If you are interested in using our BPO management features but currently don’t have access, reach out to Assembled Support to get access to these features.
Overview
BPO planning is the central location to visualize and communicate all of your staffing requirements for the upcoming months. It enables you to effectively track how many hours your various BPOs have committed and scheduled relative to your staffing requirements.
Navigating BPO Planning
On the report, you can filter by Channel, Queue, Site, and Schedule (1). You can sort and group by the site or queue (2).
Metrics can be viewed by week or month (3). With the monthly view, you can zoom into a month by clicking on the dates (4). This will change the view to show the four weeks of the month and their sum of values.
We provide a selection of viewable metrics: Required (month), Required (hour), Scheduled, and Adherence. The additional metrics are calculated numbers for the difference. They appear to the left of the table at the bottom of each cell and are highlighted. Hovering over the number provides details on the calculation used to determine that metric.
For any site/queue you can also drill down and get a more detailed look:
- View breakdown by queues/sites (1) shows all of the queue or site level data depending on the selected grouping
- View hourly breakdown (2) links you to the BPO heatmap page for an hourly breakdown of your requirements. The heatmaps report is only enabled if you have "hourly" intervals enabled. Please reach out to Assembled if you would like to change the intervals in your Assembled instance.
In the top right, we have three buttons: View upload history, Upload allocation, and Export (5).
Allocations
Allocation types
Requirements: Number of hours the customer is requiring from the BPO.
Who can upload them: If you are a manager role or admin without a restricted site, you will see the option to upload requirements when you upload allocations.
Workflow: Generally we see customers use the following workflow to generate requirements:
- export requirements from Assembled (via heatmaps report)
- split the requirement numbers by allocating % splits across sites outside of Assembled
- upload those % allocations in BPO planning.
Commitments: Number of hours the BPO is committing to. You will see the optional for granular committed hours, however, these are optional.
Who can upload them: If you are a manager role with a restricted site, you will see the option to upload commitments when you upload allocations.
Allocation uploads
You can upload the requirement allocation for at least a month. In the top right, is the button Upload Allocation. That will open a panel where you can select the CSV to upload. Below is an example of the format that the CSV must be in:
| start_time | channel | queue | site | required |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-08-21 00:00:00 | chat | queue1 | site1 | 650 |
You’ll be asked to specify the interval you are uploading in: hourly, weekly, or monthly. Please reach out to Assembled if you would like to change the intervals in your Assembled instance. Once uploaded, the requirement metric will be populated so you can compare how your vendors are matching your needs.
Upload history
You can view a snapshot of past uploads so you have a solid audit trail and can understand how the current requirements came to be. You can even give these uploads a name in order to better find them in the future.
For each historical upload, you can Rename (1) the upload name, Compare (2) to a previous version, or View snapshot (3) of that upload.
Comparing to previous uploads
Comparing current vendor data to data from previous uploads is useful for understanding how numbers have either increased or decreased from those uploads. To enter the comparison, click Compare next to the historical upload you'd like to compare to.
A comparison section will populate underneath the allocations data you are currently viewing. In each cell within the comparison, you can view the exact difference and the percentage difference between the data you are currently viewing and the historical upload. Hovering over those differences will show you how those numbers were calculated.
To highlight certain cells that have large differences, you can set custom threshold percentages. By default, cells with greater than 10% differences will be highlighted, but to configure these settings, click Edit thresholds (1).
In the above example, cells that are below a 2% difference from the current allocations will be highlighted in orange, and cells that are above a 4% difference from the current allocations will be highlighted in blue.
View snapshot
Clicking View snapshot will take you to the historical report for the uploaded requirements.
Export
The Export (1) button will prompt a CSV download of the data for you to use outside of Assembled. After clicking export, you can enter which interval of data you'd like to export and for which time range.
The interval you configure here will determine which data is exported. For example, if I set my interval to hourly, allocations that I uploaded at the hourly interval will be exported for each hour within the export range.
If you have any questions on this feature, feel free to reach out to our Assembled Support team!