Fujitsu is accelerating its shift toward a solutions and services led business, a transformation that also requires modernizing the management processes supporting it. As personnel costs grew as a proportion of total expenses, managing them effectively became critical for the success of the transformation. However, HR and Finance were using different standards for workforce and personnel cost planning, creating a persistent dual standard that undermined consistency across the organization. Takaharu Akiyama from the HR division recalls, "Our workforce plans weren’t being reflected in the financial plans, and hiring criteria within the Business Units had become unclear. These issues were slowing down the business."
He continues, "Since securing and allocating the right talent is central to HR’s role, we realized that our traditional approach didn’t allow us to capture personnel costs accurately. To ensure these workforce changes were properly reflected in the P&L, we realized we needed to align with Finance and ultimately agreed to replace our separate standards with a unified approach."
Sumito Inazumi from the Finance division shared the same sense of urgency. He explains, "As our business model and portfolio evolve, our talent portfolio must change as well. With limited resources available to achieve both our business plans and P&L targets, optimizing human resources is a shared mission for Finance and HR. That’s why we first considered unifying all workforce and personnel cost data—actuals, plans, and forecasts—into a single, consolidated view.”
Business transformation also reshaped the workforce. Mid-career hiring increased, and the skills required across the organization became more diverse. Whereas headcount had previously been managed centrally with new employees assigned to roles after joining, the organization now reviews its structure more frequently and must secure the right talent in a timely manner. This shift has elevated workforce planning from simply determining hiring volumes to identifying the specific skills, capability levels, and number of people needed for each business area.
To address these challenges, the team first integrated data across the organization and refreshed the planning process. Consultant Hiroshi Shimada from Ridgelinez recalls that the situation
reflected a common, deeply rooted issue: workforce and management accounting practices varied widely across departments, existing budgeting tools fell short, and teams continued relying on
Excel. With no solution that met business requirements, the team decided to transition these Excel-based processes to a digital platform.
The team sought to move away from Excel to streamline workforce-plan consolidation and better align departments. Each unit had been creating its own Excel files, which then had to be manually combined-an effort-intensive process prone to errors. As business conditions and talent mobility accelerated, this approach could no longer support timely, accurate planning or meaningful simulations.
Toshinori Nozaki from the Cross-Industry Solutions Division saw that a platform like Anaplan would best support modernizing the planning process. He highlights three essentials for effective planning: keeping data current to increase speed, using AI- and statistics-based forecasting to improve accuracy, and documenting the rationale behind plans to ensure transparency and identify the most reproducible scenario.
