Workforce management

And joining me as co-host is Felipe Escobar, director of marketing and design at focus services.

WFM used to be a back office function with rising contact complexity and multi-channel demand.

Why is workforce management now a business imperative?

Workforce management balances service level and cost.

Mastering forecasting, scheduling, and real-time management drives customer satisfaction and gives a measurable competitive advantage.

Let's start right there.

What are the foundational elements of Call Center WFM and how does forecasting feed scheduling?

Forecasting uses historical data, seasonality, and business intelligence to predict volume and handle time.

Those elements support accuracy and agility.

How do you improve agent engagement through WFM?

Focus on schedule predictability, self-service shift swaps, preference bidding, and fair overtime and time-off processes.

Those practices reduce turnover and improve performance.

And the trends to watch?

AI and machine learning will continue to improve forecasting.

Automation will handle repetitive WFM tasks.

Gig and on-demand staffing models will grow.

There's varying security models for each of the modules or applications, and they all tie back to Infor Federation Services, where you set up roles and you add users to those roles.

So FSM, HRT Payroll, Mobile Supply Chain Management, XM, WFM, Burst, CSF Analytics, HRT Analytics, WFM Analytics, EPM, that's the BI, FSM stuff, the cubes, and for document management.

Man,

there's all these different applications and they all have their own security model.

It provides audit trails for all the activities.

You know, like I said before, it works with everything.

So landmark applications and non-landmark like WFM, XM, BERS, IDM, and so forth.

They have, like I said, the pre-built templates, and those can obviously modify, as I said.

Now, for HR teams previously, they didn't always have that type of data and that information.

But now that they have it, now that you have AI allowing you to be able to bring in more of this information, from an ERP system, from a WFM, WMS warehouse management system, and a lot of the data around the temporary staffing, you can start to put this together and be able to have insights that previously, like the data was there, but you weren't able to effectively consolidate it and view it in a way that helped you understand the trends.

Now HR professionals have this and they're able to drive much more meaningful change that has financial impacts to the organization as a whole.

And so you're starting to see HR professionals are being thought of more as like profit centers.

Yeah.

Can I ask about the context of like, like what kind of a lift of WFM do you guys have? Are we talking unions? Are we talking, uh, multiple-- obviously multiple business units, but what's the, what's the s- what's the elephant you're biting off here? [chuckles]

Yeah.

So we have about, about eighteen thousand, uh, frontline workers that we-