Manpower Demand Planner

Job Overview

This position requires forecasting, planning, and coordinating manpower needs across various projects and departments to ensure timely availability of appropriate human resources. The role involves harmonizing manpower demands with existing workforce capacity to aid recruitment, mobilization, deployment, utilization efficiencies, and cost management.

Core Responsibilities

• Develop short-, medium-, and long-term manpower forecasts derived from project pipeline insights, workloads, scheduling, and organizational priorities.
• Conduct capacity planning by contrasting forecasted needs with current headcount and skill configurations to pinpoint deficits, surpluses, and timing challenges.
• Collaborate with Operations, Projects, HR, Recruitment, and Finance to verify manpower needs, prioritize initiatives, and set deployment timelines.
• Recommend strategic actions such as transfers, hiring, temporary staffing, or other measures to balance workforce demand and supply, reducing idle time and controlling costs.
• Maintain meticulous manpower planning documentation, assumptions, and approved plan versions, ensuring traceability and effective communication of changes.
• Create and distribute regular manpower demand and capacity reports, including utilization, mobilization updates, and planning effectiveness dashboards.

Detailed Task Execution

• Aggregate manpower requests categorized by project, role, skill, location, and required dates into a unified demand plan.
• Validate these requests against project timelines, scope approval, productivity data, historical records, and financial budgets.
• Maintain a rolling forecast covering mobilizations, demobilizations, leaves, and anticipated attrition.
• Analyze discrepancies between forecast demands and workforce availability to identify capacity gaps and excesses.
• Prioritize recruitment and mobilization by translating confirmed gaps into actionable hiring and deployment targets.
• Assist in resource deployment planning, facilitating transfers and reassignment between projects based on skills, availability, and priorities.
• Develop manpower scenarios to accommodate new contracts, delays, scope variations, peak demand periods, and other significant changes.
• Support manpower review meetings weekly and monthly, recording decisions, follow-up actions, responsible parties, and deadlines.
• Align manpower tracking tools, ERP/HRMS data, and dashboards with approved staffing plans and deployment information.
• Perform variance analyses by comparing actual manpower usage against forecasts, investigating key deviations, and refining future planning assumptions.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives in planning processes, workforce utilization, reporting automation, and data accuracy by leveraging analytics tools, Power BI, and AI as applicable.

Deliverables & Key Performance Indicators

• Deliver an up-to-date, rolling manpower demand plan categorized by project, department, role, skillset, and time period according to approved systems.
• Provide insight into staffing shortages, surpluses, timing issues, and actionable recommendations for closing resource gaps.
• Maintain a comprehensive manpower planning dashboard reporting on demand, capacity, open requirements, mobilization progress, utilization rates, and notable exceptions.
• Monitor and improve forecast accuracy by benchmarking planned versus actual manpower usages and applying corrective measures.
• Supply HR, Recruitment, and Operations with timely and prioritized manpower requirements to guide hiring and deployment efforts.
• Support workforce efficiency and cost containment by maximizing utilization and minimizing idle time, excessive overtime, and avoidable staffing expenditures.

Health, Safety, and Environmental Responsibilities

• Proper use of company machinery, tools, appliances, transportation, and equipment is mandatory.
• Strict adherence to wearing company-issued personal protective equipment is required.
• Removing safety devices or disabling machinery protections is prohibited.
• Compliance with all safety regulations and cooperation with the company to maintain a risk-free working environment are expected.
• Responsible for monitoring and reducing resource consumption to minimize environmental impacts.

Qualifications & Experience

• Minimum of four years’ experience in manpower, workforce, or resource planning, ideally with project-based operations.
• Demonstrated expertise in demand forecasting, capacity assessment, utilization management, workforce mobilization/demobilization, and manpower analytics.
• Strong analytical skills to evaluate and interpret workforce data and planning assumptions effectively.
• Additional certifications in workforce planning, data analytics, project planning, or human resources are advantageous.