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"Infor WFM Workbrain gives you that ability. Designed to
automate and standardize the time and labor processes for large, distributed enterprises,
the solution features a broad set of workforce management processes deployed on a field-proven,
enterprise-class open architecture. With Infor WFM Workbrain, you have the web-based tools you
need to empower employees with self-service capabilities and enable your management team to
make fact-based decisions in real time."
Source: Infor
The ROI of Your Labor Force
Workforce Management Strategy is also known as :
Workforce Technologies,
Efficient Workforce Scheduling,
Workforce Regulations,
Workforce Productivity,
Infor WFM Workbrain,
Workforce Software,
Workforce Time and Attendance,
Workforce Absence,
Managing Workforce Investment,
Performance Management Processes,
Workforce Optimization,
Workforce Business Trends,
Workforce Solutions,
Productivity of the Workforce,
Maintenance of the Workforce-Processes,
Benefits of Employee Self-service,
Infor Labor Workforce,
Human Resources Departments,
Employment Labor,
Labor Forecasting and Scheduling,
Return on Investement of Labor Force,
Typical Workforce Management Solutions,
Innovative HR Leaders,
Labour Pool in Employment,
Improving the Performance of Workforce,
Day-to-day Operational Analysis.
Table of contents
There is real value in your workforce. By driving innovation in the front-line
people-processes, human resources can attain the full heights of its strategic
value.
Leading HR organizations have driven real returns by extending their reach to
the front lines of people processes. As investors increasingly scrutinize
measures like profit per employee and labor cost as a percentage of revenue, the
need for HR to measure its business impact in dollars has never been more
intense.
PwC Saratoga's annual study results show that workforce productivity, as
measured by metrics comparing labor costs with revenue, increased in 2007. Labor
costs as a percentage of revenue dropped to 28 percent, the lowest level since
2005. At the same time, revenue per full-time employee (FTE) grew to $355,358,
an increase of almost 8% over 2006. These productivity figures suggest company
leaders are successfully managing their workforce investment.
Labor costs are the single biggest expense on the income statement in most
industries, so improving the performance of your workforce can drive your
corporate performance. Even seemingly small changes in workforce productivity
can have a huge impact on the bottom lines of large organizations. Consider an
organization with a $1 billion US payroll that reduces labor costs by 2%: the
resulting $20 million in cost savings would certainly pique the interest of any
CFO.
Your company can achieve the same kind of results if you optimize your most
important asset—your workforce.
Few would disagree that people count as an organization's most strategic asset.
Being strategic means delivering initiatives that are critical to the success of
the business.
Historically, Human Resources departments have attacked the challenge by
focusing on the employee relationship. By developing first-rate benefits
programs, skills and training delivery, succession and compensation planning,
performance management processes and recruiting, HR rightfully felt that they
were contributing to the development of this key asset.
But a back office focus on the employee relationship can only take HR so far. HR
must extend its influence and impact beyond "the worker" to "the workforce."
The workforce is more than the aggregate of all employees—the workforce is the
engine of operations. As your largest single controllable expense and largest
driver for value creation, your workforce as a whole must be managed optimally.
This workforce optimization provides the two key ingredients of strategic HR. It
provides the real-time labor input for core HR efforts, while also producing the
measurable business impact that HR needs to deliver.
Given the high financial stakes of workforce productivity, a strategic HR
program must align itself with the needs of line managers. Line managers have a
direct impact on the cost of labor, the profitability of operations, and the
productivity of the workforce. HR can no longer simply provide a support
function within an organization; it must enhance the efficiency of people
processes.
While there's no need for a hostile takeover of operations, HR can help deliver
tools that assist line managers in managing the workforce.
Delivering innovative tools isn't a new concept to HR. Employee
self-service—personal data maintenance or life events management—is a good
example of HR innovation reaching the front lines. These initiatives have
typically transferred tasks from administrative clerks to employees. Perhaps as
a result, industry findings tag the self-service payback at three years among
organizations that have attempted to measure returns.
But the benefits of employee self-service go beyond cost savings, extending to
operational improvements. As Webster Buchanan Research points out "One of the
benefits of automating manual activities is that it generates data that can be
used for a range of business intelligence needs, from day-to-day operational
analysis to workforce business trends. Because self-service tends to improve
data accuracy—by eliminating rekeying and putting data accuracy into the hands
of the beneficiaries—it also improves the quality of the resulting analysis."
If HR is to impact business success, it must help the business confidently
measure the impact of the workforce. Consider the scheduling process, a
mission-critical activity. After all, stores can't open, goods can't be
manufactured, and products can't be sold if the right employees aren't there to
make it happen. Yet all too often, critical workforce processes are handled by
disconnected systems requiring significant manual intervention.
HR needs to drive innovation and efficiency in operations by bringing to bear
tools and solutions to the line that are people-related, not simply HR-related.
Getting operational in this way helps HR drive workforce productivity, measure
it, and benefit from it.
Fortunately, leading HR organizations are charting this course—and reaping the
benefits.
To improve their material impact on the bottom line, HR professionals are
focusing on workforce technologies that impact operational effectiveness. That
is, tools that support managers and employees where they work. The shop floor.
The retail store. The tarmac. The hospital ward.
To do this, innovative HR leaders are looking beyond the long-term planning and
maintenance of the workforce—processes like demand planning, organizational
competency management, compensation analysis, recruiting and onboarding—to the
day of operations processes that dramatically impact business performance.
Shifting HR's gaze from the back office to front line workforce processes is the
key to operational impact. The ROI associated with optimizing these
processes—labor forecasting and scheduling, time and attendance, and operational
self-service—provides a tremendous opportunity for HR to positively affect the
income statement.
Accurate labor forecasting and efficient workforce scheduling is critical to
optimal workforce performance. For many organizations, this is a cumbersome,
ineffective process, and supervisors spend many hours a week building shifts
that don't align with workforce demand. A host of constraints, including
employee schedule preferences, minor laws and other workforce regulations, and
budgeted labor spend, affect the supply of labor. Reconciling that variable
supply with ever-changing demand for labor (i.e. store traffic) becomes a giant
math problem.
Across a range of industries, accurate labor forecasting combined with new
scheduling technology now delivers employee schedules that maximize coverage
while minimizing labor spend. According to research from the Aberdeen Group,
"Best-in-Class companies achieved a 36% average improvement in staff
productivity as a result of integrating their scheduling process with the
organization's workforce management strategy."
As Aberdeen explains "An efficient workforce scheduling process enables a
company to allocate the right people, with the right skills, in the right place,
at the right time. As a result, it has direct impact on a company's ability to
decrease costs, increase workforce capacity utilization and productivity, as
well as escalate overall customer satisfaction."
Some of the quantifiable benefits a company can recognize include:
| Benefit Area |
Representative Results |
| Decreased supervisor time spent scheduling |
National retailer's store supervisors reduce scheduling time by 2.5 hours
per week; spend more time coaching employees and servicing customers |
| Reduced absenteeism and resulting call-in pay |
Major airline reduces incidence "overstaffing" due to planned absenteeism by
5% |
| Better compliance with company, union, and Dept. of Labor scheduling
policies and laws |
Retail chain decreases exposure to minor law violations; eliminates risk of
$10,000 per infraction fines |
| Reduced gross payroll |
Large theater chain reduces work hours with scheduling efficiencies |
The benefits of workforce scheduling technologies are driving better bottom line
results across many industries, including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation,
and the public sector. By shepherding workforce deployment technology into operations, HR can
deliver the quantitative savings CFOs cherish. At the same time, core HR metrics—workforce
satisfaction and retention—can create dramatic improvements due to better alignment of schedules
with employee preferences and union contracts.
Managing employee time and attendance is a daunting task for managers of large, complex workforces.
Frequently this process is manual, with front line managers completing paper timesheets and attendance
forms. Even where time entry systems help streamline the daily chore, downstream data entry is
still required into the payroll systems. Access to real-time workforce data—late arrivals, hours
worked, current pay information—is non-existent for both managers and employees. Overtime,
incentive calculations, retroactive adjustments and other complex processes complicate matters even further.
Errors in time tracking and submission do more than waste manager time. Because employees don't
always report payroll errors—particularly when the amount on their pay stubs is higher than
expected—these errors also hinder profitability. For this reason, erroneous pay rule applications
can have a significant impact on labor costs. Combined with other shortcomings of manual zero to
gross pay management, organizations can incur gross payroll inflation of 1-6%.
Best of breed time and attendance solutions that automate 100% of an organization's pay rules,
accurately track employee hours, and automatically handle overtime and incentive allocations can
dramatically reduce enterprise payroll.
| Benefit Area |
Representative Results |
| Reduce payroll by reducing errors |
Fortune 500 process manufacturer reduces gross payroll by over 1.5% by reducing payroll errors |
| Reduce improper overtime allocation |
Major airline eliminates "rocking chair" or overtime bypass pay |
| Comply with union rules and policies |
Healthcare organization standardizes pay rule application across 600 departments, 4 unions,
and 300 job classifications |
| Reduce supervisor time spent manually processing timesheets |
Transportation company cuts manager timesheet administration by 3 hours per week/manager |
By helping to introduce Web-based, centralized time and attendance technologies, HR leaders can have
a profound effect on both the efficiency of labor and payroll costs.
Employee self-service (ESS) has achieved broad adoption, with over 75% of the Fortune 1000 having
implemented technologies that allow employees to self-process HR. Yet reported return on investment
from these deployments has been less than spectacular because traditional ESS rollouts have focused
solely on HR forms and processes—benefits enrollment, personal information updates and life events management.
HR innovators are now realizing that the promise of ESS lies in automating operational employee
processes—those that happen on the front lines every day. These are processes like swapping shifts,
submitting availability, bidding on shifts, or requesting overtime. Because they happen with greater
frequency, and replace more manual-intensive processes, these operational transactions represent the
next wave of self-service automation—and significant ROI for HR and operations executives.
An operations-focused ESS agenda yields strong dividends and contributes to greater workforce performance.
| Reduce costs |
Representative Results |
| Reduce payroll by reducing errors |
Business case for one major airline projects a $250K annual cost reduction for automation of
employee pay stubs alone |
| Accelerate internal processes |
Auto parts manufacturer shortens cycle times from weeks to hours |
| Reduce administration |
Less manual data entry helps manufacturer reduce administrative FTE count |
Labor forecasting and scheduling, time and attendance, and operational self-service are all "day of
operations" workforce processes that can yield significant ROI through the use of new workforce technologies.
And HR can be the motivating factor for organizations to make this transformation. While the ROI
associated with each process is compelling, the Holy Grail lies in an integrated workforce management
approach that connects all of these processes on a single platform.
Working with IT, HR can focus on a single, centralized workforce management platform—with functionality
robust enough to meet the complex requirements of front line operations. A centralized, real-time system
can deliver the timely workforce information that front-line managers require to answer the call for
greater workforce intelligence, and make effective decisions.
Deploying new workforce technology can transform your company's operations and deliver significant and
repeatable ROI, as well as provide data that improves core strategic HR applications like workforce
planning, recruiting, and performance management. Key employee data captured by typical workforce
management solutions extend the value of these core initiatives by providing insight, predictability,
and accurate labor information into the process.
The focus on front line people processes enhances HR's strategic nature and produces a significant,
measurable impact on workforce productivity and business performance.
This workforce transformation requires HR's involvement and leadership. And given the rewards, it's no
wonder that leading human resource organizations have turned their attention to workforce management to
fully deliver on the HR promise.
About Infor
Infor acquires and develops functionally rich software backed by thousands of domain experts and then
makes it better through continuous innovation, faster implementation options, global enablement, and
flexible buying options. In a few short years, Infor has become one of the largest providers of business
software in the world. For additional information, visit www.Infor.com.