News & Events

Media Coverage

January, 2005

Preparing for the New Hiring Wave

Trends & Tidbits

January, 2005

By: Robert Farina - CyberShift Inc.

With the economic slowdown over the past few years, many large organizations have invested little time or money in their workforce management solutions. With signs of a recovery on the way, this is the time to reevaluate current practices and make necessary adjustments.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, payroll employment continued to increase in 2004, and current estimates show the trend continuing into 2005. In addition, a study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found that employers expect to hire 13.1 percent more new college graduates in 2004-2005 than they hired in 2003-2004.

With employment numbers on the rise, companies must be prepared to address complex time, attendance and employee scheduling needs so they can effectively and profitably absorb new employees.

Organizations must have a workforce-management solution in place before new hires come on board if they want to achieve optimal levels of productivity and performance while lowering total costs. If they fail to put in place reliable and scalable solutions now, they may find it difficult to control costs and effectively manage workforce assets across the enterprise as they grow. This is especially true with large, complex organizations that rely heavily on scheduling practices to comply with union work rules and regulations.

The market offers a wide range of workforce management solutions, but all solutions are not created equal. There are certain functions and traits that must be included in a workforce management solution for it to truly help organizations achieve their business goals.

Time Management

This is the functional foundation of a solution that both coordinates time entry and helps managers get a better view of their organizations. These capabilities should support essential functions including: time entry, evaluation and action; approval processing; exception, accrual and leave management; project accounting; labor distribution; time billing; and administration of legal requirements.

With this functionality, managers can perform mass updates and preview the results before initiating business process/job allocation changes. By allowing such previews, the solution eliminates many "trial and error" sessions previously unavoidable, thus more quickly driving end results and allowing managers to seamlessly incorporate new employees.

Scheduling

These capabilities allow managers to put the best people doing the right job at the right time, maximizing the productivity of the workforce, and the quality of the end products or services produced. This should be an integral component of any solution considered.

Employees, contractors, managers and scheduling administrators must have the flexibility to replicate, improve and automate the daily scheduling processes. To allow this, a solution should support all aspects of employee scheduling, including overtime scheduling monitoring, job skill matching and worker substitution.

Data Acquisition

There must be a bridge from legacy hardware and employee-facing devices to the system. Comprehensive, reliable data exchange is important for organizations that need to maintain existing investments in employee-facing devices while making improvements in the back office.

Data acquisition capabilities must provide support for a broad variety of data acquisition devices used in a client environment from the more traditional time clocks and badge readers to newer proximity and biometric devices.

Additionally, Research firm eMarketer predicts that two-thirds of U.S. workers will work away from the office, in some capacity, by 2006. Clearly, a workforce management solution must also address the technology needs of geographically diverse organizations and support wireless options used by the growing mobile workforce, like pagers, WAP/WML-enabled cell phones and PDAs.

Process Automation

The best systems utilize a robust rules processing capability that increases efficiency and ensures compliance. Whether functioning independently or in combination with the entire solution, ruled-based automation also should form the basis of any workflow management toolset.

Based on accepted industry-specific practices, a workflow engine should support sophisticated, existing workflow rules and process mapping-a feature that streamlines all activities and alerts users to activities that cannot be automated. Enterprises should also seek solutions that feature message routing and a workflow dashboard.

Of course, underlying all of this functionality, a solution must employ a scalable infrastructure that not only allows companies to seamlessly integrate new employees and new locations into the system, but that can also accommodate the ever changing employment landscape with regards to union agreements, labor rules and accounting standards regulations.

The workforce-management market offers a wide range of solutions that all claim to fit every user's needs. However, without a comprehensive offering that not only offers time management and scheduling functionality, but also provides tight integration with existing HR and Payroll systems and employs rules-based automation, companies who are looking to hire more employees in the near future will not be completely prepared to properly manage these new workers and fully realize the business benefits intended.

Robert Farina is Chief Executive Officer of CyberShift Inc., a New Jersey-based provider of workforce management software and services for complex organizations with more than 1,000 employees.

About CyberShift

CyberShift Inc. (www.cybershift.com) is a leading provider of workforce management software and services focused on helping large, complex organizations optimize and manage the deployment of their people. CyberShift's rules-based platform delivers a fully integrated solution for the management of all aspects of time and attendance, scheduling, self-service functions and workforce reporting and analytics. The enterprise-class workforce management suite reduces costs and improves processes for a variety of industries, including media and entertainment, retail, manufacturing, transportation, financial services, healthcare and the public sector. CyberShift is the workforce management solution provider of choice for more than 100 major organizations throughout the United States and Canada.

# # #

<< Back to Media Coverage