Part 1: Cataloging Employee Skills and Work Activities - The Complete Guide To Workforce Optimization
Contents
How to use advanced planning and scheduling techniques to keep employees and customers happy while operating efficiently and profitably.
Why is it Necessary to Catalog Employee Skills and Work Activities?
The primary purpose of workforce optimization is to match workforce supply (capacity) with work demand while meeting business objectives, such as minimizing over and understaffing. This is often referred to as capacity planning.
Here are a few examples of application screenshots that illustrate some ways that capacity and workload can be shown and compared:



What is a Skills Catalog or Taxonomy?
Most organizations have a standardized set of job roles with skills that are associated with each of them. In this way, job profiles are formalized. For example, the mapping between job roles and skills may look like this:



What about Assets?
For some industries, the work conducted by employees is tied to assets. Appliance repair technicians or telecommunications system engineers are two examples. Organizations with these roles typically have an enterprise asset management system or database where the information about these assets is stored. The asset-level data is often also referred to as an asset taxonomy.
The WFO system will need to integrate this data in order to properly match engineers or technicians with the equipment or asset groups that they can work on.
What about Personnel?
Data Integration - The Necessary Plumbing

Start Creating your Taxonomy Today
Creating a skills and work activities catalog and taxonomy is fundamental to running any data-driven initiative to improve workforce efficiency and make the right strategic, tactical, and operational decisions to ultimately meet your business goals.
To help you create your own catalog, we created a quick-start Skills Catalog template in Microsoft Excel that you can use to take the first step on your path to workforce optimization.
Read all the articles of The Complete Guide to Workforce Optimization:
Introduction to our Series
Part 2 Benchmarking Performance Metrics
Part 3 Demand Planning
Part 4 Operational Scheduling
Part 5 Tactical Planning
Part 6 Strategic Planning

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