Multi-site Workforce Management with InVision Software: Efficient Staff Scheduling at Seven International Contact Centres of arvato services

Ratingen (Germany), February 12th, 2009 – arvato services, a market leading service provider for effective solutions in the fields of customer communication, financial services and supply chain management, uses the workforce management solution InVision Enterprise WFM of InVision Software, one of the leading international providers of enterprise-wide workforce management (WFM) systems, for the demand-oriented multi-site staff scheduling of seven interconnected international service centers. This way, the complexity of staff planning as well as idle times could be reduced while productivity and efficiency of the service centers were significantly increased.

At the arvato service centers in Argentina, Estonia, India, Morocco, the Netherlands, Sweden and at the German site in Muenster, over 500 agents answer customer queries during arvato’s business hours, which include weekends and late evenings. Agents deal with customers in 18 languages. By using the multi-site functionality of InVision ´s WFM solution, the staff scheduling for each of the seven sites is now planned and optimized centrally from Muenster. The various business hours and the volatile volume of inbound calls are considered automatically, as well as the system takes into account the multitude of legal requirements in each country and the agents’ various language skills and individual needs .

Ralf Voigt, Director of the Staff Planning Team of arvato services at the Muenster site, explains: “By using the workforce management solution InVision Enterprise WFM, we are now in a position where we can achieve optimal requirement coverage across our internationally dispersed sites while improving our efficiency by 15 to 20 percent thanks to automated optimized scheduling.” The time taken for staff planning dropped significantly as well.

“Our solution meets the needs of arvato services in an ideal way as the system is capable of mapping virtual structures and thus optimally supports the multi-site scheduling of geographically dispersed sites”, says Peter Bollenbeck, CEO of InVision Software . “The analysis and monitoring features of InVision Enterprise WFM also help arvato services to further increase the productivity of their service centers: For instance, target-performance comparisons are permanently monitored to readjust exacting future scheduling to the forecasted demand. Additionally, arvato services uses our WFM system to regularly determine key performance indicators such as sales per week or sales per language.“