Labor Planning Tools
BetterVu has just released our latest white paper, Labor Planning: Agile Approaches for a Dynamic Environment. The white paper is a great tool intended to be a guide for organizations looking to understand how labor force scaling can impact the bottom line - and how the ability to forecast labor demand can make an enterprise more resilient in the face of fluctuating markets.
Quality, Costs and Agility
When approaching the challenge of market and consumer volatility, creating an enterprise that can withstand the ups and downs requires zeroing in on the most essential operational elements. On the simplest level, an organization that has an abundance of labor on hand and a deficit of actual work to do - whether due to a drop in demand or rising material costs driving up prices - is losing money.
On the other side of the coin, a company with a fully utilized labor force may find itself suddenly overwhelmed by demand. As it strains to accommodate an avalanche of orders or respond to a peak level of customer contact, the quality of its product or service is bound to tumble - damaging brand integrity and squandering the demand surge.
Both sides represent the yin and yang of a single idea: Optimal labor capacity isn't a static line item. Instead, it’s a balancing of forecasted business demand with available labor supply. This what makes planning for labor needs so tricky. Just because you needed a certain amount of labor capacity yesterday doesn't mean that you'll need the same amount today. When it comes to labor, plans are, at best, secondary to strategy. Or, in the words of the 19th century German general Helmuth von Moltke, "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
Strategies are about agility and responsiveness - looking at labor as part of an overall business process and optimizing minute-to-minute based on data and trends. Since labor is one of the largest expenses for organizations - often upwards of 70 percent of total operating costs - misalignment with demand could prove disastrous.
Driver-Based Labor Planning
In modern markets, technological innovation and competition mean that you have to think fast and respond quickly, lest you find yourself sunk. But how do you identify optimal labor capacity? What labor planning tools to you use? What factors should enterprises pay attention to so as to understand what they'll need on a given day?
Labor Planning: Agile Approaches for a Dynamic Environment outlines the most vital drivers of a distinct labor planning model, proven to optimize capacity. Using a Connected Planning approach, labor planning managers can look at each operational activity associated with a unique business volume driver, measure it against demand and other factors like minutes per activity, before finally breaking down actual demand into staffing hours or FTEs.
The result? A clear, concise labor planning dashboard that allows enterprise managers to visualize optimal labor capacity and demand in real time. With flexible logic and multi-dimensional modelling, the ability to link disparate data sources and handle large transaction volumes, this labor planning approach offers more intelligence and agility than a spreadsheet-based approach.
Labor Planning: Agile Approaches for a Dynamic Environment is a tool designed to aid managers looking for labor planning solutions to quickly plan future staff levels under alternative growth scenarios, significantly reduce unused staff capacity, optimize labor, satisfy customers and boost the bottom line. To learn more, download this FREE white paper today.
