EDS

The Challenge

How optimal are your WFM software’s
“optimal” agent schedules?

The WFM Global Optimization team at EDS is continually pursuing all promising opportunities and technologies to increase the responsiveness and operational efficiency of their Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Service Delivery operations. Instead of accepting “Trust us – Our schedules are optimal” claims and hearing about opportunities other Fortune 500 companies identified through WFM benchmarking, the WFM Global Optimization team evaluated the efficiency of agent schedules generated by their Workforce Management (WFM) Software and the opportunities offered by the concurrent optimal scheduler technology pioneered by ac2 Solutions, Inc.

Opportunities Identified

The AWO Optimal Scheduler software has the new generation technologies to generate schedules with the greatest efficiency possible in a contact center environment at a minimum cost or total paid hours. This is achieved using ac2’s proprietary mathematical optimization models and algorithms for concurrent optimal scheduling. Agent and skills requirements, work rules, and an astronomical number of possible schedules all factor into ac2’s mathematical models and algorithms for concurrent optimization.

To evaluate the effectiveness of the agent scheduling capabilities provided by their WFM software, the Global Optimization team compared the scheduling efficiencies provided by their WFM system and the AWO Optimal Scheduler over a target week. For benchmarking purposes, the team selected the following EDS contact center environment:

• 1 contact center environment
• 3 contact center locations
• 238 full time agents
• One skill type
• Only 5×8 and 4×10 schedules

Using the same contact center data, weekly agent schedules for this environment were generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler and EDS’ WFM software provided by a traditional WFM solution vendor. Schedules generated by both systems were examined and verified by EDS for their conformance to weekly tour, daily shift and break scheduling parameters, agent and skills availability, agent and skills requirements, and operating hours.

The AWO Optimal Scheduler showed significant advantages and improvement opportunities in all metrics considered over the WFM software used by EDS. EDS required schedules for all agents. Therefore, “savings in total cost” was not included as a metric. The focus was on the elimination of agent shortages. Major benefits identified included:

• 98.5% schedule efficiency: The AWO Optimal Scheduler provided 98.5% schedule efficiency.
• 75% reduction in excess agent time: The AWO Optimal Scheduler required 75% less excess agent hours than the WFM software used by EDS.
• 100% elimination of agent shortages: Schedules generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler met 100% of all agent and skills requirements while schedules generated by the WFM software used by EDS resulted in 4.2% shortages.
• Elimination of extreme agent shortages: Schedules generated by the AWO Optimal Scheduler also eliminated period shortages as high as 31 agents (in a week with a peak requirement of 142 agents) generated by the WFM software used by EDS.