Workforce Scheduling Archives - Page 4 of 6

Effective workforce management – the importance of scheduling

Posted on: 17 January 2022

Scheduling is the glue that keeps organisations together. It provides clarity over tasks to be completed and helps management teams in looking back to see what has been achieved. Who performed what tasks and when? How did they do? In times of employee strain, when workforces are stretched – something we’ve seen a lot of during Covid – having an agile scheduling tool is vital for firms in keeping their projects and services running. Without a robust scheduling framework, organisations are at the mercy of guesswork and good fortune.

Scheduling pervades every aspect of company life. At a basic level, the majority of working contracts outline expected hours along the lines of the 9-5 theme. From there, employees are expected to complete tasks in a timely fashion. Staying on top of individuals is easy enough, but what if you have an entire workforce to assign tasks to and track? In industries such as healthcare, transport and construction, project completion and service delivery are dependent upon the input of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of staff members.

In such organisations, a central administrative team needs to assign tasks to employees to ensure that projects and services can be delivered effectively and efficiently. It can be akin to moving chess pieces around a board, using different pieces in different ways to attack the tasks at hand. From time to time you also need to go on the defensive, when projects overrun, or services are disrupted.

To fill your tasks, an understanding of what each employee is competent in is vital. You can’t use a knight to do a bishop’s job, to labour the chess analogy. Manually researching who can step in to fill a role is a painstaking process. It’s also a waste of time, since with a robust scheduling system, it is something that can be done automatically.

Quickly filtering through employees and instantly understanding their training, competencies and experiences facilitates swift and efficient decision making. Further understanding of their existing schedule enables administrators to assign tasks within business rules and legally contractable hours.

By setting out schedules in advance, organisations can clearly communicate with their employees and enable them due oversight of their shifts and tasks. Within a centralised scheduling system, it is also possible to facilitate the swapping of schedules between staff members to provide flexibility.

Your business rules, your scheduling

Everything can be completed within the boundaries of your business rules. Each organisation has its own unique ways of working, so catering for these on a case-by-case basis is vital. This can also be true of individual departments within an organisation. For example, many contracts reward staff for longer service with the provision of extra annual leave. Holidays need to be factored in, as do the rules around when a certain number of employees can be off at any given moment.

Factoring in overtime and how that’s dealt with, in terms of overrunning projects, compensation and the impact it has on future shifts, also requires careful consideration. Considering these elements in an automated fashion facilitates not only swift decision making, but also fair and consistent decision making.

External and internal regulations also need to be factored into your scheduling process. Aspects such as fatigue management can easily get overlooked when there’s pressure on to finish projects and tasks, but ignoring them can be costly.

Renown Consultants Limited was fined £450,000 with £300,000 in costs in 2020 after being convicted under the Health and Safety at Work Act. The company had failed to ensure that two of its workers were sufficiently rested to travel home after a shift in 2013. The two employees were driving from Stevenage to Doncaster after a nightshift when the driver fell asleep, resulting in a collision which was fatal to both passengers.

Travel times to and from shifts that require safety intensive work to be conducted must be factored in. Clearly, travelling from Stevenage to Doncaster is a lengthy journey – 133 miles. Again, a robust scheduling solution can help factor in aspects such as distances and potential travel times. This can help to avoid unnecessary journeys and deploy staff more intelligently based upon their location.

This also helps in plotting out schedules for staff such as district nurses. In conducting care visits, it makes sense to reduce travel times between tasks, helping to improve efficiency and complete more visits in a single shift.

Be agile in the face of change

Navigating a global pandemic has been challenging for all and sundry. With various periods of lockdown, mandatory self-isolation and people contracting Covid-19, assigning tasks and keeping services running has been a case of swimming against the tide at times.

There have been cases at airports where entire security and baggage handling teams have been taken out, and Northern Rail had to cancel services when too many staff members were forced into isolation. These have been exceptional times, but it is possible to navigate them effectively.

With a single view of the workforce, it makes it easier to manoeuvre people and keep services running. If the worst does happen, it at least facilitates swift decision making and clear communications with end users of your services. Without a central view and the help of automation, scheduling in times of stress is time intensive and manual at best; guesswork at worst.

Plug your scheduling into your wider organisation

Scheduling is vital for every company. In managing a large workforce, it is even more important, especially where vital infrastructure and healthcare services are concerned. Having robust oversight of your scheduling links closely to your efforts to deliver services and projects, recruit new staff, train existing employees and keep on top of your competency management.

It also helps in monitoring and reporting on objectives and outcomes. If projects have overrun or performed well, having a holistic view of who managed and worked on them is vital in garnering understanding that can inform future tasks.

Fundamentally, however, scheduling is central to the very core activities of any business. Leaving it to chance, guesswork and human error is a risky process. The tools exist to enhance your scheduling, by equipping your administrative teams with the tools to help them make swift, informed and effective decisions. Without the need to manually trawl through records, it leaves them free to focus on exceptions and improvements, in turn helping to move your organisation forward.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

How competency management can underpin your workforce safety efforts

Posted on: 4 November 2021

Competency management may sound like a basic construct in the world of safety-critical work. Employees are hired, they prove that they are appropriately trained and qualified for their role and off you go. Being qualified and competent at the commencement of a role is only one aspect of competency management; a robust framework is required to ensure that all staff receive ongoing support, assessments, training and guidance for their tasks. Complying with safety protocols depends upon it.

Understanding your workforce

Having a central record and database of your workforce enables you to keep track of who is competent at what. In times of strain, for example where there might be a number of absentees at short notice (something we’ve seen regularly during the Covid pandemic with people having to self-isolate), it is crucial that you can be nimble in assigning tasks across your workforce to keep services running and projects on track.

A single view of competencies required for tasks and competencies across your workforce facilitates flexible decision making. Staff can be reassigned across your organisation, safe in the knowledge that they are appropriately skilled and competent for the task at hand, whilst remaining compliant with health and safety regulations applicable to the organisation. An easily accessible record of hours staff have worked, for example, must be maintained. Fatigue is a major cause of accidents in the rail sector and can affect staff competencies to perform their tasks. Jobs should not be allocated to staff when they have not had the required amount of rest or they will exceed a safe number of hours to work.

Central record keeping is also useful for identifying skills gaps. Where such gaps are identified, this can trigger a workflow regarding training of staff in your existing workforce and can be linked to your organisation’s recruitment efforts. This further helps to ensure that your workforce has adequate competencies to fulfil the tasks across your organisation.

Safety first

In safety critical environments, competency management can be particularly important in order to comply with safety regulations. It is vital that your workforce is regularly assessed and observed, and that where ongoing training for a role is required, it is delivered, attended and passed.

For example first aider certificates last for three years, although the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommend that refresher training is conducted annually. Most working environments require the presence of trained first aiders, so it is important that administrators ensure that there are sufficiently competent personnel to perform the role.

In more safety intensive environments, for example trackside work on the rail network, it is vital that all members of the workforce receive appropriate safety training and briefings to understand their equipment and environment on an ongoing basis.

Ensuring that safety briefings are delivered is crucial and then, when incidents do occur, so is the recording of them, including near misses. With a log of all activities, from briefings to incidents, it makes it much easier to gain a full view of workforce safety and to understand why incidents have occurred. This can then trigger follow-up activities such as observations, assessments and the implementation of remedial training where necessary.

Upskilling your workforce’s competencies

Having a central log of information also makes life easier for your workforce to understand their training and assessment obligations, whilst also opening up and suggesting new training opportunities to them. This helps them with their career development and helps you with broadening the competencies available to you across your organisation.

Ongoing training is a prerequisite in some roles, so using a supporting competency management software tool can help you with auto-allocation of mandatory courses and sending notifications to staff members of training opportunities relevant to them.

Where potential skills gaps are identified, you can recommend relevant courses to your workforce to encourage them to broaden their competencies, making your workforce more flexible and agile in the face of unforeseen shortfalls in staff numbers. This feeds directly into responding to short-term incidents such as self-isolation arising from Covid by equipping you with the knowledge of your workforce that facilitates quick fixes where they are necessary.

A bird’s eye view

With all competencies across your workforce logged, it is much easier to allocate relevant tasks to people in a timely and even automated fashion. A bird’s eye view of your entire workforce makes decision making much easier.

The deployment of the correct technology is crucial to this. Moving away from manually intensive processes such as spreadsheets and phone calls, to having all the relevant information made available to the relevant decision makers in an automated fashion creates great efficiencies in your competency management processes, making it simple to understand who is competent at what.

This carries over benefits to your scheduling, training and, crucially, safety protocols. It’s one thing having appropriately competent staff members when they join your organisation, but updating and upskilling their core competencies keeps your entire organisation on track in a more harmonious manner.

Having a central log of all activities and incidents also makes it much easier to schedule the necessary assessments and observations of your workforce. This central log also makes it easier to identify trends and understand why incidents occur.

Ultimately, keeping your workforce appropriately trained and competent for the tasks which they are assigned to undertake carries huge benefits to your safety efforts. If staff are being assigned to tasks for which they are not appropriately competent, accidents are more likely to occur. Having a clear evidence base and bird’s eye view of your entire workforce helps to comply with safety protocols and keep your projects moving.

For a more detailed look at improving workforce safety across the UK’s rail network, please take a look at our free white paper on the topic.

The role of rostering in workforce safety

Posted on: 3 November 2021

Scheduling your workforce goes beyond simply ensuring that tasks are being performed by certain members of staff. Of course, fulfilling tasks is a minimum requirement, but having a holistic view of your workforce, its specific skills, competencies and experience can help you to drive deeper understanding. It is also critical in understanding hours worked, where further training is required and in giving management relevant information on each staff member.

This links back to workforce safety, too. Simply by understanding hours worked and hours planned, makes it much easier to comply with fatigue management protocols for workers in safety critical environments. With real time information from out in the field recorded into a single system, overtime and over-running tasks can also be considered as and when they occur and dealt with accordingly. This includes communicating delays in good time and understanding the workforce implications on overlapping and future tasks.

Responding to short term changes

With a central pool of information to call upon, schedulers can begin to automate swathes of their scheduling, with a rules engine matching staff members to tasks based upon specific criteria. This allows scheduling and administrative teams time to focus on more cumbersome areas such as exceptions and reacting to short-term changes in the workforce.

Short-term changes have been brought sharply into focus by the Covid pandemic, with the need for people to self-isolate upon coming into close contact with anyone who has contracted the illness, or having to isolate upon receipt of notification from the NHS app. This has led to scenarios where entire teams have been out of action; something of a challenge in scheduling staff and meeting deadlines.

This was brought into focus for Northern Rail, which experienced a number of positive Covid tests across its workforce, with other colleagues having to isolate as a result of contact with them. The company had to issue a warning to passengers that services would be disrupted.

With a holistic view of your workforce, it’s much easier to see who is available to step into a role, based on their experience, qualifications and other tasks they are expected to perform. This helps to create a more fluid and efficient scheduling system that also enables you to put safety front and centre of the whole process.

It also helps to understand who has been in contact with whom, which can further help with workforce safety regarding Covid. If necessary, like Northern Rail, having a complete understanding of the workforce enables swift decision making as regards the need to amend timetables and cancel services. Having flexibility in such times is crucial to being able to make the right decision for the safety of the workforce and the smooth running of services.

Who can fill in where?

Competency management also has a big role to play here, in tandem with scheduling. It enables schedulers, where necessary, to consider personnel from other areas of the organisation who might be able to help with other tasks. Having the support of a system with a holistic view of your workforce also removes the element of human error in assigning tasks to other people.

This rounded view of competencies and skills can also facilitate the reintegration of staff members who have been isolating or have been off work. Where a colleague has stepped in to cover their tasks, they can be reassigned to other teams. Their return to work can be planned in, ensuring that appropriate protocols have been accounted for and that they’ve supplied things such as a negative Covid test before returning to work.

Rostering solutions to help

In these highly complex and fluid scenarios, a robust rostering solution is paramount in order to keep projects moving and to maintain workforce safety, with the need to be able to adapt at short notice and make best use of available staffing resources.

The deployment of a rostering solution facilitates the central recording and all-encompassing view of the entire workforce. With aspects such as auto-scheduling and auto-allocation of tasks, it frees up schedulers’ time to work on exceptions and deal with issues as and when they arise. As we’ve seen, it helps to be in a strong position to react to unforeseen circumstances.

CACI’s Cygnum software is designed to do all of this. We help transport operators to schedule their workforce and understand their resources, bringing scheduling, training and competency management together in one place. This helps to not only schedule and understand workforce patterns, but to implement training and move staff around to fulfil tasks as necessary.

Our white paper on improving workforce safety in the rail industry further explores the ways in which technology can help organisations to maximise workforce efficiency whilst implementing high safety standards. It is free to view here.

Effectively managing your fatigue management process

Posted on: 26 August 2021

Fatigue management protocols are commonplace in labour intensive industries which require prolonged periods of physical or mental exertion. If you’ve got engineers or drivers keeping services moving, their working hours need to be carefully monitored in order to ensure that they don’t become fatigued, thereby impairing their ability to perform to the best of their abilities. Providing appropriate rest breaks during shifts and ensuring that they get enough time to rest in between is paramount. So, how can management teams effectively manage this process and ensure that workers are getting enough rest and adhering to your company’s fatigue management protocols?

The role of management

The role of management is fundamental to ensuring that fatigue management procedures are in place, first and foremost. There are usually industry standard guidelines depending upon your sector, for example the number of hours a train driver can consecutively drive for, or be on a shift for, is closely monitored to best ensure that they are in good condition to drive.

More broadly, where safety critical work is being conducted, there is a requirement that there be a 12-hour break between one shift ending and the next one beginning.

Putting these procedures in place is one thing. Enforcing them, however, is another.

The role of technology

Technology can make the process of establishing and adhering to fatigue management protocols much easier for management teams. If your workforce can sign into and out of shifts via their mobile device, then real-time, archivable records can be kept with notifications established where infringements occur.

This enables management teams to better understand the shifts undertaken by the workforce and to take action where required.

Furthermore, by linking your fatigue management protocols to your workforce management structure, you can understand the circumstances of each worker to better combat fatigue. For example, you could link a team member’s domestic address to their shifts, better understanding their travel commitments to get to and from the location of work.

This may not sound important, but Renown Consultants were fined £450,000 by The Office of Road and Rail, with £300,000 in costs, after two of its workers were killed in a road traffic accident on the way home from a shift. Fatigue management protocols had not been adhered to and the two workers had to travel a significant enough distance home for this to prove fatal.

A holistic view

Understanding your workforce and the shift patterns of your workers is crucial to implementing an effective and robust fatigue management framework. Deploying all the information available to you and considering all the aspects will also help in implementing and maintaining your protocols.

Setting shift patterns and rosters is one thing, but then monitoring how they are conducted is another. Receiving real-time data from out in the field gives you a plethora of information.

Not only will it reveal how many hours are being worked, but it will also offer performance indicators where projects are concerned. For example, a set number of hours will be assigned to complete a given task – if this timeline is not met, understanding why is important.

Your fatigue management protocols can plug in to and interact with the rest of your processes in this way, which can help in revealing strengths and weaknesses in your processes to inform other decisions. You will also be able to identify where work is unlikely to be completed within the allocated time, in advance. All the while, you will be able to enhance the safety of your workforce.

Cutting corners with workforce safety is unacceptable and fatigue management is a central component of that. Understanding your workforce’s shift patterns and linking them to their external circumstances can play a fundamental role in ensuring that you have a robust and manageable fatigue management framework in place.

CACI is approved on the NHS England Health System Support Framework (HSSF)

Posted on: 14 July 2021

CACI has been listed to provide workforce deployment solutions for eRostering, job planning and temporary staffing software solutions by NHS England

We are delighted to announce that CACI’s Cygnum workforce management software has been listed as an approved solution on the Health Systems Support Framework (HSSF). Operated by NHS England, the HSSF is a group of associated procurement frameworks to support delivery of integrated care, digitisation of the NHS and scaling of innovation by providing a marketplace of approved providers for NHS bodies to work with.

The addition of new workforce deployment service lines focus on eRostering, job planning and temporary staffing solutions. This will help the NHS become a truly modern employer by enabling evidence-based change and utilising best practice in workforce management, deployment and development of staff. The aim is that all workforce systems purchased and used by NHS organisations will meet national data and interoperability standards.

We’re delighted that CACI has been listed as an approved supplier on this framework,” says, Ollie Watson, Business Development Director at CACI. “Our Cygnum workforce management solution meets all the service line requirements as well as offering a step change with its patient demand-based approach and resultant workforce scheduling functionality.

We’re excited to show just how much potential there is to innovate within this area.

CACI’s Cygnum workforce management software is utilised by a number of public and third sector care organisations to help optimise and automate service delivery and support excellent patient care.

eRostering is core functionality in Cygnum, with the software allowing resources to be intelligently mapped to demand. Demand can be driven by patient needs, be this task-based from a patient care plan, or based on physical occupancy such as wards and rooms.

Cygnum ensures job plans are in place by recording assessments, training and competencies effectively and considering these against patient pathway demand and organisational needs.

Cygnum also meets the requirements of temporary staffing, ensuring an efficient and controlled process from first application, recording of training and competency, to staff rostering and self-management.

For more information on Cygnum, please click here.

CACI achieves ISO 20000 accreditation

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As part of CACI’s ongoing efforts to enhance our service delivery to our customers, we’re delighted to announce that we have achieved the ISO 20000 service management certification. Our team has worked incredibly hard to align our practices with those outlined by ITIL, and the awarding of this certification is reward for all that hard work.

The ISO 20000 certification sits alongside our ISO 9001, 14001 and 27001 certifications and demonstrates CACI’s commitment to delivering the best possible service and ongoing support to our customers. To achieve the ISO 20000 standard, we have streamlined our processes and procedures and improved the ways we manage customer service. For example, we now use dashboards to monitor customer reviews and track feedback and internal improvement against these.

I’m delighted that we have been awarded the ISO 20000 certification,” says Matt Cooper, Senior Vice President at CACI. “It provides a further layer of assurance to our customers and inspires increased confidence in our solutions. Furthermore, it highlights the robust data security controls that we have in place, demonstrating the quality of, and ongoing commitment to, our products and services and best practices that we apply as a company.

CACI becomes a member of the RSSB

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CACI is delighted to confirm that it has been approved as a member of the RSSB (Rail Safety and Standards Board) as it seeks to strengthen its position as a 360-degree provider of products and services to the UK’s rail industry.

RSSB’s vision of a better, safer railway for everyone is shared by CACI. Via its multitude of products and services, CACI is strongly positioned to support the entire UK rail network in delivering this vision.

CACI provides products and services across the whole rail network to help deliver improvements in infrastructure management, optimise operational resilience and enhance the overall customer experience. Our portfolio of services includes understanding passenger numbers and putting in place solutions to facilitate passengers’ safe return to rail post-Covid, to understanding and driving efficiencies across the workforce employed to operate and maintain the network. CACI also supports operators through specialist consultancy, bespoke systems development and solution migration to aid operational efficiency.

We’re delighted to welcome CACI aboard as a member of RSSB.” says Chris Leech, Membership Development Manager UK + International at RSSB. “CACI’s products and services have lots to offer our vision of a better, safer railway in the UK and we’re excited to see what difference it can make to our industry. Efficiency, safety protocols and operational insight of services have been under the spotlight in recent years, so we welcome any technology provider that can help underpin improvements in our industry.

We’re delighted to have been approved a member of RSSB,” says Matt Cooper, senior vice president at CACI. “We firmly believe that our range of products and services are a great fit for the UK’s rail network. The rail industry, like everyone else, has been impacted by Covid, so there has never been a greater need to understand customer demand for rail services. Operational insight is vital, both to understand passenger journeys and to understand the challenges faced by those working on our rail network. By driving operational insight, we firmly believe that we can support the rail industry in delivering a better, safer railway for everyone.

Retail Marketing Group Deliver Better Campaign Results Using Data, Analytics and Field Force Optimisation Tools

Posted on: 12 July 2021

Retail Marketing Group are a multi-award winning Field Sales and Marketing agency specialising in Consumer Electronics, with insights and data to help brands better understand their customers, retailers and the marketplace.

The Challenge

In the past Retail Marketing Group faced a number of challenges – call files were selected based on individual’s knowledge of the market and long nights were spent wrestling with Excel and rudimentary maps to create territories and call schedules.

Retail Marketing Group needed a more efficient and accurate way of defining call files, calculating headcount, designing efficient territories and optimal call schedules. The goal was to reduce the cost of planning and running their field teams.

The Solution

They use CACI’s Retail Footprint catchment model to tell them where people shop and a mix of Acorn demographic and marketing data to tell them where their targeted consumers live. This allows them to identify the best stores to visit and set the most beneficial contact strategy.

InSite FieldForce makes sure that the headcount for each project is correct, that territories are planned in an efficient way and identifies the ideal place to hire field agents pre-campaign. CallSmart produces optimal call schedules and allows Retail Marketing Group to accurately estimate mileage and required overnight stays so they can budget effectively and quote clients with accuracy.

Adding CACI’s InSite FieldForce, CallSmart, Retail Footprint catchment model and Acorn Demographic database to our portfolio of solutions
for field marketing has meant that we provide much stronger, more efficient, data led solutions to our clients. We gain a better understanding of the optimal solution for a campaign from the start, meaning fewer reasons to rework projects throughout.

David Rivers – Business Intelligence Manager

The Results

Retail Marketing Group licence a number of CACI’s solutions and utilise them to plan outsourced field teams for their clients and support pitches for new business.

Having the software in-house means Retail Marketing Group can continue to accurately quote clients, improve results due to visiting more appropriate stores for the specific campaign, reduce costs through optimal routing, hire people in the right places first time resulting in reduced recruitment costs, give the field agents a sense of fairness by utilising territories at the right level, and massive time savings for their team of analysts who use the software.

Further Information

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s field force expertise can help you and your team, get in contact now. We have a range of solutions that can help you optimise your field force.

Agile Field Force Planning For a Leading US Retail Merchandising Specialist

Posted on: 2 July 2021

Lawrence Merchandising Services (LMS) is a full-service retail merchandising organisation with experienced field staff across all 50 states and Canada. The firm is committed to increasing sales and profits for clients by delivering in-store solutions for their merchandising needs. LMS works for clients in many respected retail brands.

The Challenge

Over the last two years, LMS has seen strong growth in its retail merchandising activities. From a base of long-standing traditional retail accounts, LMS made the decision to expand and seize new opportunities.

Director of Data Analytics Michael Terpkosh explains: “With more and more retailer accounts across the US and Canada, we needed something to help us understand those clients’ businesses better, so we could deploy our field teams efficiently and continue delivering great service.”

“Before this, LMS had limited technology resources for field force planning. Say if we were bringing on a new client with 5,000 stores, we would have used Google maps to put pins against their locations, then compared it to a map showing where LMS already had reps working. It was not efficient and didn’t give us multiple scenario modelling or optimisation capabilities.”

Previously, LMS matched the incremental growth of its long-standing customers over time, adding more reps as needed. Michael adds: “With one of our new accounts, we service over 16,000 stores a month. At that level, we needed structured guidance and support with the complex task of refining overlaps with other reps and retail stores. We had to expand our network of field reps quickly but it was vital to do it accurately, investing in the right places to service existing customers and new business.

The Solution

“We chose InSite FieldForce because we could not find any other solution that could handle our volume of business across every US state,” says Michael. “We felt this was the only application that could accommodate our scale and continuing growth.”

InSite FieldForce supports LMS’ move from a traditional merchandising company to a fast-growing, digitally led business with headroom for further expansion. The solution has enabled LMS to change its approach, moving towards more territory-based reps rather than recruiting for particular accounts. This helps LMS operate more efficiently, with reps working in the area where they live and servicing multiple clients.

The solution is now embedded in LMS’ business processes, from onboarding new clients to continually reviewing and optimising deployment of existing reps across the USA. CACI’s InSite FieldForce integrates with other software from another provider, giving LMS strong analytics capability across its entire field operation. LMS uses CACI’s InSite FieldForce along with Movista’s Natural Insight software to run LMS Client Services and Operations, enhancing field team performance.

The benefits are not just internal and operational. “We expected to keep InSite FieldForce behind the scenes and use it to optimise our planning. But we’re also using it to demonstrate our capability in RFPs, showing clients the capabilities that we have to work in the field with a widespread account,” Michael explains.

“There’s nothing in the marketplace that measures up to CACI’s InSite FieldForce for national coverage across the USA and Canada. It’s unique, customisable and a perfect fit for retail field businesses. InSite FieldForce has been a direct enabler of our business growth to the level we’re at – and where we’re going next. It started out that we wanted to use it to run our existing business more efficiently and now it’s become a part of our strategy. It’s credit to CACI that it’s become an integral part of how we look at existing and new business.”

Michael Terpkosh – Director of Data Analytics, LMS

The Results

Michael Terpkosh identifies many benefits of using InSite FieldForce. “It helps us with client retention – they know we can adapt and refine our team to match the evolution of their business. In the pandemic we’ve had to be more nimble and flexible. When clients have needed us to help them retune their store calling programmes, we’ve been able to do what-if analysis to show the impact of changes to coverage or visit frequency. Clients know we have the tools and expertise to work with them to optimise their approach.”

Using InSite FieldForce at proposal stage means LMS can ensure that new engagements will be profitable. Michael says, “We typically get a list of stores to be serviced and their addresses – we can plot out the stores and model their estimated service requirements against our existing reps’ locations. That shows us how we’ll need to change our field force – who to add and how to optimise our existing people. We can predict the costs of recruitment and on-boarding for a new account.”

There’s also a benefit for LMS’ field-based employees. “In the current employment market, some reps are nervous about working on just one or two accounts – they’d rather work with multiple accounts and work more hours. InSite FieldForce means we can optimise our workforce to give people those opportunities. We want to hire great reps who will be motivated in their work: it’s a virtuous circle as clients then get high quality representation from committed, expert people.”

Further Information

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s field force expertise can help you and your team, get in contact now.