Webinar 'Erlang and Capacity Calculations' by Ger Koole PhD. - CCmath

[@samlee547]

i must have missed the part of determining how many FTE's are required when you have various shifts - operational hours is 20 or lets say 24 (i must admit this is one of the best contents on capacity planning that i have come across

[@ccmathnext-levelwfm6878]

Hi Sam, Thank you very much for your kind words and feedback! How different shifts influence total FTE was not explicitly addressed in the webinar. It is indeed an important aspect of capacity planning and deserves a dedicated discussion. In general, having different shifts can lead to discrepancies between the required workload and the actual workload being covered by your staff. This discrepancy can result in either overstaffing or understaffing, depending on the flexibility of your shifts. To minimise this discrepancy, it is advised to use a program that employs intelligent mathematical methods, such as linear optimisation. These types of programs typically require inputs such as the workload needed for each time interval and the possible shifts for each agent. The program then allocates the shifts in a way that minimises both overstaffing and understaffing. For a small contact center, you could potentially create your own solution by utilising the Solver tool in Excel. For larger operations, it is more efficient to use a dedicated program. Our CCschedule tool is specifically designed to handle this aspect of capacity planning, offering a comprehensive solution for optimising staffing needs. I hope this clarification helps, and please feel free to reach out if you have any further questions!

[@aussiecopy]

How do I use this to calculate staff required for a week or a month? Where you produce Gross staff for scheduling, how do you turn this into number of heads?

[@ccmathnext-levelwfm6878]

Hi Warwick, The easiest way is to calculate the average forecast for an interval of the week or month and use that forecast together with the Erlang formula to get the number of agents that are required for each interval. The final step is to translate this back into FTE. As an example, let's look at the first line of the last sheet. There we have a weekly forecast of 10000, an AHT of 350 seconds, and 84 opening hours per week. The average forecast is 10000 / 84 = 119 per hour. So we apply the Erlang formula using 119 / 60 as the forecast per minute and 350 / 60 as the AHT in minutes in order to get about 14 agents required in column G. This number means that we need to have 14 agents that are present for the whole 84 hours that you are open, which means an FTE count of 14 * 84 / 40. With a 40% shrinkage (divide by 0.6), we finally get an FTE count of 50.

[@alejguz1552]

How do I translate that to actual schedules? like for example 4 agents will entered at 8:00 am some others at 11:00am some will be full time some other part time?

[@ccmathnext-levelwfm6878]

Hi, thanks for the questions. "Translating" the staffing into actual schedules is shift scheduling. The more flexible the shifts in the call center are, the more efficient the "translation" will be. As you mentioned in the example, when you only have 8-hour shifts, if you want to schedule enough agents for the peak moments, then you will have too many agents in the less busy moments. But if you have both 8-hour and 4-hour shifts, then you can use 4-hour shifts to meet the requirements of the peak moments. We will soon have a webinar discussing shift scheduling. Feel free to follow our website so that you don't miss it!

[@awesomestuff9775]

Hiya, could you please let us know, how to convert that 30mins gross workforce hours in to every 30 mins in FTE (head count) pls

[@ccmathnext-levelwfm6878]

Hi! Let's assume that an FTE corresponds to an agent working 40 hours, i.e., an FTE is 40 agent hours. The gross workforce per 30 minutes gives the required number of agents measured in the unit agent half-hours. To convert to FTE, we, therefore, need to divide by 2 (to get the requirement in agent hours) and by 40. Finally, we can sum all intervals of the day and all days of the week to get the FTE requirement per week. Please let me know if you have more questions!

[@arisdomingo9244]

do you know how to forecast the abandon calls?

[@ccmathnext-levelwfm6878]

Hi, thanks for the question and sorry for the late reply. The number of abandoned calls is related to the service level of the call center. Therefore, it is different from predicting the fresh call volume. To predict the abandon calls, we usually suggest to use Erlang X calculator which takes abandonment into account. Please check more in our website for the calculation and there is also free-trials and other webinars that talking about it.

[@jaredvogler9789]

How do we get this add in

[@ccmathnext-levelwfm6878]

Hi Jared. More information about the Excel add-in can be found here: www.ccmath.com/erlang-excel/ And, recently we also have launched Python and R applications, check them out on this page www.ccmath.com/erlang-python-r/

[@mohamed.montaser]

can you share the excel sheet?

[@ccmathnext-levelwfm6878]

Hi Mohamed. Thank you for your interest, you can download the worksheets here (www.ccmath.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/webinar.xlsx). Good luck and let us know if you have any questions or want to learn more!