An airline can order the aircraft and still have no way to fly them. Alicia Roach encountered that problem while working in finance: a board looking ahead to new A380s and 787s needed to know whether enough pilots would be available. Aircraft deliveries had a timetable. Human capability needed one too.
That question is a useful entrance to eQ8. The company makes software for strategic workforce planning, a discipline with an uninviting name and a wonderfully blunt purpose: work out whether the people you expect to have can do the work you expect to sell.
- Start with business demand, then calculate the workforce it requires.
- Compare possible futures before committing to hiring, training or cuts.
- eQ8 combines planning software with advisory expertise; Enterprise pricing is by quotation.
A very expensive empty cockpit
In a Digital HR Leaders interview, Roach described bringing passenger demand, route networks, retirement, training downtime and external pilot supply into the same conversation. Then the global financial crisis arrived. The assumptions changed. Having a baseline made it possible to reconsider the plan.
There is a distinction here that matters far beyond airlines. A payroll budget describes what people cost. A workforce plan asks what the business needs them to make possible. A company can meet its payroll target while quietly losing the capacity to meet its sales target.
eQ8 occupies that space between finance, HR and business strategy. Its expertise comes from practitioners: Roach worked in workforce planning at Qantas and NBN; co-founder Chris Hare held senior planning, rewards and sourcing responsibilities at NBN. The two worked together there before building their own business.
The customers who stayed behind
The route to software was less tidy than the pitch. Their consulting predecessor, QHR, began in 2014. eQ8 dates initial software development to 2018 and its global launch and rebrand to 2020. Consulting gave the founders industries to study and a method to test.
It did not give them an automatic software customer base. As the founders told the Australian Financial Review, in an account republished by investor OIF Ventures, none of the consulting clients immediately wanted to move onto the platform. Consulting capital financed the new effort.
Other assumptions moved too. They expected Australian first customers; Roach’s LinkedIn articles brought inquiries from US corporations. MetLife and the UN signed in March 2020. Pandemic restrictions then pushed the founders to concentrate on those cornerstone customers. OIF backed a Series A in 2022, reported by eQ8 as US$4 million.
“Organizations can no longer assume that the right workforce will just materialize.”Alicia Roach / 2022 funding announcement
Put the what-ifs in the room
What does a user actually do? Begin with the business direction: growth, digitization, a changed service model. Translate that into demand for work and skills. Compare it with workforce supply. Change the assumptions. Then choose actions to address the resulting gaps.
In a hypothetical service business, more customers might mean more staff, unless automation changes the tasks involved. Higher attrition could widen the shortage. Training might close part of it. Those are related decisions; keeping them in separate spreadsheets makes the relationships harder to inspect.
Change an assumption. Revisit the decision.
Enterprise includes customizable inputs and reporting, skills forecasting, integration and single sign-on. Its market position is a dedicated planning layer. Broader HR systems, consulting projects and spreadsheet models can all enter the buying conversation. Buyers should examine the demand model and decision process, rather than treat every product labelled workforce planning as interchangeable.
The $10 million question
The customer problem becomes concrete in eQ8’s insurance case study. A Fortune 50 insurer had a $10 million learning programme but needed to validate the expenditure. It wanted to connect future skills requirements with development decisions, using a small team with limited planning experience.
Learning programme validated in eQ8’s insurer case study.
A programme budget, not the software price.
eQ8 reports that the work helped validate that programme and supported a leadership programme reaching 5,000 employees. These are vendor-published outcomes. The $10 million figure describes spending under examination, not money saved. The useful claim is that workforce planning helped give an existing investment a business rationale.
The customer’s vice president also described Excel’s version-control burden when comparing multiple scenarios. That is an everyday selling point: keep the alternatives together so the discussion can move from finding the correct file to deciding what to do.
By April 2024, eQ8 reported more than 70 customers, work affecting two million employees across 100 countries, and customers including MetLife, Nestlé and Novartis. Its commercial model combines B2B software with advisory services. Enterprise buyers request a custom quote, making scope, integration and internal effort part of the purchasing conversation.
The blank page gets a guide
eQ8 introduced Essentials in April 2024 for organizations seeking a lighter start. Its current AI-guided experience takes the adoption argument further: a platform is less useful if nobody knows the next planning step. The product proposes connections, explains reasoning and guides users through the plan.
The company says recommendations are determined from data and planning models, with AI writing the explanation. Proposed changes require human approval and are logged and reversible. That is the design claim to test in a demonstration: can the user follow a recommendation back to its assumptions?
For a prospective customer, the first meeting should therefore involve a real decision. Ask how a change in customer demand alters the workforce forecast. Ask which assumptions came from the organization and which came from external research. Then ask who will act on the answer. A convincing demonstration should make those connections visible. Attractive charts alone cannot establish whether a plan fits the business.
The practice readers can copy is modest. Pick one business problem, identify the workforce segment involved, compare a few futures and give the resulting actions an owner. Shared assumptions and accountable leaders matter. A model cannot resolve a disagreement that executives refuse to discuss. The aircraft question remains a good test: when the strategy arrives, will anyone be ready to fly it?