Workforce Management
In many markets and industries, workforce management is all about assigning the right employees with the right skills to the right job at the right time. The term is differentiated from traditional staff scheduling because staff scheduling is rooted to time management and simply manages the administration of past and future working times.
This traditional approach has since evolved into the more integrated, demand-oriented workforce management, which includes changes in personnel requirements and objectives when optimizing the scheduling of staff. Besides the two core aspects of demand-orientation and optimization, workforce management may also incorporate:
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forecasting of workload and required staff
integration of employees into the scheduling process
management of working times and accounts
analysis and monitoring of the entire process
The market for workforce management (WFM) is still quite young. In the eighties and nineties, entrepreneurs mainly focused on topics such as SCM (Supply Chain Management) or PPS (Production Planning Systems) and, in recent years, on ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). As cost pressures have increased, managers have increasingly turned their attention towards HR issues. In all personnel-intensive industries, workforce management has become an important strategic element in corporate management.
Workforce optimization
Workforce Optimization
Workforce management is itself evolving into a solution termed workforce optimization. This builds on workforce management to encompass all aspects of managing the complete workforce life cycle and supports the business with key insights into how its workforce is performing. There is an emphasis not simply on improving operational efficiency or on managing the workforce effectively, but tying this to key business concepts such as the customer experience. The role of workforce optimization is to tie together siloed systems and bridge between the three main stakeholders of HR, operations and IT. This approach is business driven. It involves automating entire processes, making key data more visible to support better decision-making, ensuring compliance with a wide range of relevant legislation and solving business problems related to staff. Workforce optimization is best viewed as the next logical step in the move to optimize the performance of staff and to manage and understand the impacts of staff on both operational efficiency and the customer experience.
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