What Is Workforce Optimization?

Growing a business means one thing: growing pains. Often, your workflow is the first thing to feel the strain. Juggling your customer experience, physical assets, and maintenance schedules can be headache-inducing, even on the best of days.

Knowing how to keep quality management level requires knowledge of some key concepts, like an asset management system as well as how workforce optimization works in the first place.

Workforce Optimization, in Plain Terms

If you’ve heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder,” you’ve probably had to resist the urge to roll your eyes. However, there’s a major nugget of truth in this saying. As businesses grow, it becomes critical to adapt in real-time or risk mucking up customer satisfaction and reducing agent productivity.

Simply put, workforce optimization (WFO), is balancing all of your key performance metrics to get the maximum benefit. Sounds easy enough, right? Unfortunately, as businesses grow, so do their needs. This can mean you require different mobile devices, new products with stronger key features, or smarter ways to track analytics.

Luckily, WFO performance management and workforce management solutions exist. Some of the key features of these include an intuitive interface, help desk availability, better dashboards and browser visibility, and contact center support. All of these key features can give you greater insight into your business’s performance, especially during periods of growth.

Many platforms allow you to upgrade your account as needed so you’re able to scale your performance solutions alongside your business and ensure that you’re not negatively impacting productivity across the line.

While the greater umbrella of workforce optimization is incredibly important, one of its key concepts is often mismanaged or lost in the shuffle: physical assets and asset management.

The Ins and Outs of Asset Management

Unless you’re already using an asset manager, chances are you’ve experienced some of the difficulties of asset tracking. It often involves juggling work orders, barcode labels, serial numbers, and asset tags. Many businesses rely on an outdated spreadsheet model to asset track and, while there’s always a place for a well-thought-out spreadsheet, your asset tracking system isn’t that place.

Whether you’re working with physical assets or mobile assets, you need to have both the tools and a dedicated asset management solution in place to ensure that your product warehouse doesn’t suffer as a result of unprecedented growth.

So, what makes a good asset management solution? Firstly, it needs to fit into your warehouse structure. If your warehouse is used to a certain method of operations that an asset management solution can’t accommodate, it may not be the right choice.

Key features should include dedicated asset tracking, an intuitive interface, a maintenance management system for mobile assets, IT assets, and physical assets, and contact center support that can give you a notification or smartphone alerts about changes to your account or work orders. You also need the capability to rapidly scan barcodes and tags. While each vendor operates differently, these general key features cover some of the main bases. As far as physical hardware is concerned, a barcode scanner that can read QR codes is a must.

The ability to customize alerts and notifications for work orders is an added benefit. It makes barcode and tag tracking that much more streamlined and removes a lot of the guesswork. Whether these alerts go to a tablet or smartphone is up to you. Bluetooth connectivity for smartphones and tablets is also a plus, but not necessary in many instances

A Complex Machine

As simple as workforce optimization sounds, it relies upon the management and maintenance of numerous moving parts. Especially when it comes to assets, barcodes, and tag management, it’s easy to let yourself fall behind. By implementing a robust WFO solution, you’re making it that much easier for your business to scale upwards.