What are the most effective ways to evaluate scheduling software and tools for workforce management?

Our scheduling process encounters challenges such as inefficient resource allocation, difficulty in managing employee preferences, compliance issues, lack of visibility, and customer complaints. Addressing these issues is essential for selecting scheduling software that enhances efficiency, improves employee satisfaction, ensures compliance, and resolves service inconsistencies.

I would say gather your requirements of scheduling, related rules and policies, business need and employee's expectations. Based on these points company can define overall expectations or requirements in terms of scheduling rules, operation time, minimum coverage, requires skill, maximum hours for individual, special allocation on special events and many more. Then these parameters help to identify suitable software from the market.

Here I would suggest to start with the MoSCoW prioritization method. The acronym represents four categories of initiatives: must-have, should-have, could-have, and won't-have, or will not have right now. This method helps you to sort out your priorities and focus on the most critical requirements. It allows a large audience (managers, planers, forecasters, advisors, team leaders, ...) to participate in the requirements gathering decision and vote using e.g. a Miro board and some of the voting methods like 100-Point Method.

workforce management (WFM) solution is a software solution that helps organizations streamline and automate the processes that manage workers' time, organize and deploy their labor force efficiently, enable employee and manager self-service, and ensure employee safety. Workforce Management Topics.

- Define specific requirements: Clearly outline needs such as shift management, forecasting, and reporting. - User-friendly interface: Ensure the software is intuitive for both managers and employees. - Scalability: Evaluate whether the tool can accommodate growth and changing needs. - Integration capabilities: Check if the software can seamlessly integrate with existing systems like HR or payroll. - Performance metrics: Look for tools that offer robust analytics to measure efficiency and effectiveness of scheduling processes.

Based on company's size, sector they are working in, employees headcount, future growth, they can decide the product. Choosen product should be user friendly, scalable and also it should integrate with other ERP and HCM tools easily. It should be secure and compliant with data protection and governance policy. Also one of the important criteria to choose the scheduling tool is their approach/model for schedule generation. Apart from that, company can look for additional features like self-service tools and optimisation over the time.

Every WFM tool should and mostly has three parts: Forecasting, Scheduling and Monitoring modules. Where bigger gaps between products starts, is in the area of integration (from where do I receive historical/actual data, HRIS/payroll integration), user friendliness and accessibility (UI ease of use, where I can access it - web/mobile/calendar, what are the UI prerequisites, ...), other workforce engagement parts availability (such as gamification, coaching, quality management, learning and development) are they part of the software? Easy to integrate? How do all the modules work together? What APIs the software has to satisfy my specific custom needs?

Few of many benefits: Time savings Increased efficiency Enhanced Productivity Improved Communication Cost saving Flexibility So why not

For a small company/investment a vendor demo and requirements confirmation should be sufficient. For bigger investments a good practice is to ask for reference customers, participate in a short training, building and evaluating a MVP in a sandbox (this is very efficient for a Cloud based software) to personally get impressions and gather experience. This also gives a customer an initial inside of how the vendor communicates, supports, cooperate and is confident in the subject matter.

After deciding the scheduling software, company can check usability during demo or trial phase. While implementing it, during the testing phase company should test all common and complex scenario as much as possible. During this phase involve all stakeholder, not only HR and support team,but also employees from different department/regions and manager as well. In this phase only, company should ask implementor partner to load dummy data of same size as of real-life scenarios and perform load and performance test. Company can go with multiple of this data as well to ensure same performance in future as company grows.

Cost benefit analysis should be done while deciding between different the products. Key parameters to evaluate product value and to do this analysis are scalability, provided features, degree of automation, accuracy of generated schedule, recurring cost such as licensing or subscription and maintenance cost. Company can also need to factor in training and adaption cost. Above all it should meet business needs, company's policies, overall expectations and it should align with company's work culture.

Software costs are important part in making the decision, but not the only one. Sometimes buying a more expensive software will save costs in other areas (modules included in the price with no need to buy them extra, reduced costs of user training, reduced footprint, and much more). Important factor is to calculate the return of investment as a comparison factor. The ability to build highly accurate and optimized schedules is one of the large cost savings as the workforce and workforce related factor makes it most expensive part of the company expenses.

Not just in WFM, it apply for many other situations in our life, the key point with a tool is the effectiveness in the training process and the commitment of the trainees to continue growing in the knowledge of the tool. You can to have a powerful tool but if you don’t have a solid knowledge about it, you are not get the 100% of the capabilities of your investment. Many times the customers told me that they preferred to do the process manually because they don’t know how to use the tool to create an effective scheduling, but after the training they understood that the tool could do more that they saw initially.

In my experience, if you move from one tool to another one, do not insist on using the same configuration and processes as you used for years. Every tool is different and the new one will have for sure a bunch of functionalities and features the old did not have. See a migration always as an unique opportunity to re-design from scratch traying to improve and optimize your current processes. After you recognize the new tool does not give you for a particular configuration/process a better solution use then the old approach.