A software forecasting system should support:
Your business planning process
Increase commercial awareness
Monitor capacity demand and performance
Become part of your managers routine
Be easy to use and agile to respond to a rapidly changing environment
The right software solution will support many of the behaviours and changes required in your management team for forecasting success. You need to ensure that your software doesn’t restrict and close down management thought processes but instead empowers them and drives action to improve performance and efficiency.
Many operations have centralised planning and management information teams which are typically highly focussed on contact centre forecasting. But how good are they as back office forecasting? With the right training and tools your managers can make a big different to both the front and back office.
For managers to be able to plan effectively and do their job properly, they must be able to forecast. Forecasting enables managers to understand how the current position of their teams or the operation as a whole will be affected by ‘future changes’.
Typical forecasting ‘future changes’ can be new work, loss of work, rework, or dealing with new compliance issues. Being able to get a clear picture as to how these changes will affect the operation, its capacity and productivity is key to successful planning and management.
Forecasting is not just a single activity. It’s the sum of a cycle of core events consisting of planning, reviewing monitoring and improving. Each core forecasting event in the cycle should have a clear structure supported by a process in your software.
There four critical stages of the forecasting cycle
Planning– typically starting with a thought process to an external driver, e.g., new work volumes. This thought process should be supported by data analysis to learn about the facts that will drive the ‘next steps’ in the planning process. Resources can then be evaluated to explain what impact will occur on the operation from the external change. Once the available resources have been thoroughly evaluated a clear production plan can be developed.
Reviewing– is essential to the successful implementation of new plans. Routine meetings are necessary to understand progress and if there has been any variation or deviation from the plan. Your software should be able to support you with accurate performance information enabling you to identify opportunities to increase performance and balance your resources to improve efficiency.
Monitoring– Essential to staying on course and more often the missing element . Understanding if you are on track with your planned progress vs. your forecast is critical to maintaining SLA, customer service excellence and importantly operational profitability. Understanding your operations capacity and performance levels is key and where your software plays an integral role.
Improving– requires precise action planning combined with practical change. Your software must be able to support you by re-forecasting in line with these changes and help you to set new performance targets.
It’s the combination of management routines driven and backed by a software system that empowers your operation to forecast effectively and achieve tremendous leaps in performance. By equipping your managers with the skills and tools they need, you can enable them to become the driving force that consistently produces the best performance outcome.
