Strategic Workforce Planning 
Background
Apotex is a global pharmaceutical company that produces high-quality, affordable medicines (both generic and innovative pharmaceuticals) for patients around the world. The annual revenue is 500 million and they operate in more than 45 countries and have 5,000 people in manufacturing, R&D and commercial operations.
The Challenge
Our client wanted to know their current and future capability requirements in their Global Regulatory Function, and where they had to expect workforce gaps. They were not sure if they had the right talent in the right place to meet their strategic objectives. We helped Apotex with Strategic Workforce Planning.
Approach
In order to help Apotex plan proactively for future people challenges, Human Edge generated a three year supply and demand simulation in order to accurately predict how the workforce will change given if left alone with people exiting and the demand for certain roles changing.
We started with their business strategy, which consists primarily of driving growth and increasing profitability, and translated to human capital needs. This entailed working with the business leaders and taking their strategy and business drivers and creating algorithms based on their specific business operating model. This allowed us then to create multiple scenarios for them.
Once the supply and demand of talent was determined, a workshop was conducted with the senior leaders to focus on the right initiatives to close the talent gaps.
Outcomes
In order to increase future supply the following initiatives were identified:
- Focus on increasing retention in India and a reduction of turnover by half was recommended.
- Create demand scenarios for new and existing products need to be planned carefully.
- Increased training and higher retention rates were required in order to lower future demand.
- Review the baseline assumptions in 2019/20 to evaluate the impact and forecasting accuracy.
