Healthcare organizations have invested heavily in workforce management technology — yet many leaders still can't answer basic questions about their own labor spend.

The questions that keep surfacing:

Why are my labor costs increasing? What is driving overtime utilization? Are my staffing decisions aligned with patient demand? How can workforce planning become more proactive? How can workforce data support better operational and financial decisions?

The answers often exist across multiple systems, reports, and teams. As healthcare organizations grow, merge, expand services, and face increasing workforce pressures, disconnected workforce environments can make it difficult to gain a clear understanding of what is happening across the organization.

For many healthcare organizations, the issue isn't scheduling. It's that the platform supporting workforce operations can no longer keep pace with the complexity of the business. That's often what triggers the search for something new.

Signs you've outgrown your current platform

Why healthcare leaders are rethinking workforce management And what to look for in a modern platform.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

The challenge: Scheduling was never the problem

Most organizations don't replace WFM because they need a new scheduling solution. They start evaluating when they can't answer fundamental questions about performance. The hallmarks are:

Workforce and payroll live in separate systems Workforce planning runs independently of financial planning Labor reporting requires manual reconciliation Staffing decisions lack operational context Leaders struggle to identify labor cost drivers Workforce insights aren't available when decisions are being made A past platform switch overpromised and underdelivered.

Historically, workforce management focused on timekeeping, scheduling, attendance management, and staffing coverage. While these capabilities remain important, healthcare leaders increasingly expect workforce technology to support a much broader set of organizational objectives.

Today, workforce decisions influence:

As a result, healthcare organizations are increasingly evaluating workforce technology through an enterprise-wide lens. They want to understand how workforce decisions connect to broader business outcomes.

Labor remains one of the largest operational investments within healthcare organizations, and leaders need visibility into staffing trends, overtime utilization, workforce productivity, and labor costs to make informed decisions. When that information is fragmented across systems, organizations often spend more time gathering it than acting on it.

Workforce decisions also rarely occur in isolation: staffing changes affect budgets, operational changes affect workforce requirements, and patient demand affects scheduling needs. Connecting workforce, operational, and financial information is what lets leadership teams move from reactive decision-making to proactive planning.

Increasingly, organizations are evaluating solutions on their ability to forecast, plan, and automate, not simply manage schedules more efficiently. The goal is helping leaders anticipate workforce challenges before they become operational problems.

Cloud migration is not transformation Over the past several years, many healthcare organizations moved from legacy systems to cloud-based WFM. Cloud adoption provides real benefits — but technology modernization alone doesn't improve visibility, planning, or decision-making. After migrating to the cloud, many organizations find:

Labor reporting remains highly manual Workforce and financial data remain disconnected Planning processes remain fragmented Leaders still lack actionable workforce intelligence

As a result, healthcare leaders are increasingly evaluating whether their current workforce platform is helping them achieve long-term workforce transformation goals or simply supporting existing processes in a new environment.

EXECUTIVE BRIEFWhy healthcare leaders are rethinking WFM

WFM today must support a broader range of objectives

Labor costs

Workforce engagement

Operational efficiency

Financial outcomes

Patient access

Compliance performance

EXECUTIVE BRIEFWhy healthcare leaders are rethinking WFM

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Increasingly, organizations are looking for solutions that provide intelligent decision support, helping leaders move from reacting to workforce challenges to anticipating them.

Modern workforce platforms are expected to help organizations:

Forecast workforce demand Identify emerging labor cost drivers Anticipate staffing shortages Recommend workforce adjustments Improve operational decision-making

As workforce complexity increases, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an important component of workforce transformation strategies. Healthcare organizations are evaluating not only what workforce systems can automate today, but how those systems can help leaders make more informed decisions in the future.

AI is reshaping workforce decision-making

What modern healthcare organizations evaluate As organizations consider workforce technology changes, evaluation criteria are evolving.

The most successful workforce transformation initiatives typically focus on four areas:

Workforce Visibility: Can leaders see labor costs, staffing trends, and overtime drivers without chasing down a manual report?

Connected Decision-Making: Do workforce, finance, payroll, and operations teams work from one shared view, or from four different ones?

Workforce Intelligence: Does the platform tell leaders what already happened, or help them decide what to do next?

Long-Term Partnership: Will this vendor still know healthcare, and still answer the phone, three years past go-live?

Increasingly, healthcare organizations are discovering that workforce transformation depends on how well workforce, financial, operational, and ERP systems work together.

Featured healthcare success story: University of Maryland Medical System With 11 hospitals and more than 150 care locations, UMMS faced a challenge common to large health systems: disconnected platforms that created redundant workflows, rising costs, and staff burdened by paperwork rather than focused on patients.

Infor CloudSuite Healthcare connected workforce, finance, supply chain, and operational processes across the entire network, giving leaders real-time ERP visibility, consolidating supply chain spend, and automating manual work that was consuming clinical staff time. These outcomes illustrate how workforce transformation becomes more impactful when connected to broader enterprise operations.

EXECUTIVE BRIEFWhy healthcare leaders are rethinking WFM

Real-world outcomes matter Technology capabilities matter, but healthcare leaders ultimately evaluate workforce platforms based on their ability to improve operational, financial, and workforce outcomes. The most successful healthcare organizations treat workforce transformation as an operational initiative — measuring success not by go-live dates, but by what changes for their people and their patients. Here's what that looks like in practice.

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Featured healthcare success story: Children's of Alabama As one of the largest pediatric medical facilities in the US, Children's of Alabama needed more than a scheduling upgrade. Paper-based processes were driving administrative costs up, staff satisfaction down, and leaving nurse managers buried in manual work instead of focused on care.

After implementing Infor WFM and Cloverleaf, Children's of Alabama moved from paper-based scheduling to automated self-scheduling, mobile clock-in, and an internal staffing pool that cut dependence on travel nurses — freeing nurse managers from administrative work and putting scheduling control directly in staff hands.

Having tools that allow employees to pick shifts, trade shifts, figure out when they need to be here — it was a game-changer.

Gina Seekers Director of HRIS, Children's of Alabama

Supply chain standardization drove cost savings

reinvested in patient care

Automation reduced manual workflows across 11

hospitals

Real-time analytics enabled proactive, data-driven operational decisions

Across Infor's healthcare customer base, organizations consistently report reduced overtime, lower agency labor spend, and measurably improved workforce visibility — not as technology outcomes, but as operational ones.

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EXECUTIVE BRIEFWhy healthcare leaders are rethinking WFM

Healthcare workforce challenges are not becoming simpler.

Organizations face ongoing labor pressures, growing workforce complexity, increasing operational demands, and heightened expectations around performance.

As a result, many healthcare leaders are rethinking what they need from workforce technology.

The organizations seeing the greatest success are moving beyond workforce management as a standalone function and toward a more connected approach to workforce planning, workforce visibility, and operational decision-making.

For leaders evaluating a workforce platform change, the goal is not simply replacing technology, but rather creating a stronger foundation for workforce transformation.

The opportunity ahead Decision checklist

Can workforce, payroll, and financial information be analyzed together?

Can labor cost drivers be identified without extensive manual reporting?

Can workforce planning adapt to changing operational demands?

Does the platform support healthcare workforce complexity?

Can workforce insights be delivered when decisions need to be made?

Can staffing decisions be connected to financial & operational outcomes?

Does the platform support forecasting and workforce planning?

Can leaders gain a clearer understanding of workforce performance across the organization?

Will the platform support future workforce transformation initiatives?

Before selecting a workforce platform, healthcare leaders should ask:

https://www.infor.com/resources/infor-healthcare-workforce-management-suite

EXECUTIVE BRIEF Why healthcare leaders are rethinking workforce management And what to look for in a modern platform. The challenge: Scheduling was never the problem Healthcare organizations have invested heavily in workforce management technology — yet many leaders still can't answer basic questions about their own labor spend. Signs you've outgrown your current platform

WFM today must support a broader range of objectives What modern healthcare organizations evaluate EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Real-world outcomes matter Featured healthcare success story: Children's of Alabama Having tools that allow employees to pick shifts, trade shifts, figure out when they need to be here — it was a game-changer. Gina Seekers

Featured healthcare success story: University of Maryland Medical System