e-Business

Over the past 20 years, consumers’ expectations for products and services have changed significantly and created several trends. Two of these trends have generated new e-business opportunities and needs. First, customers expect both products and support services to be available at all times.

Secondly, products must be customized to fit their needs. These trends have changed the way products are manufactured and sold. Contact centers have become important sales channels by providing convenient access to products and services. They process a significant portion of the orders filled by many manufacturing companies. Managing sales-contact centers requires NEXT Generation workforce optimization technologies as the traditional WFM technologies do not support revenue based staffing and scheduling to optimize profits. The mass customization of products and allocation of resources when needed through build-to-order/configure-to-order manufacturing has resulted in mass customization supply chain models where products have variable BOMs (bill of materials). Component and subassembly requirements are customer specific, and vary from one order to another for the same product (e.g. PC’s, laptops). Traditional supply and demand planning technologies developed for products with fixed BOMs are not effective in a mass customization environment because of the added BOM uncertainty and significantly different customer expectations (e.g. instead of product delivery from shelf, whole order delivery within the promised interval).

Moreover, integrated contact center and manufacturing supply chains offer significant opportunities to optimize sales and increase supply chain velocity through,

1. Profit-optimal staffing and scheduling at contact centers, and
2. Integrated demand and supply planning for the manufacturing supply chain using staffing levels and expected sales approaching real time granularity such as 30 minutes or an hour.

ac2’s NEXT Generation technologies provide solutions to manage integrated contact center and manufacturing supply chain environments:

AWO Portal provides NEXT Generation technologies for workforce optimization at your contact centers taking customer orders and delivering services. It provides Artificial Intelligence for utmost ease-of-use, advanced forecasting technologies, concurrent optimal scheduling, a multi-criteria schedule manager, a vacation planner, an integrated strategic planner, a performance optimizer, and an agent workstation.

Profit-Optimal Staffing and Scheduling of your contact centers determines your staffing levels and schedules agents to maximize profits. This technology enables you to capture sales that you would lose by using the traditional service level or ASA targets for staffing and scheduling.

Safety Staffing is required at contact centers to minimize lost sales. This technology allows the inclusion of past forecast variation as an input to your staffing levels to capture opportunities where actual contacts exceed forecasts.

Integrated Demand Planning by contact centers and manufacturing supply chain planners provides crucial information on forecasted orders based on the staffing levels and agent schedules at contact centers. This information can be generated for short intervals such as 30 minutes or on the hour to enhance supply chain velocity.

Order Based Demand and Supply Planning provides a unique business process solution using ac2’s patented technologies developed specifically for build-to-order, configure-to-order, and assemble-to-order supply chains. Our NEXT Generation technology develops models of the order-to-order BOM variations expected, and includes them in demand and supply planning to optimize resources and meet the on-time order delivery goals.