2. What is Workforce
Management
• Part of the Greater Human Capital Management
(HCM) Model
• Human Resources – Hiring/firing, skills management,
compliance to regulations and standards
• Workforce Management – Regular vs. overtime hours,
vacation and sick time, scheduling, costing or billing
• Payroll – EI/CPP/etc. deductions, salary
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3. WFM Defined
Workforce Management (WFM) encompasses all
the activities, processes, and tools needed to
manage a workforce. A comprehensive WFM
system includes planning, forecasting,
scheduling, and tracking workers to optimize the
balance of customer, employee, labour laws and
organizational needs.
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4. Who Utilizes WFM?
• Buyers – originally HR, Payroll, IT
• Now Finance and Operations are adopting WFM for strategic,
productivity applications
• Influencers – Finance (Controller) & Operations Management
• Users – originally hour shift workers, now being utilized by:
• “non-traditional”, contingent workforce (contract, agency, temporary)
• Salaried, “professional” workforce (billing, cross-charging, security)
• MSS and ESS
• Offside workers – virtual, mobile, 24x7 “connected” workforce
• Now moving towards the entire workforce
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5. Vendor Trends
• Expanding and Contracting
• Expanding application breadth through organic development
and acquisition, with increasing vertical industry focus
• Consolidation will continue to occur in the vendor/provider
market
• Kronos acquires healthcare WFM provider API Healthcare
Corporation (2/07/11)
• RedPrairie acquires all-commerce solutions provider Escalate
Retail (2/02/11)
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6. Vendor Trends
• ERP vs. Best-of-Breed
• ERP’s are catching up, but only for the more basic WFM
applications
• Workforce Management vendors are likewise expanding the depth,
breadth, and sophistication of their WFM application suite
• Platform and Data Collection Devises
• SaaS increasing in availability and use
• Projected 50% increase in subscriptions (CedarCrestone 2010-2011
Survey from IHR Trends in WFM Slides)
• Mobile apps becoming more sophisticated
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7. Application Trends
• Mobility
• Optimized Scheduling
• Absence Management
• Used for entire workforce – hourly AND salaried
• Attendance
• Accruals
• Scheduled and Unscheduled Incidental Absences
• Leaves of Absence (i.e., FMLA, WC, STD, etc.)
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8. Application Trends
• Workforce Analytics
• Operational Performance Analytics
• Performance, productivity, quality, overall equipment and labor
effectiveness, cost/margin analysis, etc.
• Fitness for Duty (esp., transportation, services, healthcare)
• Physical (Fatigue Management, Drug Screening, etc.)
• Competency (Certifications and Licenses)
• Compliance
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9. Future of WFM
Short Term
• Scheduling Optimization
• Recent discipline
• Moving from team based to individual based
• Optimization algorithms are very basic
• Human store managers are intuitive
• Business Intelligence
• Key Performance Indicators
• Benchmarking
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10. Future of WFM
Short Term – Mobile
• Mobile sector is growing 8x faster than traditional PCs did at the
same stage in their evolution
• Your future workers & possibly current customers
• Ensure your WFM strategy includes mobile integration
• Captive vs. User Owned Devices
• Captive device • User Owned Device
• Supplied by employer • Associate (employee) manages
• Ultimate control over the device • Process required for enrollment of
• Security device
• No multi-platform development • Remote wipe
required
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11. Future of WFM
Short Term – Forecasting &
Optimization
• Many organizations are not ready for forecasting and optimization
• Not enough data in the proper format (a year of history is essential)
• Socioeconomic makeup
• Dilemma
• Market
• What is the impact of the legal/socio/economic environment
• What are the cause and effect relationships on your demand
• Continuous learning
• Much ROI still on the table
• Schedule optimization is the most computational intense function in
WFM
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12. Future of WFM
Long Term
• Building/Fitting
• Currently evolving from coding to configuring
• Think of it as “Code as Data”
• Code backdoors
• Change control is still essential
• Next evolution: system training
• Artificial intelligence
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13. Future of WFM
Long Term
• Data Gathering
• Automation of data gathering – technically we are ready
• Economically justifiable
• Primary barrier to adoption is sociological
• Current technologies employ wireless sensor bands or video
recognition with “wand”
• Future: no augmentation required
• Pattern Recognition
• Systems that watch and learn
• Any gatherable quantifiable metric
• Moving from systems that track to systems that predict
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