Workforce Management

Our last blog highlighted what makes an effective short term forecast. These are the forecasts that you will apply your workforce schedules against and in this post we will cover tips for creating and applying best practice WFM scheduling. Customer Experience vs Expense Resource optimisation and resource planning is in simple terms, an attempt to balance service expectations against expense or operating costs. The key to optimising resource and minimising expense is the creation of effective shift patterns that meet...

In the last blog we covered long term forecasts and what components are required. Today we will be covering another key component of the WFM forecasting process - special days and special distribution patterns. Forecasting within WFM for 'Special Days' All forecasts from long term down to intra-day need to take special days and special distributions into account. A special day may be: - a national holiday - a specific event - the day after a specific event. - a...

One of the key challenges for any planning team is the need to supply accurate long term forecasts providing capacity, workforce planning, and resource planning for an organisation. What are Long Term Forecasts? It generally means workforce planning forecasts that are used to provide input into budget setting, target operating models or 1-5 year plans. A business may even consider a today +1month as a long term forecast. Regardless of timescales, there is a common aim; to supply input into...

Imagine what you could accomplish with access to external workforce management (WFM) specialists, who could generate forecasts, create work schedules and analyse processes using your data - providing you with the most effective workforce planning for customer support. For smaller organisations who previously could not afford this resource, the ability to implement workforce management as a managed service for workforce planning will be a key trend to watch in 2012. If you haven’t moved beyond excel spreadsheets for planning and scheduling, a...

This week we will be looking at what to consider for resource planning short term forecasting and how to avoid some common pitfalls. What is Short Term Forecasting? By short term forecasting I am referring to the workforce planning forecasts that you will create requirements and apply the schedules against. Or in simple terms, the ones you will use for intra-day management. In terms of the forecast volumes for each contact type it is important to consider the historical data....

Workforce Management (WFM) Case Study Atkins is the largest multi-disciplinary consultancy in Europe and the world’s eleventh largest international design firm employing approximately 16,000 employees globally. Atkins delivers a range of professional property asset management services to thousands of properties across the UK and manages the demand / supply interface via a customer focused helpdesk of 100 operators, based in Leeds. In order to manage their workforce planning, Atkins were looking for a reliable Workforce Management (WFM) solution. The helpdesk...

We thought it timely to update this article with the latest features on WFM and how this can reduce attrition. To read the latest article on this topic check out our most recent blog article - 'How to reduce attrition rates with workforce Management' > With reports from ContactBabel saying that staff attrition in UK call centres has risen for the 5th consecutive year and is now running at 32% we thought it timely to look at one of the...