MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

7 Workforce Planning Platforms for Employers Trying to Raise Productivity Without Overhiring

On October 6 Brazil's senators began arguing over a constitutional amendment that would take the legal working week down from 44 hours to 40 and leave every pay packet where it is. For employers across South America's largest economy that means roughly 9% fewer contracted hours for the same payroll, and the reflex will be to hire into the gap. Seven workforce planning platforms offer a cheaper answer. They start by showing what the people already on the books can do, before anyone new is recruited.

Hiring is the easy response. On the evidence so far it also looks like the expensive one for most firms. A plant that loses four hours per worker each week hasn't lost four hours of output unless every one of the original 44 was well used, and few managers could show that. Overhiring is what a company does when it adds people to cover hours it never measured.

The Clock Inside the Amendment

Don't mistake this for a long shot. When the lower house voted on May 27 the tally was 461 to 19, and with a count that lopsided the sensible assumption for any employer is that the change is coming. The text works in two steps. Two months after promulgation the ceiling comes down to 42 hours, and twelve months later it lands on 40. Workers get two paid rest days, and salaries can't be reduced.

In the Senate, October 6 brought the first of five debate sessions that must be held before a first vote, and the chamber's president has said that vote could follow once they're done. Passage takes 49 of the 81 senators in two rounds. Civil servants are outside the rules, as are graduates paid more than two and a half times the social security ceiling unless their employer decides otherwise.

The number of people affected is large. A labour ministry survey released in May found that about a third of the 44.7 million formal workers it classified, some 14.9 million people, work six days for one day off, and that 37.2 million are contracted for the full 44 hours. The government expects shops, service firms, factories and logistics operators to feel it most.

Same Name on the Box, Different Job Inside

Anyone comparing workforce planning tools soon learns that the label covers two different products. One kind answers a finance director's question about headcount three years from now. The other tells a shift supervisor whether tonight's crew is qualified to run the line, and that second kind is the one a shorter week tests first.

Many plants already hold spare capacity in the wrong places, with one shift carrying three people certified on a machine that needs one while the next borrows an operator on overtime because nobody else is signed off. A headcount report won't reveal that, since it counts people and says nothing about what each of them is cleared to do.

Two questions sort the candidates quickly, whichever kind a buyer is looking at. How long after a certificate lapses does the system show it, and does a change made there write back to the HR system or leave the company with two versions of the same record? In regulated plants a third question follows, about whether the history of who was qualified on a given date will stand up when an auditor asks for it.

Why AG5 Tops the Seven

So the list starts with AG5. It's Dutch, and it was built for the kind of work done standing up, in factories and warehouses, not for head office. What it holds is a skills matrix that stays current for each team at each site.

A manager squeezing a six-day roster into five can therefore look up who is signed off on which station while there's still time to do something about the Saturday nobody can cover. Take a forklift licence due to run out at the end of March. AG5 sends the first warning around New Year, ninety days out, and two more follow at sixty days and at thirty. Need somebody for the labeller on a Saturday? Ask who is cleared to run it and what comes back is a list of names.

Say a bottling line runs Monday to Saturday and four people are cleared to operate it. Once those four are on five-day contracts, there's a hole in the roster every week that somebody else has to fill. If the matrix shows two packers who already hold half the sign-offs for the filler, finishing their training takes weeks, whereas a fifth operator is a salary paid for years.

If there's one printout worth pinning to the canteen wall, it's the list of stations where a shift has exactly one person signed off. Give that one person a second day off and the station stops, so this is where a five-day roster is likely to crack first. The same list doubles as a training plan, because every line on it names a course somebody else needs to finish before the 42-hour limit arrives.

AG5 won't model next year's headcount budget or run payroll, and it doesn't claim to. It exchanges data with the systems that do, SAP and Workday among them, and it logs every change to a qualification. That log has a second use this year. ISO published a new edition of ISO 9001 on September 16, and competence remains one of the things the standard covers. Certified plants can expect auditors to ask who was qualified to do what at the very moment their rosters are changing.

Its customers include KLM Cargo and Adient. Smaller firms needn't buy anything at all, since a spreadsheet matrix copes until roughly fifty people hold certificates with different expiry dates.

The Productivity Arithmetic

The numbers don't flatter the hiring reflex. Output per hour worked in Brazil grew 0.4% in 2025 and 0.1% the year before. Economists who modelled the shorter week in September found it could shave 2.9% off value added and 0.8% off hourly productivity across the economy, with wide differences between sectors. A firm that reorganises its rosters doesn't have to land on the average.

Holding output steady on 40 hours instead of 44 means getting 10% more from every hour. At last year's rate of improvement that would take roughly a quarter of a century, and the amendment allows fourteen months.

Experience elsewhere is less bleak than that sum implies. Portugal made the same legal cut, from 44 hours to 40, in 1996, and a peer-reviewed study of what followed found that the workers affected kept roughly the same monthly earnings on higher hourly pay while job separations among them fell. The same study found that colleagues already working under 40 hours became more likely to lose their jobs. Outcomes, in other words, seem to depend on how each employer adjusts.

A Labour Market With Few Spare Hands

Suppose a firm does decide to hire its way out. Who is left to hire? In the three months to July 2025 just 5.6% of Brazil's workforce was out of a job, and the series, which goes back to 2012, had never shown a lower figure.

A year on, the market was no looser. IBGE's household survey for the quarter to May 2026 again showed 5.6%, the lowest figure for that period in the series, while its broader measure of underused labour dropped to 13.3%, a record low. An employer who sets out to recruit a tenth more staff is bidding in about the tightest market that survey has recorded.

Employers say as much themselves. Put ten Brazilian bosses in a room and eight will tell you they can't find the people they need. Make it a room of firms with between 1,000 and 4,999 staff and the count goes up to nine. What do they do about it? The most common answer, given by 44% of them, is to retrain the people already on the payroll, and nothing else on the list comes close.

The recruit hired to plug a roster gap arrives untrained, and months can pass before anyone will sign that person off on a machine. The salary keeps running after the roster has been fixed some other way. Supermarkets and factories that open six days a week will feel the temptation first, because theirs are the schedules the amendment breaks.

None of this means nobody gets hired. A supermarket open seven days can't conjure cashier hours out of a skills matrix, and some employers will need more people whatever they do.

The trouble starts when the request for extra staff goes in before anyone has checked what the current staff could cover. A manager who panics in week one might ask for six people. After a round of cross-training the real gap could turn out to be two, and by then the matrix has shown which two, down to the certificates each of them must already hold on their first morning.

Where the Other Six Fit

The planning products built for finance directors earn their place further down the list. Workday Adaptive Planning, second here, ties headcount to the finance plan and runs what-if scenarios on both. Any chief financial officer with Brazilian operations should probably be running three of them now, on what 42 hours and then 40 do to unit cost if the gap is closed with overtime, with new hires, or with cross-training.

Brazil's industry confederation has already priced the first two. Its study puts the bill for buying the lost hours back at between R$178.2 billion and R$267.2 billion a year, as much as 7% of the formal payroll, depending on whether firms use overtime or new hires. For companies with nine staff or fewer, personnel costs rise by 8.7% to 13%. Both figures assume every lost hour is replaced one for one, and that assumption is the thing a planner should test.

Anaplan comes third and does similar work for groups complicated enough to need a single model spanning several countries and business lines. The heavy implementation it demands probably rules it out for a mid-sized manufacturer with fourteen months to reach 40 hours.

Neither product is built to tell a manager who can do what. Feed either one a headcount figure in which every operator counts as one interchangeable unit, and the model will show a plant fully staffed on the very day it can't run its second line.

Fourth and fifth are the analytics specialists. Vancouver's Visier connects workforce data to turnover and productivity for large organisations. Crunchr comes from Amsterdam and speaks the language of the finance department. Feed it the data on a night shift that's short of trained operators and it comes back with what the shortage costs in overtime and in quality incidents, and a training request with a price on the problem is much harder to turn down.

Either product gives a board an answer when it asks why turnover or overtime keeps climbing. What neither will do is fix anything on the shop floor.

Sixth place goes to Eightfold AI. It reads people's career histories, works out what skills they probably have and then points them towards openings inside the company. That suits a group that would sooner move people than recruit them. The catch is that an inferred skill hasn't been assessed, and a safety inspector is unlikely to accept an algorithm's guess that a forklift driver is competent.

SAP SuccessFactors closes the list. For enterprises already running SAP it's the sensible system of record for people data, and its skills features have improved. They remain general, though, so a manufacturer tends to get more from it when a shop-floor skills tool sits alongside.

What the Neighbours Already Know

Chile is further down the same road. Back in April 2023 Chilean deputies voted 127 to 14 to bring the week down from 45 hours to 40, though not all at once, because the law spreads the cut over five years. It also lets a company hit 40 as an average over four weeks, as long as no one week runs past 45.

This April 26 was the day the Chilean ceiling dropped to 42 hours. What did the lawyers tell employers to do beforehand? Go back through their schedules, shift rotations and time-tracking systems. Brazilian firms now have the same homework, only Chile gave its companies five years to do it and Brazil's text gives fourteen months.

Brazil isn't the only place where the wage bill has become the argument, either. Across the border, Uruguay's only industrial brewer is negotiating the loss of 80 of the 400 jobs at its two plants after declaring that a beer costs twice as much to brew there as in Argentina or Brazil. Pay, contributions and benefits absorb about a quarter of its revenue.

Nobody wants to end up in a negotiation like that, with the union across the table and the government sitting in. By then the headcount is already the problem, and all that's left is haggling over how many jobs go. Next to that, a planning tool looks boring. It's also a good deal cheaper, most of the time, than a restructuring.

Seventeen Months of Warning, Fourteen to Comply

Employers can hardly say they were ambushed. The six-day roster had protesters in the streets on May Day 2025, a full year before the lower house got round to voting. A firm that spent those months lobbying when it could have been mapping its own skills has less excuse for reaching this week unprepared.

The amendment itself hands employers some room. During the transition year a collective agreement may stretch the normal working day beyond eight hours to make 42 fit, provided the two rest days survive. Relief for micro and small businesses is left to a later law.

There's a harder edge as well. Is the Saturday shift written into the union agreement? If it clashes with the new limits, that clause stops counting two months after the amendment is published. So the bargaining has to happen fast, and the side that turns up knowing which shifts it can't cover will do better than the side that's guessing.

Count the Skills Before the Heads

Which of the seven a company buys matters less than what it does first. Begin on the floor, with who can do what. On a headcount spreadsheet, the operator who can run three machines and the one who can run none both show up as the number one. Build a 40-hour model on that and you're guessing. So leave the forecasting and analytics tools on the shelf until somebody has written down who can actually do what, and buy them afterwards if the board still wants them.

None of that first job needs a purchase order. It needs a clipboard and about a week. Walk the line and, for every station that has to run on the day about to be lost, write down who is signed off on it, shift by shift. Where a station has a single name next to it, find out what it would cost to train a second person. The question of how many vacancies to post can wait until that's done.

Managers who do that this month will know how many people they really need well before the 42-hour limit takes effect. Those who wait will be recruiting in a hurry, in a market with almost nobody spare, to cover hours they still haven't measured.