Budget Office Brings Rutgers an Unprecedented Look at its Workforce 

From 2018 to 2020, the University Budget Office worked collaboratively across the university on a project that would streamline and automate budget-related processes that traditionally are time-consuming. The Workforce Planning module would wholly transform the way that the Budget Office and other departments at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, would access and review workforce data pertaining to individual and departmental salaries, as well as annual trends in departments’ financial profiles.  

“We have more than 24,000 full-time and part-time employees at the university, so you can imagine just how much this really changed our reporting and data analytics landscape,” said David B. Moore, associate vice president and chief budget officer.  

Through the introduction of Rutgers’ first-ever Workforce Planning module, Moore and colleagues afforded the university an unprecedentedly detailed method of workforce analysis that displays departmental salary spend and breaks down this sum in a granular demonstration of where the departmental dollars go. 

“Before we put the Workforce Planning module in place, we really just had a surface number, a dollar value that was not necessarily tied to the individual positions,” Moore said. “Through Workforce planning, we’ve been able to tie the dollars to individual positions. You can even drill down into doing more data analytics.” 

The Workforce Planning module, which was co-released with the Budget Office’s operating transfers module within its Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (EPBCS) system, has proven an invaluable resource within the toolkit used to understand and ultimately support Rutgers’ financial planning. Its utility is owed in part to the historical view of departmental position- and salary-related shifts that it offers. “This allows you to track any changes within workforce planning and the overall workforce at the university,” Moore said.  

This information can be used to inform hiring approaches that most closely align with a department’s needs. However—and perhaps most importantly—the Workforce Planning module aids end user’s efforts to track and plan the overall budget for Rutgers’ robust workforce. 

“The university’s budget is over $4 billion and of that amount, 65 percent of the budget is connected to total compensation. In developing any budget, the human capital—the people side of the budget—is the largest and most important to make sure it is correct,” Moore explained.  

Circumspect reconciling of any changes that have occurred between the prior year and the current year is essential to the development of an accurate budget for the year ahead. By providing a pathway for university planners to enter their roster of employees to settle any such changes, the Budget Office simplified a complex but necessary step in Rutgers’ annual budget forecasting activities. 

The Workforce Planning module is a testament to the Budget Office’s identity as a steward of the university’s financial resources—and other Big Ten institutions have taken notice. The initiative has notably won Moore’s office praise from fellow schools in the conference, which have sought the office’s assistance in implementing similar approaches. From its internal to its external influence, the Workforce Planning process embodies the office’s commitment to establishing the best practices in financial analysis, forecasting, budgeting, and planning, while contributing to Rutgers identity as a leader, revolutionary for more than 250 years.