It’s at risk of showing my age that I tell you I’ve been selling and implementing workforce management (WFM) software solutions across multiple industry sectors for nearly 18 years. During that time I have seen:
However, what has remained constant throughout my time in this field are the key components required for a business to make the most of a WFM software solution. Over the next few weeks I’ll be summarising some of these, starting today with the importance of a simple and transparent labour model:
Modern WFM solutions are capable of forecasting labour demand by taking multiple data feeds and performing complex algorithms. This creates the temptation to over-engineer the labour model which introduces several risks:
Many organisations learn this lesson the hard way. I worked with a retailer who abandoned their unsuccessful ‘bottom-up’ labour standards approach (labour demand derived from hundreds of productivity measures) in favour of a ‘top-down’ labour budgeting approach (labour demand derived from sales forecast based on a sales-per-labour-hour target). As a result, their managers embraced the system much more readily, and they found that it is even worth compromising slightly on the accuracy of the labour forecast in order to achieve this buy-in.
After all, what’s the use of a ‘perfect’ forecast if the manager has no confidence in it and so chooses to ignore it?
Read part 2 of my blog discussing how critical the flexibility of your workforce is to the successful implementation of a WFM system.
