Telecom Solutions
Telecom Workforce Management System (intelliFORCE)Service providers are confronted daily with the difficult task of optimally assigning work requests to their field workforce, dispatching work from the office to the field, monitoring the progress of the work, and responding to changing conditions. In addition, field service organizations must measure their workforce’s performance in order to improve the quality of strategic forecasting and planning efforts.  A comprehensive workforce management solution is achieved through advanced system integration, which provides the enterprise with a more holistic view of which employees are best suited to deal with specific tasks, and then allocates work accordingly. Enter intelliFORCE, a flexible framework for building a custom workforce management solution for communication service providers. Through the use of frameworks and rules engines, intelliFORCE can be customized to fit in to any telecom environment. This means, for instance, that collaborating systems such as provisioning and trouble ticketing do not require any modifications to fully interface with intelliFORCE – intelliFORCE, instead, conforms to their messaging protocols. The intelliFORCE feature set:Ease of Use – it is critical that when customers begin to use any software, they find it to be highly intuitive and very straightforward. This simple difference shortens the learning curve and enables organizations to realize a quicker return on their investment. Forecasting Flexibility – allows an enterprise to build a custom forecast model by creating a “template” of weeks and using any week in the entire history database. Proficiency-based Scheduling – provides insight into the performance capabilities of each agent to achieve greater scheduling precision in matching the workload with the workforce. This can drastically reduce variations in service levels from one time of day to another. Field Technician Self-Management of Preferences – provide agents with direct management and control over their schedule preferences from a standard Internet browser - improving morale, employee buy-in, and agent retention. Field Technician Self-Management of Schedules – allows staff members to engage in their own schedule management through “shift-swaps” and trades. The Web-enabled self-service scheduling module allows associates to more easily switch shifts with colleagues. Long-range Planning – helps management teams to arrive at logical, well thought-out conclusions to challenging questions. These questions include decisions about what skills should be cross trained to maximize the training budget or the number and skill profile of field technicians who may be required 18 to 24 months down the road. “What If” Functionality – allows management to alter the forecasting and scheduling environment to identify alternative scheduling outcomes by creating profiles of fictitious field technicians with their own skill mix and schedule preferences. These scenarios provide information about what field technician profiles — and how many field technicians that fit the particular profile — are required to achieve lower labor costs and more consistent workload matching. Real-time Field Technician Adherence – provides real-time rolling field technician adherence and exception display, so when an field technician is out of adherence, the team leader or supervisor can view the field technician’s adherence history. Exception Management – if a field technician deviates from his schedule, these deviations are sometimes deliberate on the agent’s part, sometimes accidental and sometimes caused by customer needs. Effective WFM solutions enable team leaders and supervisors to differentiate among these various exceptions by approving those particular schedule deviations associated with positive behaviors. Performance Management – availability of services and support beyond simple software installation helps maximize the return on investment by providing guidance for creating scheduling solutions that meet business objectives, respect employee requirements and support health and safety in the workplace. Strategic Consulting Services – guidance for creating scheduling solutions that meet specific business objectives, respect employee requirements and promote health and safety. Mobility – Wireless Access Module that allows field engineers to receive work orders, send status updates and order completions in real-time directly from the field. Intelligent, automated dispatch – rules engine technology drives many intelliFORCE functions including policy-based automated dispatching. Modular, pluggable architecture – system functionality can be extended via plugins such as GPS or Routing module or legacy system functionality support. Fully automated exchange of information with collaborating systems – for example, “cut through” access to provisioning system enables technicians in the field to provision installed services. Web Portal enables employees to have real-time access to the company's information. Technicians can receive all the information available concerning the assigned tasks, update the status of the service order and report back to the system any relevant information. Web Portal also provides real-time receipt of orders by field technicians as well as the real-time dispatch of data to those same field technicians. IntelliFORCE also provides adapters to other services such as: Service Fulfillment, Service Assurance, Network Planning, CRM, Corporate Management and Time Tracking reporting. IntelliFORCE includes prebuilt adapters for integration with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), SLM (Service Lifecycle Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and HR (Human Resources) management systems. At the heart of intelliFORCE is job scheduling, forecasting, and tracking. intelliFORCE takes in to account real-time employee performance as well as historical. For example, unexpected employee absences may transform the best planned order into unmitigated chaos. intelliFORCE features methods to automatically substitute field personnel based on skills, work preferences, and other factors that help retain the integrity of the original schedule with minimal disruptions to service levels and customer service. intelliFORCE also includes a variety of reports, forecasting tools, and the ability to be compliant with all applicable government regulations and union rules, as well as time off requests. intelliFORCE components:
Job Dispatch stores job status, automates order activation, and collects performance metrics. Job requests, which are generated by the Trouble Ticketing system, are transferred and stored in the Work Catalog database where they are prioritized according to their level of importance. Job priority scheduling is rules-based and can be fully customizable. Job prioritization has the following values:
Job Scheduling facilitates work execution by providing schedule optimization based on the following information: Additionally, intelliFORCE’s Work Scheduling functionality supports organizational hierarchy and access rights, in which employees are arranged into two groups according to their roles:
Workload Forecasting – based on company's specific needs, forecasting is responsible for predicting workloads and generating actions that ensure optimal workforce performance. Analysis and planning automatically matches resources to corresponding activities and analyzes the workforce’s performance. For this analysis, the following information is collected:
Workforce Information Repository – a central repository that provides informational support for all WFM operations.
The intelliFORCE benefits:
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TELECOM SOLUTIONS
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