Optimizing Workforce Management in Outsourced Vendor Partnerships: A Framework
The Vendor Management (VM) WFM Framework outlines a structured approach for managing Workforce Management (WFM) processes in environments where outsourced services (OS) are utilized. By clearly defining responsibilities, this framework eliminates redundancies, drives efficiency, and optimizes service delivery while maintaining cost-effectiveness.
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Optimizing Workforce Management in Outsourced Vendor Partnerships: A Framework
When a company utilizes Outsourced Services (OS), a structured framework is essential for effectively coordinating and executing Workforce Management (WFM) processes. In such cases, the WFM team assumes a Vendor Management (VM) function, requiring a different approach compared to managing in-house operations alone.
Various frameworks can be successfully implemented depending on the organization’s size, structure, and service agreements. These range from a centralized VM approach, where the OS provider has minimal WFM involvement, to a model in which the OS provider handles all WFM functions. The framework outlined here represents a best-practice approach commonly used in multi-vendor, shared environments where both the client and vendor have strong WFM capabilities. This model aims to eliminate redundancies, drive efficiency through “trust-but-verify” controls, and optimize service delivery while maintaining cost-effectiveness.
A key aspect of this framework is distinguishing between active and passive roles. The VM-WFM and OS-WFM teams may take on an active role, where they execute tasks and own deliverables, or a passive role, where they primarily provide input, oversight, or acceptance. While this classification serves as a general guideline, both teams must collaborate closely and align their efforts to achieve shared goals.
In forecasting, the VM-WFM team plays an active role by creating contact forecasts, ensuring their accuracy, and delivering them on time. The OS-WFM team, in a passive role, has the opportunity to review the forecast, ask questions, provide feedback, and ultimately accept it. For capacity planning, both teams contribute, with the OS-WFM team actively developing, maintaining, and updating capacity plans based on the provided forecast before delivering them to the VM-WFM team. The VM-WFM team then consolidates these plans into an enterprise-wide view, ensuring that supply meets demand. While the VM team can provide input and, in some cases, override OS capacity plans, the final version is typically reached through mutual agreement.
In scheduling, the VM-WFM team has a passive role, ensuring that interval-level staffing requirements align with service and efficiency goals. The OS-WFM team actively develops schedules that balance demand and supply, accounting for factors such as shrinkage. Once schedules are developed, the VM-WFM team reviews them at both the enterprise and vendor levels, making adjustments if necessary to minimize staffing gaps before finalizing them.
Both teams play an active role in real-time management, but with different focuses. The VM-WFM team takes an enterprise-wide and vendor-level view of performance throughout the day, making adjustments to supply as needed based on real-time deviations. This includes allocating transactions at the vendor, site, queue, or staff group levels. Meanwhile, the OS-WFM team is responsible for ensuring staffing commitments are met at every interval, adapting to variations in staffing assumptions, and implementing guidance from the VM-WFM team. Additionally, the OS-WFM team is accountable for assigning agents to appropriate skill groups as required.
Reporting responsibilities are also divided between the two teams. The VM-WFM team actively generates enterprise-level reports, which include breakdowns by vendor, queue, site, and agent as needed for performance management. The OS-WFM team, in a passive role, typically has access to self-service reporting for the queues, sites, and agents under its responsibility. In some cases, OS-WFM must provide specific data points or processed reports, including commentary, updates to action plans, and postmortem analyses at the vendor level.
This structured VM-WFM framework ensures seamless collaboration between in-house and outsourced WFM teams. By clearly defining roles and responsibilities, it enhances efficiency, maintains service quality, and optimizes resource allocation—ultimately driving better business outcomes.
