The ultimate flexibilization

By now, most businesses have perfected their production and logistics processes. Unfortunately, when it comes to demand- and employee-oriented workforce management many companies are still resorting to pencil and paper, or spreadsheets at best.

Andreas F.J. Obereder | CEO and Founder, ATOSS

Where are the potentials to be found?

In virtually all industries! Take retailing for instance. According to a recent 2013 study by Porsche Consulting and Forsa, 66 percent of customers in the retail sector feel they receive poor service; 81 percent of customers will not make a purchase if the service is not up to par. To date, just around a fifth of companies in the high-end market segment can actually plan and work in line with demand. These agile companies are capable of synchronizing their workforce resources to short-term demand. In turn, they increase their conversion rates, while optimizing personnel costs. The knock-on effects are therefore positive – on costs and revenue. Demand-driven, transparent and fair deployment, coupled with attractive working time models also boost employee motivation. Or let’s take a look at the banking sector, which is on the verge of momentous change worldwide. Many banks are going back to their roots in the branch business. Banks have to meet increasing customer requirements, while cost pressure remains stubbornly high. Longer opening times or higher service levels can only be achieved through a more intelligent, more flexible deployment of the existing workforce.

Aren’t our companies already capable of workforce management?

That is generally true. German companies, for example, took their first steps toward working time flexibilization back in the 1970s and have reaped enormous benefits as a result. To maintain or even extend their lead they now have to flexibilize the flexibilization. Annual working time, flextime and working time accounts are no longer sufficient. Today, the aim is to gear workforce management consistently to the company’s requirements. 

Does that mean that many companies are good, but not good enough?

You could say that. The strategic importance of the issue of workforce management is often underestimated. Not long ago, we had a presentation of a retailer´s best stores. The management firmly believed that everything was running optimally in these stores. But the analysis revealed just how wide off the mark they actually were! Workforce scheduling was insufficient on four out of six days. Shortfalls or surpluses of 30 percent and more were not uncommon and directly impacted on service levels, revenue and employee productivity. This kind of scenario is not an exception, by any means. We have had similar experiences involving projects in manufacturing, logistics and healthcare. In logistics, for instance, an average of almost 20 percent of working time is spent unproductively.

Do you have specific examples of how workforce management pays off?

EBIT improvements of 5 percent plus can be achieved in the retail sector thanks to better demand forecasts and more flexible deployment of the workforce. Or take healthcare. More than half of all hospitals in Germany operate at a loss.Already with 1,000 employees, optimized workforce management can achieve annual savings of up to 30,000 working hours otherwise spent with unproductive administrative tasks. Ad-hoc control mechanisms are the only means of gearing the business model transparently and calculably to new strategies in many places. As part of a current hospital project our customer managed to record quantifiable benefits amounting to a high six-figure sum following the initial roll out stage. Once the project is fully up and running, we expect this figure to have increased almost fivefold.

Are high budgets inevitable?

Absolutely not. For a retail business with 2,000 employees, workforce management can be rolled out with a budget running to a low six-figure sum. The payback period for most projects is between six and twelve months. These projects deliver a positive return on investment in the first year already. In actual practice, how does ATOSS support companies in mastering these challenges?
Workforce management is not just about tools and software. At the start of a project our consultants specifically analyze our customers’ processes. Thanks to our extensive cross-industry expertise we are able to very quickly identify shortcomings and optimization potential within existing processes. 

What are your solutions capable of achieving?

Our highly specialized algorithms enable future staffing needs to be forecasted precisely, and provide, at the push of a button, demand-optimized schedules for as many as several thousand employees, factoring in all the relevant criteria. That alone is an absolute mammoth task, as even just with 20 employees with four different starting times you have billions of possible daily schedules. In retail we can forecast footfall to an accuracy of +/- 2 percent. Most companies do not even come close to this. The true potential of workforce management is, however, unleashed through a combination of highly intelligent software solutions and constant fine-tuning of the company’s functional organization and organizational structure. The cross-divisional standardization of processes enhances efficiency, planning quality and the benchmarking opportunities throughout the whole company. 

What makes ATOSS so successful?

We support our customers with best practice expertise in workforce management, which we have amassed in several thousand projects across the widest range of different sectors and industries. And we do so around the globe – from the United States to Japan. What’s more, our customers benefit from the effectiveness, stability and scalability of our software in which we have invested over 80 million euros to date.