Forecasting and Scheduling overview

The Workforce Management (WFM) application uses work rules, campaign parameters, forecast data, service goals, and scheduling parameters to generate automatically an optimal schedule that fits your organization. If needed, you can also manually edit the schedule. When the schedule is finalized, you can publish it, making it available to managers and employees.

Administration entities

In the Work Administration and User Management modules, work rules are defined and assigned to specific employees. Work rules, including shifts, shift events, VTO events and OT extensions, are assigned to work patterns. Work patterns, in turn, along with other work rules, are assigned to employees.

Employees are also assigned other types of work rules, such as minimum and maximum paid hours, pooling rules, assignment rules, rotations and time banks. For skill-based scheduling, employees are assigned skills, which define the required skills employees need to handle the workload.

Scheduling entities

In the WFM Forecasting and Scheduling module, schedules are generated for a specific campaign and scheduling period.

A scheduling period is a specified period of time when selected employees target a specific workload. A campaign is a collection of scheduling periods. You define specific settings for each scheduling period, including the number of weeks and start date of the scheduling period, and the organizations to which the scheduling period is linked. You then link employees and work queues to the scheduling period.

When you generate the schedule, WFM creates schedules for all employees linked to the scheduling period. All of the work rules and skills assigned to these employees are incorporated into the schedule.

Forecasting entities

Also in the WFM Forecasting and Scheduling module (under Tactical Forecasts and Goals), you define forecast data and service goals, which the scheduling engine takes into account when generating an optimal schedule.

A forecast estimates the required resources for a specific scheduling period based on historical data. The data in a forecast includes interaction and work volume, and Average Handling Time (AHT). Based on this data, you can build a forecast that is statistically probable for each work queue.

Service goals allow you to determine how quickly you want work to be handled. You can set the following service goals:

Service level: Set percentage of interactions handled in a set unit of time
Average Speed to Answer (ASA): Average amount of time by which an employee must respond to a customer interaction or work unit
Deadline goal: Specified time period within which work that has arrived must be completed (used in Operations environments)

The scheduling engine uses the forecast data and service goal requirements to generate a schedule with the assigned resources.