Patent ID: 8332249
Filing Date: 2012-12-11
Classification: G06Q,H04M

Abstract:
1. A computer implemented method for integrated supply chain and contact center management for products and services sold by a plurality of contact center agents located at a plurality of sales centers and serving customer contacts received through a plurality of contact groups, comprising the steps of: (a) acquiring, via a computer, a planning period, and contact groups served; (b) acquiring, via the computer, performance targets (c) acquiring, via the computer, agents' skills and a type of contact-to-agent routing system used for routing contacts to agents; (d) acquiring, via the computer, agent scheduling rules including one or more of a number of work and non-work days, a number of consecutive days and weekend days off, daily start times, shift lengths, a number and duration of daily breaks for each shift length, an earliest break start times and break slack for each break, weekly cost of assigning an agent to a schedule, wages, benefits, facility costs per hour, and work availability for each agent; (e) acquiring, via the computer, a plurality of forecasts including forecasts of contact volume, average handling time, sales ratios with no backorder, and sales ratio with backorder for products and services sold during the planning period for the contact groups served; (f) acquiring, via the computer, connect costs per minute for each contact group of the contact groups served, and lost sales costs per unit of lost order due to permanently abandoned contacts for each of the products and the services sold during the planning period for the contact groups served; (g) generating, via the computer, required staffing levels using a non-skills based staffing method to meet performance targets for the contact groups served based on the plurality of forecasts acquired in step (e) over the planning period when the contact-to-agent routing system is a non-skills based system, and then scheduling a plurality of agents that most closely meet the performance targets over the planning period for the contact groups served; (h) generating, via the computer, a plurality of skilled agent schedules using a skills based staffing method to most closely meet the performance targets specified for the contact groups served with the forecasts acquired in step (e) over the planning period when the contact-to-agent routing system is a skills-based system; (i) acquiring, via the computer, forecasts of supply chain product and service availability; (j) generating, via the computer, sales forecasts for agents scheduled in step (g), step (h) or both step (g) and step (h) using the plurality of forecasts acquired in step (e), the forecasts of supply chain product and service availability acquired in step (i), and the sales ratios with and without backorder acquired in step (e); (k) inputting, via the computer, the sales forecasts generated in step (j) into a demand planning and forecasting model of a supply chain management system; (l) combining, via the computer, the sales with one or more sales forecasts received from a plurality of other sales channels to generate combined sales forecasts for the supply chain; and (m) updating, via the computer, the demand planning and forecasting model based on the combined forecast produced in step (l).