Cognos unveils new performance solution for workforce resource management

As service-based industries such as retail stores, restaurants, hotels, and hospitals become increasingly challenged to manage the process of effectively allocating employee resources to meet customer-service demands, the new Cognos Workforce Resource Management Blueprint provides staffing managers with a Web-based planning process and the associated visibility to forecast workforce requirements based on customer demand across the global scope of the organisation.

"We have integrated Cognos enterprise planning across marketing, engineering, production and finance operations and are just beginning to extend our implementation to a workforce planning project across Qualcomm," said Robert Loreto, Senior Manager, Finance Systems, Qualcomm CDMA Technology group. "This new blueprint helped us provide a valuable headstart to capitalize on industry best-practice, quickly increase visibility, make more efficient and effective use of human resources and eliminate disconnected decision-making across the staffing process."

The Blueprint delivers a process anchored in industry best-practices that helps managers determine headcount requirements based on activity levels and gain real-time visibility to cumulative variances in the staffing requirements which may impact key business metrics, such as customer satisfaction, from a financial and operational perspective.
Staffing managers can use the Workforce Resource Management Performance Blueprint to eliminate 'best-guessing', and determine headcount requirements by activity, based on highly flexible methods that map to the key business drivers of the organization.
In addition, managers can set staffing effectiveness ratings by activity for each employee, streamline entry of employee shift details to reduce schedule creation time, vary employee pay rates, set additional pay multiples for national holidays by employee by day, and automatically generate detailed financial implications of the staffing schedule.

Through these capabilities staffing managers can allocate the correct resources to the activities that meet customer demands and, through a forward looking planning process, corporate Human Resources teams can better understand the demand requirements of operations and set hiring and personnel development practices to meet these requirements.

"Our Workforce Resource Management Performance Blueprint helps organizations take the first step towards linking financial and operational planning to improve resource allocation decision-making," said Derek Morrison, regional general manager, Cognos Middle East. "The blueprint's best-practices provide service-based organizations with invaluable insight into the nature and timing of human capital requirements. This improved visibility enables companies to take related action that can simultaneous raise customer satisfaction, service levels and profitability."

Cognos will be @ Gitex 2006 at Concourse 2, DIC stand 18.