360° Vendor Management

Schedule Adherence in an Outsourcing World

Vendor managers know this well: It once was very easy to stand-up and count the empty chairs to know who was or wasn’t in the office today.  For the more technically adept, it was easy to login to the workforce management system and know exactly what your schedule adherence was for the hour, week, or month.  Once you outsourced, you lost line of sight to a fundamental aspect of operations management: ensuring you have enough agents available at peak intervals or days to meet your desired service levels.

Less skilled vendor managers will say, “That’s the vendors responsibility. I don’t get into the details, and making sure people arrive on time is one of those detailed areas that vendors should manage. After all, it’s their own people.”

They are wrong. Very wrong.

Your fundamental job as a vendor manager is to ensure the vendor meets your performance expectations. Workforce management is as fundamental is it gets as it is the workforce that provides the capacity, the engine, to deliver service levels. Schedule adherence is a measure that ensures that agents are available at precisely the time scheduled. If agents do not adhere to their schedules, well, you may as well be flying without gas.

Before we go much further, note that schedule adherence is not just a call center metric. Sure, the real-time environment puts an added pressure on scheduling at peak call periods, but anyone with a budget and measurable turnaround time goals knows that failure to have agents available at peak periods will slow throughput, leaving you short of your goals. That’s the problem: backoffice vendors simply fail to adequately measure and track this metric. Instead, all a vendor manager can see from 15,000 miles away is a report (hopefully real-time) indicating that inventory levels are rising…

What is even more depressing is that probably 50% of backoffice outsourcing deals are priced on a hourly basis, as are the minority of call center deals. If you’re not measuring scheduled adherence, the vendor is charging you for the time the agents aren’t available. Schedule adherence goals are typically in the 95-98% range. For the financially inclined, that means the vendor makes an extra 2-5% profit, which probably covers the 5% penalty that the vendor may have to pay if the miss their service level goal. So, you can see that vendors have little incentive to measure this metric. More fundamentally, most offshore vendor agents are salaried, full-time employees, meaning they don’t even have the mechanism to track this metric…

Vendor managers must track this metric as a means of 1) ensuring vendors are positioned to meet turnaround time goals and 2) ensuring vendors don’t over charge.

Do you track schedule adherence? What are your challenges? Let us know!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Metrics, Outsourcing, Scheduling, Vendor Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.