Solving Complex Workforce Management Challenges with Scheduling, Communication and Analytics

Workforce management today is about balancing three things: employee engagement, cost-efficiency, and flexibility. Evaluating the trade-offs between these objectives is difficult, even in small organizations. It can become nearly impossible in large companies if you’re not using the right tools. If this challenge sounds familiar, you’ve landed in the right place. In this article, we will address how ORTEC can help you balance competing goals and optimize your workforce.

Cost-efficiency

Cost-efficiency requires that you allocate the right people, to the right place at exactly the right time. You need to do this while complying with labor regulations, and without losing sight of your organization's KPIs. An accurate forecast can help ensure you can meet demand. Yet, there’s a limit to forecast accuracy in today’s uncertain environment. That’s where flexibility comes in.Fem

"Flexibility is essential to react to unforeseen events quickly - even if they come up last-minute."

Flexibility

Everyone talks about flexibility. It’s only natural after the labor shortages, lockdowns and overall disruption we experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Flexibility is essential to react to these unforeseen events quickly. It’s about swift problem resolution and keeping things under control when you experience changes in demand or supply. To get things right, you need to ensure quality for your customers and transparency for your employees. However, this can be very difficult when your business reality is constantly changing. Having a good engagement strategy can help.

Employee engagement

Employee engagement has gained new relevance in boardroom conversations. Engaged employees are more motivated and less likely to leave. Research also shows that companies with high workforce engagement produce better results, have higher productivity rates, and are more attractive employers. Unfortunately, employee engagement is not always easy to translate into quantitative benefits. That is why we set out to tackle this challenge with a new generation of software.

ORTEC Workforce

ORTEC Workforce helps you drive employee engagement and satisfaction while reducing costs and increasing flexibility. The solution is an intelligent control center that provides a powerful combination of workforce scheduling, communication, and analytics. In the paragraphs that follow, we delve into these components in more detail.

Workforce scheduling

Usually, the starting point in workforce scheduling is the volume forecast. For example, you need a good overview of expected orders to assess how you can best meet demand. In ORTEC Workforce, you can combine your forecast with other data, such as Point-of-Sales information, minimum staffing requirements, KPIs and seasonal events. The solution’s machine learning algorithms help you minimize under and overstaffing and create optimal shifts. You can use the insights and recommendations to support the manager in assigning work shifts. Alternatively, ORTEC Workforce can create shift schedules automatically.

Employee self-scheduling is also supported by ORTEC Workforce. This enables your employees to enter their availability and work preferences and submit “leave of absence” requests. Employees can also decide to take up open shifts or resolve scheduling issues themselves. Nouryon is a chemical manufacturer that has been using self scheduling to significantly reduce overtime. They also improved their ability to meet demand.

ORTEC Workforce can also help you cope with unexpected changes. S-Group, the retail market leader and largest private employer in Finland, is among the many companies that benefit from this solution. They use ORTEC Workforce to plan over 34,000 employees in a variety of retail and hospitality businesses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the solution played an instrumental role. It helped them to deal with many last-minute changes by quickly allocating replacement staff to shifts. Since the solution can be used on any device, planners and managers could easily assign open shifts regardless of their location. This ties in very closely with another application area in ORTEC workforce: communication.

Communication

Engaging employees during the planning process through functionalities like self-scheduling is a key value driver. It’s equally important for employees to consume relevant company news and other important information in a timely way. Nowadays, many teams suffer from information overload. Email, social media, chat, and other messaging apps are just some of the channels they use. Company news is rarely tailored to employees. That’s where ORTEC comes in. ORTEC Workforce enables a targeted set of employees to consume the right information, on any device, at the time of their choosing. They can check schedules, exchange shifts, communicate with each other, and are notified about the most important news in real-time. This can be very helpful when you need to share corporate announcements, like remote working best practices and policy changes. Altogether, this also generates data that is crucial to drive improvements and optimize content strategies. For instance, you may find that your news items are not being thoroughly read. In this case, you can consider splitting up the content in smaller, bite-sized announcements. There are many other examples of valuable insights you can gain to improve communication and engagement.

Analytics

ORTEC Workforce has robust analytics capabilities that help you take decision-making to the next level. The wealth of information is presented in user-friendly dashboards. The insights can then be applied by your management team to steer the workforce management process in the right direction and understand what’s happening in your organization. All execution data is automatically passed on to your payroll, reporting and invoicing systems, helping you streamline and minimize manual administration.

We hope this article inspires you to assess how ORTEC Workforce can add value to your organization. If you want a more detailed assessment, contact our experts by sending an email to info@ortec.com.