IBM Cognos TM1 Workforce Management Solutions

Managing Workforce to drive organisation-wide performance improvement is complex and technology plays an important and essential role in assisting the business in achieving this.

An organisation that lacks a strategic view on Workforce Management to drive Performance Management and does not align business activity with staff rostering will have major cost and customer satisfaction implications for any business, especially those in services industries.

Using IBM Cognos TM1 as the Management Information System, Cubewise provides a four phase solution to this complex business requirement.

 This implementation of the solution leverages quick prototypes at each stage of the process, thus not only ensuring full customer satisfaction but also ensuring a strong partnership with our clients.

The solution, whilst delivering utilisation reports, analysis reports and scenario modelling would also drive staff rostering based on forecasted business activity. This aligns scarce skilled human resource with the proper business activity. This approach leads to continuous performance improvement.

Enhancing Productivity through Workforce Management

Leveraging effective workforce management solutions allows organisations to have the correct number of skilled staff to meet the desired staffing levels based on a forecasted workload.

In essence, a good Workforce Management Solution would remove the guesswork from staff rostering by leveraging analytics of payroll and timekeeping information with business activity information. This approach would allow for Continuous Labour Performance Management and at the same time provide the key stakeholders with key Workforce Management information. 

In order for a business to enhance productivity through Workforce Management, every organisation needs to go through a Workforce Performance Management Cycle as illustrated.

Central to achieving the objectives is having an effective and efficient Management Information System.

Workforce Management is complex in many organisations, in part due to the lack of timely information and the demands of various key stakeholders for this important and highly secure information.

Some of the key stakeholders are Department Managers / Team Leaders who actually roster staff and manage them day to day, Business Analysts whose primary task is to provide the middle and senior management with staff utilisation analysis reports and the Human Resources (HR) Manager, whose primary focus would be to recruit skilled staff and negotiate with various external agencies / agents on staff contracts.

These various stake holders demand an array of queries on data held in Payroll, Timekeeping, and HR systems and Business Activity information systems to manage the reporting / analysis requirements.

In order for these key stakeholders to work together and achieve their objectives, it is important that they source the information from one central system, to ensure that all users can get one version of the truth.

The key benefits of good Workforce Management Solution System are:

• Real Time Employee costs reporting and Analysis
• Single source for all information
• Scenario Modelling
• 'What If' analysis capability
• Real time KPI Measurement
• Proactive Labour KPI Management Reports
• Volume Forecasting Model
• Activity-Based Staff Rostering

Costs of ineffective Workforce Management

In a typical organisation that lacks a good Management Information System , information is often gathered from various sources systems manually and stored in either non-structured databases or spreadsheets.

Analysts are often constrained with the inability of spreadsheets and simple end-user databases to perform complex what-if analysis and scenario modelling. These constraints often lead to an inability of managements to take proactive and objective decisions.

Lack of an integrated system also leads to a gap in understanding of forecasted business activity, thereby leading to overstaffing or understaffing, both of which are bad for business.  Overstaffing is costly and can erode profit margins, while understaffing results in inferior customer service, lower staff morale, high staff attrition rates and increased recruitment costs.

Department managers / team leaders usually spend a significant amount of time in every working week devoted to employee scheduling issues, but still use spreadsheets to roster staff.  Spreadsheet systems are not flexible, collaborative or robust enough to deal with the increasing complexity of today's business requirements.

Unfortunately, in such scenarios, HR managers take an inordinate amount of time in contract negotiations, thereby adding to the cost of negotiations and would lead to ill-informed management decisions which could not only have financial implications but could also affect staff morale.

The Cubewise Approach

Cubewise have come up with a solution using to facilitate all the complex business labour management reporting and analysis requirements necessary.

The solution is based on four phases as our experience has shown that progressively developing modules based on business specific requirements has a far better end result than adopting a 100% "out-of-the-box" solution.

This approach spends time upfront in understanding the complex nature of various data sources and then developing a prototype at the beginning of each phase. From our many years of experience in implementing these solutions, we know that this approach provides the best end solution to the business.