Engineered workforce management

Ben Zifkin of Axsium Group on the science of managing your people.

There are few disciplines that can both generate hard cost savings and increase revenue for your organisation. Engineered workforce management, however, is one of them. Industries that place a heavy emphasis on demand-driven scheduling (retail, healthcare, financial services and others) are increasingly relying on quantitative analysis to manage their workforce. Gone are the days of managers scheduling their people based on 'gut feel'. Those subjective, intuition-based methods have been replaced by detailed measurements, terabytes of data and advanced software.

The end goal is quite simple: create an accurate forecast, workload and schedule to ensure that you have the right people staffed at the right time. Overstaffing means that you are burning labour dollars. Understaffing leads to a drop in customer service, which inevitably results in decreased sales. The good news is that your organisation most likely has all the components required to achieve this goal. The bad news is that each of these components are typically owned by different groups within your company without much visibility into how their piece affects the others.

Holistic view

The key is to develop a holistic strategy that pulls these pieces of the puzzle together. If we look at a very basic model, you can collect transactional data from a retail POS system, patient care system or bank teller till. You can then put that information together with facility access information or traffic counters and you would have wonderful historical information as the input for a forecasting algorithm. If you know who will be coming into your facility, when they will be coming and what they will be doing based on that algorithm, you can then multiply those figures against your labour standards (measurement of how long it takes to do a task or a portion if a task) to determine how many resources will be needed throughout the day.

The final stage would be to use this scheduling information to validate how it would manifest itself in the real world. You can do this by utilising queue modelling or traffic simulation software to determine how long your clients are waiting in line or how many patients would be queued up in the waiting room. The first step to achieving these results is to setup your engineered workforce management platform.

Optimise your processes. Develop a labour standards framework that is granular enough to provide meaningful data but not too granular that your organisation is paralysed by numbers. Then accurately measure all critical processes. Compare your standards against industry standards. Finally, re-engineer processes accordingly.

Effectively deploy your workforce. First, fine-tune a forecasting model for your unique organisation. Identify drivers for workload demand. Then implement legislated, union or employee-agreed scheduling rules.

Simulate. Transform the theoretical into reality by running computerised models.

The outcome of adopting this approach is that you have a clear and direct link to cause and effect. For example, if a store was running a promotion where the cashiers are to give a coupon at the end of every transaction, that step would almost certainly modify the labour standard. That labour standard change may affect the workload and schedule. That schedule modification would then have an impact on the number of people waiting in a queue. The ability to make this link in a simulation environment is a very attractive proposition to many organisations. What is even more attractive is that these initiatives are highly visible programs that send a clear message to employees and shareholders that the company is taking significant steps to shore up its operations.

However, the main selling point is the unbelievably compelling business case. Hard cost savings by reducing overstaffing and increased revenue by enhancing the customer experience will always be the reason why world-class organisations see an engineered workforce as a critical piece to their future success.

Ben Zifkin is a co-founder of Axsium, a global business and technology consulting firm dedicated to workforce management. As Axsium's partner in charge of international operations, Zifkin has established a reputation for delivering quality solutions to many of the largest and most complex organisations throughout the world.