Workforce management

[Philip]

Hi, great board by the way... Do you know what workforce management products are compatible with Genesys 5 and 6? Where can we find the integration modules, from Genesys? We are looking at Blue Pumpkin, IEX and TCS. Did anyone ever integrated these with Genesys? What would be your recommandations?

Thanks. Phil

[Vic]

Hi, Phil,

we just had a 2 weeklong WFM course taught by one of the people from Genesys PS. He really knew his stuff and was able to walk us through most of the product features. He did mention that WFM would work with both Genesys 5 and 6, but you will need to be careful with configuration server, because, if I remember it correctly, you need a different ocx for for those versions.

In integrating the product with other Genesys products, I would give WFM at least a B. TCS and Blue Pumpkin are not even close.

Featurewise, I think WFM still beats its competition; however, in trying to make their product as flexible as they can, its GUI was left in preNeanderthal state. I would rate its userfriendliness somewhere bellow a hungry bear in the winter. I was told that it is designed for a call center planner in mind; however, grouping of functions is not intuitive, terminology is not consistent, and it is limited to Windows.

The scheduling algorithm is rather nice. I found it to be rather flexible, and even creative. Whereas Blue Pumpkin strains to fulfill scheduling integrity requests and forecastased manpower estimation, Workforce Manager aims at learning recursively from previously forecasted call volume and manpower by using adherence functionality and comparing the forecasted information to the actual data. WFM is a very nice tool, part solution if I might say, which greatly benefits the user in a long erm. The problem, however, is getting to that long erm, because most of the users I know would give up probably two days into implementation and go with TCS due to its simplicity or Blue Pumkin, due to its 0day startup requirement.

[John]

By reading your note it doesn't even sound like you knew that Genesys had a scheduling product! Truth is I would pretty much agree with all of Victors comments and I would like to add in a couple more points.
I have worked with Blue Pumpkin and TCS and I can tell you that their integration to Genesys is not as strong. The biggest reason for that is Stat Server. No third pary apps get data from it and as a result, adherence data is latent at best. This can be further complicated by the switch you are running on, with Nortel being the least straight forward.
TCS is integrated with Genesys using an API called GWI (genesys workforce interface) this is not a product and I think you can only get it by working with the Genesys PS org. It still falls very short in features and function and you will still have a double duty admin roll keeping the databases in sinq. I have also used GWI to integrate BP but never ever got it into production but I know it will work. BP also built some store and forward DB procedures to help reduce the administration... but there is still no SS and CME!
For skills based scheduling ...both TCS and BP use a simulator, (Not sure if TCS is still doing this) which ties up the schedulers PC for at least 15 minutes while it generates a schedule for 150 agents! (CPU and memory are maxed out during that time). I know that BP is trying to write a better simulator but it doesn't even come close to the algorythm in GWM.
GWM means one less vendor with their fingers in the pie, one or more less integration points, a slightly lower featured workforce product, which is augmented by its browser capabilities. You can't forget that the product is still relatively new to the marketplace. Genesys will eventually deliver the features that the competition has today (intraday scheduling is the one I hear about most). Customers will have more influence over the direction of the product and its features and functions with GWM because there are less of them around... so you can demand more!
Thats my .$.02 anyways !

[scott]

Hi, all. Very informative guys, I must say.

I have one question which I hope you may enlighten me .

If i have a SCCS 4.0, Meridian Rel 24, Genesys 5.1 and BluePumpkin(BP), I am wondering where should BP be integrated to ... Should we integrate to Genesys or SCCS?

If it is BP to SCCS, is the WFM solution GOOD as Genesys is the main routing solution and Genesys will have more complete reports and SCCS will be a secondary tool?

If it is BP to Genesys, I understand that there is a way to integrate using GWI for scheduling and forecasting. However, the Real Time Adherence (RTAA) feature cannot be used unless BP has a plugin to Stat Server. So, can we do like this use BPGenesys for scheduling and forecasting, use BPSCCS for RTAA feature.

Thanks