Better workforce agility and resilience: Adapting to change with Infor WFM

Infor™ recently surveyed hundreds of Infor Workforce Management (WFM) users to gain a deeper understanding of how our solutions deliver value to customers, improve their operations, and help them achieve their organisational goals. Organisations have different motivations when selecting and implementing a WFM solution, and we aim to better understand these diverse needs and priorities. In this blog series, our WFM strategists and Product Management team will share how Infor WFM addresses customers’ specific challenges and supports their key initiatives.

Here are the top five challenges organisations seek to address with Infor WFM:

1. Customers need better workforce agility and resilience to adapt to changing market conditions.
2. Many lack adequate data visibility and advanced scheduling capabilities that prevent optimal workforce utilisation.
3. Inaccurate and inaccessible labour data often hinders organisational growth by complicating strategic planning.
4. Inefficient workforce processes create obstacles to meeting productivity goals across departments.
5. Many organisations select Infor WFM as part of a broader initiative to adopt newer technologies that can transform their operations.

This first blog of the series explores the number one reason why our clients choose Infor WFM: to support better workforce agility and resilience.

Chetan Parmar, Head of Product Management for WFM, believes that adaptive, demand-driven scheduling is the cornerstone of improving workforce agility and resilience.

Why it matters: Workforce agility starts with matching labour to fluctuating real-time demand—whether that’s patient census, store traffic, or service-level agreements (SLAs). These factors must be balanced without overutilising or burning out staff. As organizations strive to do more with less amid workforce shortages, workforce agility significantly impacts the bottom line.

How WFM helps: Infor WFM supports organisations in meeting coverage workload requirements through intelligent forecasting and workload-driven scheduling, ensuring the right number of employees are assigned to match operational demands. Its open shift management capabilities streamline the process of filling unassigned shifts by providing visibility into staffing gaps and enabling employees to claim available shifts through self-service tools, reducing administrative overhead. Additionally, Infor WFM's advanced scheduling features leverage automation and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven insights to create optimised schedules that balance business needs, employee preferences, and compliance requirements. By addressing critical aspects of workload coverage, shift management, and scheduling complexity, Infor WFM helps businesses maintain operational efficiency while fostering a more agile and engaged workforce.

According to Kristin Shelley, WFM Strategist for Healthcare, unified time, attendance, and labour analytics for fast decisions provides the quickest route to agility and resilience.

Why it matters: Resilience depends on identifying trends early, such as creeping overtime, skill shortages, and compliance drift—and acting before they snowball. Large, complex organisations relying on multiple siloed sources of data, manual or paper processes, or poorly adopted WFM solutions struggle to detect these warning signals.

How WFM helps: When schedules, clock data, accrual balances, and labour cost metrics flow into the same analytics layer, leaders get one source of truth. Dashboards highlight budget variances, drill down to root causes (shift, unit, employee), and enable “what-if” scenarios for leaders. For example: “If incentive pay increases by $5.00/hour, what will be the cost to Facility A?” These insights support efficient decision-making and rapid course correction.

For Brianna Zink, Global WFM Strategist, employee empowerment and engagement that support ownership at the frontline are key to achieving true agility.

Why it matters: A workforce that feels in control of its schedule recovers faster from disruption and is less likely to churn—a key facet of organisational resilience.

How WFM helps: Infor WFM’s self-service capabilities allow staff to swap or pick up shifts, view balances, and request time off without manager intervention. These features give employees immediate input into their schedule, giving them greater flexibility from day one. Intelligent rules automatically ensure trades meet skill, credential, and labour-law requirements, removing this burden from frontline managers. By empowering employees with agency and transparency, you build trust, reduce administrative overhead, and maintain a deeper bench of motivated talent.

Together, these three capabilities—adaptive scheduling, unified analytics, and employee empowerment—transform workforce management from a back-office chore into a strategic lever for agility and resilience.

Stay tuned for the next blog in the series to explore how Infor WFM addresses the critical challenge of inadequate data visibility and advanced scheduling capabilities that prevent optimal workforce utilisation.