Improving the Resource Planning of Sensée’s home-working advisors
Sensée is a unique UK-based outsourcer in that all of its advisors are homeworkers. It employs over 700 advisors, and is expanding. Its clients include leading UK insurers, retail businesses and logistic companies. Through its use of homeworkers, Sensée offers a high level of performance, including very close scheduling against client interval requirements.
Sensée identified that its long term planning of resources required an improvement, and collaborated with Drakelow Consulting to redesign and rebuild it.
A single tool was created covering all clients, to maximise the accuracy and rigour of the resource planning. It included all proposed recruitment, with the ability for analysts to experiment with different recruitment strategies. The treatment of attrition was improved. Several checking mechanisms were placed within the model to ensure that all projected values were appropriate – taking into account historical values and also what is known about the future.
A number of colourful visualisations were developed – both at client level and business level - to highlight risks and deviations, which allow analysts and operational managers to identify and deal with any issues immediately.
Rob Smale, Sensée’s Operations Director, said “Phil brought a great deal of experience to help us redesign our planning tool and processes. He spent time developing the solution in collaboration with our support staff to ensure that it met our requirements and also that we were fully able to maintain it after the project.
“Phil challenged our thinking in a number of areas, ensuring that every element within the model was defined precisely, maximising the model’s usefulness. We are happy to have worked with Drakelow Consulting, and as a result of this project, our resource levels are more robust within each client account.”