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.
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We’re not rookies here at 360° Vendor Management. We’ve seen a fair number of outsourcing contracts serving different types of operations. While the fine specialty advisory and law firms will write lengthy white papers explaining why service level agreements, termination clauses, change management, and governance organization (or lack thereof) are the root of all evil, the nuts and bolts of day-to-day vendor management is where most outsourcing relationships go sour.
We recently shared our perspective on the importance of forecasting. Failure to forecast or the inability to forecast accurately is definitely a reason why vendors fail to perform, but you, the highly skilled vendor manager, can control that. Ensuring your vendor schedules staff to meet your forecasts is an entirely different challenge because it’s a level of detail that most vendor managers completely ignore, but is a key ingredient in the forecasting-scheduling-staffing triangle of workforce management. Our experience with vendors and in-house operations teams suggests that scheduling is biggest challenge to meeting timeliness goals.
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