Effective Human Resource Planning Using Quantitative Tools - A Suggestive Approach

Basic process of Human Resource Planning (HRP) is not only to compare present human resources to future needs but also to identify skill and competency gaps. Competency gap analysis helps to develop required competency in line with the organisational mission, vision and strategic objectives. HRP provides strategic basis for taking HR decisions, anticipating change. Of-late HRP has become an important enterprise-wide strategic function not only to achieve goals and objectives but also to sustain present level in organisations. Globally, skill shortages, competency gap, redundancies, downsizing, rightsizing are the major issues in today's organisations. The biggest problem for manpower or human resource redundancy lies with inadequate Human Resource Planning (HRP). To achieve any goal, manpower requirement needs to be assessed, located and harnessed. HRP is not mere assessment of number of men required. An organisation also has to categorise men as per their knowledge and skills and so also to ensure their balanced allocation. This study discusses the contemporary HRP process, without, however, discarding the importance of traditional processes altogether. Traditional processes, by and large follow logical sequence to study the job and then translate the job information into manpower requirement. Here, however, we have discussed the importance of application of some selected quantitative manpower planning models and then suggested their consideration for reducing the risk of inaccurate manpower planning. While doing so, some theoretical discussions with illustrations have been made deliberately to avoid any possible gap in understanding the models.