At some larger companies, the question of who’s succeeding whom — of who’s set to rise, or move laterally, or otherwise evolve in the company hierarchy — never gets answered until it absolutely has to be. A 2015 U.S. Trust survey found that two-thirds of business owners don’t have a succession plan in place. Another survey found that only half of North American companies are grooming a replacement for their CEO.

Corporate succession at the executive level is risky: changing leadership can destabilize a company from the top down, affecting hiring, retention, and stock prices. Sudden or unexpected leadership changes make headlines. A study reports that CEOs that have to be forced out lose the company an average of $1.8 billion in shareholder value.

Changes to Corporate Empires

Even multinational corporations have been known to use three-ring binders to manage succession planning. Companies have reached out to PwC to upgrade outdated platforms in order to stay ahead of leadership changes.

PwC, which assists in succession planning for everyone from CEOs and family businesses to utility companies, partnered with Salesforce to build an Executive Succession Planning App, designed for a full-sized touchscreen display but optimized for tablets and phones. The app keeps track of employee data like work history, education, career interests, and geographic regions as well as noting top performers, presenting a development path to help an employee to the next role, and an org chart allowing users to drill down and find out an employee’s successors and who’s ready to move up.

With a custom user interface built on Visualforce, the Executive Succession Planning app incorporates Google components, Bootstrap, and Node.js. This architecture allows the app to pull in HR data in real-time, quantifying those qualities that make for good leaders and offering companies a total view of how succession should be handled.

Looking Ahead, Now

With Salesforce App Cloud, PwC built this application in just five weeks. It spent another three weeks iterating, refining, and polishing the end product. As succession planning is important for all businesses, PwC is looking ahead at ways to make apps like this available to more Salesforce customers.

The app even has a Future State feature to predict the outcome of employee moves on the company. The company can shuffle employees around and analyze the results of a number of different moves. Once the most desirable arrangement is found, users can pull reports and make plans to reach that Future State in reality.

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