Intelligent Workforce Management Helps Companies Navigate Economic Gloom

A steady stream of economic data suggests the U.S. economy is approaching or already experiencing a recession. However, the marriage of business intelligence and workforce management programs is making it easier than ever for managers to keep close control over staffing levels and productivity.

Thanks to the latest analytic tools found in programs like Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise and Oracle E-Business Suite, organizations can leverage these tools to more accurately track labor costs, worker productivity, and labor efficiency to continually assess whether they have the right number of people with the right skills to support their business objectives.

“Organizations can use the business intelligence analytics to track workforce metrics that are most important to the overall organization,” says Sherri Bartels, Oracle’s director of HCM strategy for workforce management applications. “Workforce management applications historically were seen as adding value to an organization by streamlining the capture and processing of time and extending self-service capabilities to managers and employees in order to alleviate the burden on HR. While that’s still true today, organizations that have already adopted workforce management systems are now realizing the wealth of data they have on their most costly asset—labor. By applying business intelligence tools to this data, HR can now truly become strategic.”

For example, Oracle Workforce Scheduling can forecast business demand based on historical data for seasonal, weekly, daily, and hourly periods to help managers determine how many people they'll need and what skills will be required. Moreover, with the right metrics in place, an organization can identify the root causes of issues such as understaffing to determine whether they are the result of hiring levels or training deficiencies. Matching resources to demand reduces both overstaffing and understaffing.

“Workforce management is more critical than ever as organizations wonder about recession and whether they need to start thinking about hiring freezes or layoffs,” Bartels says. “They’re asking themselves, ‘How can we better utilize the employees we have today and help them be more productive?’ All of that is enabled by our workforce management and business intelligence applications."