Having launched the innovative shift_it software last year for real-time employee scheduling on the shop floor, the management and IT consultancy MHP has now brought out plan_it, a tool suitable for short- to long-term human resource planning.
Markus Wambach, Group COO at MHP: “This is now the eighth in-house development for our ICS portfolio and a logical upgrade to the previous solution used for tactical employee scheduling on the shop floor. With plan_it, companies have another tool at their disposal for planning their production operations more efficiently and closing potential gaps in actual demand.”
Precise and flexible human resource planning across locations
As an integrated software solution, plan_it helps manufacturing companies to manage the entire human resource planning process – across all time frames and locations or plants. The solution consolidates all relevant planning data from the ERP and other connected systems in a single data pool and facilitates realistic human resource requirement forecasts and scenario analyses. After all, production managers are often faced with the challenge of planning the number of employees actually required at the right time in the short to long term, particularly against the backdrop of volatile demand, scarce resources and short product life cycles. To do this, they need tools that give them a realistic picture of these aspects.
Visual dashboards also make decisions more transparent and help employees to use the tool intuitively. Integrated workflow management also permits fast approval procedures.
Marius Reber, product manager at MHP, reports: “Human resource planning is made much easier with this tool, especially when it involves new investments and upgrades, new model series, or other production changeovers. It systematically reduces the risk of overstaffing or bottlenecks.”
plan_it and shift_it: a strong team
Evidence-based, short- to long-term human resource planning is an important factor in enabling industrial companies to make smart investment decisions and other fundamental decisions. For example, plan_it helps them to plan on an annual, monthly, and weekly basis for headcount optimization and scenario management.
At the same time, however, companies are also faced with the task of efficiently organizing their day-to-day production operations, with the main focus on coordinating up-to-date shift schedules and employee rosters. MHP’s shift_it is also an ideal solution for these tasks. It helps employee scheduling to run smoothly in the company’s operations – in other words, it ensures that there are always enough employees with the right skills in the right place on the shop floor at the right time. Together, plan_it and shift_it form a comprehensive solution for the efficient deployment of staff in production areas.
“shift_it and plan_it already add real value as individual solutions for manufacturing companies. This is increased even further when companies intelligently combine both solutions, with plan_it allowing companies to cover their staffing needs cost-efficiently in the long term and shift_it guaranteeing flexible and quickly adaptable deployment of staff on the shop floor,” summarizes Michael Appel, partner at MHP.
MHP will be presenting the new solution for optimal human resource planning for the first time in Munich at automatica, the leading trade fair for smart automation and robotics. Besides plan_it, all seven software solutions from the Industrial Cloud Solutions (ICS) portfolio will be presented from June 24 to 27, 2025.
SOURCE: MHP
