy projects are slow, expensive, and stale by the time they are complete.
No incumbent models AI displacement. None of the major planning tools can answer the defining workforce question of 2026–2030: which roles will be automated, on what timeline, and what reskilling investment is required to redeploy affected employees.
Vendor lock-in restricts best-of-breed planning. Workday's "better together" bundling and Anaplan's proprietary Hyperblock data model prevent organisations from assembling a planning stack from the best components available.

Key Features

Headcount & Cost Planning

Headcount planning by role, department, location, and time horizon (quarterly and annual)
Workforce cost modeling including salary bands, benefits, and contractor costs
Actuals vs. plan variance tracking with rolling forecast updates
Driver-based headcount modeling tied to revenue, volume, or customer ratios
Role-based dashboards for CHRO planning view and CFO cost view

Scenario Modeling

Multiple simultaneous what-if branches without overwriting the base plan
Side-by-side comparison of cost, headcount, and span-of-control across alternative org designs
Natural language scenario authoring (e.g. "What if we automate 30% of customer service over 18 months?")
Continuous plan deviation alerting with root-cause attribution

Skills Intelligence

Skills taxonomy integration with ESCO and O*NET as reference standards
AI-driven skills inference from HRIS records, resumes, and project data — no employee self-reporting required
Continuous taxonomy updates as roles and job-market terminology evolve
Skills supply versus future demand mapping linked to strategic plans

AI Displacement & Reskilling

Task-level analysis of roles to identify automatable, augmentable, and irreducibly human work
AI displacement modeling with hours-saveable estimates per role
Reskilling path modeling with learning time estimates and ROI projections versus external hiring
Skills adjacency mapping to surface internal redeployment candidates

Integrations & Reporting

HRIS integration via HR Open Standards or REST API, targeting Workday, BambooHR, ADP, and SAP SuccessFactors
Pluggable connector framework for ATS, LMS, and finance systems
ISO 30414:2018 human capital report generation from plan data
XBRL human capital disclosure export for SEC reporting use cases

AI-Native Advantage

AI is woven into the planning loop rather than bolted on as a query interface. Skills inference runs continuously from passive signals in HRIS, project, and learning systems, collapsing what is currently a 6–18 month manual taxonomy project into days. Natural language scenario authoring lets HR Business Partners and finance leads ask planning questions directly without Anaplan certification or spreadsheet expertise. Most distinctively, the platform models AI displacement and reskilling pathways at the task level — a capability no major incumbent offers as of 2026.

Tech Stack & Deployment

The platform is designed with a self-hosted Docker Compose deployment as the primary distribution mode, with an optional managed cloud offering for organisations that prefer a SaaS posture. Skills data exchange aligns to ESCO and O*NET taxonomies and the HR Open Standards schemas, with REST and webhook APIs for HRIS, ATS, LMS, and finance connectors. The architecture is API-first so that the skills intelligence and scenario engines can be consumed independently of the bundled UI, enabling a best-of-breed planning stack rather than monolithic lock-in.

Market Context

The dedicated workforce planning tools market was valued at $1.5B in 2024 and is projected to reach $3.8B by 2033 at a 10.5% CAGR (Verified Market Research, 2026), with the broader workforce management software market estimated at $9.76B in 2026 (Mordor Intelligence). Incumbent annual pricing ranges from approximately $25–$40 per user per month for Workday Adaptive bundled with HCM, up to $100K+ for Anaplan, $80K–$200K for Visier, and $50K–$150K for Orgvue. Primary buyers are CHROs, VPs of FP&A, Heads of Talent / Workforce Strategy, and People Analytics leads at organisations aligning headcount with multi-year strategy and AI transformation roadmaps.

Project Status

This project is in the research and specification phase.
Contributions, feedback, and domain expertise are welcome.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from developers, domain experts, and potential users. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Important: All contributions must be your own original work or clearly attributed open-source material with a compatible licence. Copyright infringement and licence violations will not be tolerated and will result in immediate removal of the offending contribution. If you are unsure whether a piece of code, text, or other material is safe to contribute, open an issue and ask before submitting.

Licence

Licence to be determined. See discussion for context.