Fujitsu Limited Smarter Workforce Decisions

Since its beginnings in 1935, Fujitsu has been innovating information and communication technologies around the world, becoming a leading company in the industry. Fujitsu’s purpose is to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation while offering a broad range global.fujitsu/en-global of products, services, and solutions, globally.

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.

Fujitsu chose Anaplan for its ability to eliminate Excel-based workflows and rapidly consolidate scattered planning data. HR and Finance jointly drove the implementation, unifying headcount and personnel cost information into a single platform. This created an enterprise-wide planning foundation that enables faster, more accurate resource management and seamless P&L alignment.
With Anaplan, data is aggregated instantly as plans are entered, improving both accuracy and efficiency. The platform also allows each department to plan at the level of detail they need, without rigid formatting requirements.

Akiyama from HR explains, "We first unified headcount and personnel cost planning so that HR's resource needs and Finance's P&L requirements could be managed together. We then worked with business units to adapt the platform to their workflows. Although we initially expected a single standardized model to suffice, each department required different planning elements, so we refined the specifications to ensure practical usability."

Anaplan’s flexibility allows teams to manage data with an Excel-like experience while unifying HR and Finance information, eliminating version inconsistencies and enabling more accurate planning. Its ability to create and simulate multiple scenarios also supports selecting the most effective, data-driven approach.
Shimada from Ridgelinez notes, "Even basic personnel cost data differs between HR and Finance, making accurate comparison difficult. Workforce planning was new to Fujitsu, but the strong expectations of stakeholders helped drive the project forward as we aligned everyone on the purpose and benefits."

The introduction of Anaplan delivered significant benefits from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

1.Eliminating Manual Effort
By removing manual, Excel-based aggregation, consolidation work and human errors were eliminated. Data is now updated and visualized instantly as plans are entered, enabling faster and more accurate decision making.
2.Greater Autonomy and Faster Execution
With a unified planning process, business units gained the autonomy to make timely hiring decisions within defined plan parameters. This enabled faster, business-aligned staffing and contributed directly to organizational growth.
3.data-driven Scenario Exploration
By simulating multiple scenarios in real time—such as different personnel cost assumptions—the planning process moves beyond simple visualization and enables data-driven discussions that lead to better company-wide decisions.

Looking ahead, the new planning foundation will enable more precise workforce allocation by linking staffing decisions with business specific productivity indicators and combining them with P&L insights. Finance can now perform deeper analysis of personnel costs alongside other financial variables, while the team plans to work closely with HR to develop more innovative planning content and improve usability through Anaplan templates. HR is also strengthening its approach to workforce allocation by identifying talent gaps and addressing them through targeted hiring, development, and reskilling.

The insights gained from the internal implementation now support customer transformations that extend beyond tool deployment. The team emphasizes that navigating constant change requires continually seeking the best solution and enabling rapid workforce realignment. True progress for organizations facing planning challenges comes from transforming not only tools, but also management practices, talent models, and culture—and the team is committed to helping customers achieve that.

Fujitsu draws on the experience gained through its internal projects to offer practical support for digital transformation. By considering not only tools but also process and organizational needs, it continues to help companies improve their planning practices at a pace that works best for them.