Predictive workforce estimates how many staff are required for future shifts. These predictions are visible on the daily schedule view when creating schedules.
The predictions are based on projected future demand (in sales revenue or transactions) combined with a ratio of how many employees are required to service the demand.
What types of businesses should use predictive workforce?
Predictive workforce requires historical sales or transactions data to be imported to Workforce.com. The easiest way to do this is with a point of sale integration to Workforce.com.
Because you will require sales or transaction data to be imported into Workforce.com regularly, it's usually not practical to do this manually, although it is possible to manually import your demand data.
Setting up your sales data
After integrating your point of sale system, navigate to Settings > Integrations > Manage Data-streams.
Click on the data stream you want to configure:
Decide if you want to create projections of historical sales (in dollar amount totals) or transactions (in number of transactions). Use the sales/transactions selector to make a choice
Select the teams you want to 'join' the data stream to. This means when scheduling or reporting for that respective team, the datastream will be associated
Creating demand projections
To open the demand prediction tool, navigate to the daily schedule view. On the left side bar, click Predicted Demand to bring up the demand prediction tool.
Projections can be made based on an average of several previous dates, or a single day. You can modify the projected total sales using the modifier (percentage), or by entering a new total sales amount for the day. Modifying the prediction will retain the same pattern of sales, but increase or decrease the amounts proportionally across the day.
Configuring required staff predictions
To enter the ratios of how many employees are required relative to demand, select 'edit' on the top left of the prediction table on the daily schedule view.
This opens up a field to enter a ratio of the value of sales (or number of transactions) required before each additional employee is required.
You can enter the ratios in either of the below ways:
Option A: enter a simple ratio, e.g. for every $50 in a 15 minute, schedule a staff member
Option B: enter a ratio for each additional employee. Click the cog wheel icon to define the specific value you want to schedule each additional employee separated by a comma. E.g. entering '50, 120, 280' means $50 for staff member 1, $120 for staff member 2, $280 for staff member 3 and so forth.
These staffing ratios are applied to the projected demand to calculate the suggested staff counts shown on the projections table.
Staff requirements before and after store open hours
Periods where there is no demand data - where the store is being opened and closed can also be factored in using the below steps.
Enter your business hours
The business hours are editable on the schedule sidebar. These are the hours that your business trades.
Enter how long it takes to open and close the store outside of trading hours
Open the Cognitive creator settings, and confirm the amount of time required to open/close the shift outside of the trading hours.
During these times, the minimum staff count defined under the 'Staff' tab becomes the required number of employees suggested in the projection table:
Combining the requirements of multiple teams
The assisting teams feature is used to combine several teams towards contributing to a common staffing requirement.
For example in a cafe, the main team might be called 'Barista', but other teams like 'Team Leader' and 'Store Manager' might also work serving customers.
Rather than setting up individual ratios for each team, you can make the teams of 'Team Leader' and 'Store Manager' an assisting team of Barista - making their staff numbers count towards the staffing requirement of Barista.
To use assisting teams, navigate to Settings > Feature Management > Assisting Teams and enable the feature.
Make all the operational teams that serve customers an assisting team of the main team that customer facing team members work in.
This is done in each team's settings by navigating to Workforce > Teams > Edit team > Advanced Options > Assisting teams: