Cognos Unveils New Performance Solution For Workforce Resource Management

Cognos, provider of business intelligence and performance management solutions, has announced the launch of a new performance solution designed to help organizations better manage workforce resources and improve workforce utilization with Cognos 8 Planning and Cognos 8 BI.

Service-based industries such as retail stores, restaurants, hotels, and hospitals are particularly challenged to manage the process of effectively allocating employee resources to meet customer-service demands. Service-oriented internal functions that provide shared services to the enterprise are also challenged to meet the needs of internal clients. 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 organization.

“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.

“CFOs and CIOs should consider looking to Cognos’ blueprints as a way to improve the ROI on their performance management investments. Cognos’ Performance Blueprints are based on pre-built business processes and drivers. This can drive improved ROI on performance management,” said David O’Connell, Senior Analyst, Nucleus Research. “These Blueprints have the added benefit of improving breadth of adoption which can enhance a company’s standardization efforts by promoting uniformity across the enterprise. With the shrinking workforce and competition for good workers, companies need to both retain the good workers and deploy them optimally. The Workforce Resource Management Blueprint can help companies use performance management for this with less custom code development.”*

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
• 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. 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 Doug Barton, vice-president, product marketing, Cognos. “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.”