Workforce Management

Today more than ever, you must not only fight for good employees, but also find the balance between staffing to get the job done right, forecasting accurately, and keeping costs down.

This requires full visibility into the work that needs to be done and your employees’ schedules, skills, and experience so you can plan accordingly. The problem is that large HR systems don’t have that functionality, and you don’t have time to deal with trying to piece together a solution with spreadsheets and databases.

Key areas of information—recruiting, training, certifications, experience, availability, security roles, and even physical assets—are in silos. You need technology that will facilitate those efforts but that will also work with and pull data from your existing HR system, external recruiting resources, and other systems of record…and you need it yesterday—not in a few months, which is what typical software development would require.

Built with the Microsoft Power Platform, HSO’s People Accelerator is a workforce management platform that bridges the gap between your HR software and what you need to better manage your people. It streamlines the process of managing your human resources while enabling you to ensure their time and talents are being utilized to their maximum potential.

You also gain the capability to handle ad hoc requirements and tasks, making that data automatically available to the enterprise. With insight into your operations and actionable data, you can optimize your workforce based on a variety of attributes, from geographic location and skill set to availability and utilization limits.

Location and Facilities

Define a data set of locations and facilities to which other functions can be tied. Most large organizations divide the world’s geography in ways that make sense to their mission and operations. The flexibility of the solution allows for location data to conform to the way your users see the world:

• Regions are a continent or custom category, such as Americas, EMEA, or CENTCOM
• Countries are self-explanatory but flexible enough to define “England” or “Puerto Rico” as you need
• Territories allow for logical groupings within countries, say by State, Province, or County
• Localities define jurisdictions, such as towns and cities within a territory
• Locations are specific places, such as a campus, building, or other facility you manage
• Location Types group your data the way you want, for example, to def ne offices, clinics, or warehouses.
• Location data is then tied to other organizational data, which makes it easy to answer questions like: How many people do I have working in this facility where there’s just been a COVID outbreak? Who do we need to evacuate from this location due to a weather event? Are we over or under capacity here, and what’s that misallocation of resources costing us?

Organization and Personnel

Achieve a “single source of truth” for your organizational and personnel data, secure it, and then reuse it in whole or in part across all your applications. Most organizations reuse this data across hundreds or thousands of apps, spreadsheets, and other databases. The Accelerator brings it all together:

• Organizational Units nest within each other to produce hierarchies that drive business logic
• Org Unit Types allow you to determine, for example, who’s at HQ and who’s in the field
• Job Positions tell you what’s filled, what’s vacant, and everything you need about any given role
• Personnel Files create a single, securable source of truth for HR data about an individual
• Assignment History tracks assignments to duty or work experience over time

The accelerator provides specific functionality useful to military, security, and other larger organizations with more hierarchical structures

• Ranks allow individuals to be tied to organization-specific levels of promotion
• Grades facilitate apples to apples comparison across organizations, for example, in establishing equivalency between a Captain in one organization and a Lieutenant in another
• Specialties tie individuals back to the disciplines in which they are trained or focused

Competencies and Skills Bank

Competencies, Skills, Certifications, Qualifications. Regardless of what you call them, the Accelerator allows organizations to establish their own competency set, to differentiate between (for example) skills that one might have acquired through experience versus certifications earned through a specific process. This capability helps match the right people to the task in scenarios such as:

• Defining requirements for a job or assignment so the accelerator finds your best matches
• Managing re-certification timelines so that you comply with external requirements
• Quickly identifying skills you didn’t know your people had when emergencies arise

Training

Managing training curricula, scheduling courses, registering students, and tracking student progress can be consuming, as well as Integrating these activities with other personnel management functions. The accelerator lets you manage:

• Disciplines or subjects like “Accounting” or “Criminal Procedure” or your preference
• Courses, or repeatable collections of content taught together, think “Criminal Procedure 101”
• Course Off erings represent a one-time teaching of the course into which students may enroll
• Students, or the enrollment of a single person in a course (to be approved, rejected, or waitlisted) and their status (e.g., pass or fail)

This becomes a powerful app capability from which we’ve seen many scenarios:

• Students or employees take charge of their own course enrollments via an internal catalog
• Thresholds are set for minimum and maximum student enrollment to automate planning
• When mishaps occur, regulated or sensitive organizations such as medical, police, or military can trace which students were enrolled in a course at a certain time—and which version of an always evolving lesson they were taught

Work Groups

Different sectors refer to their ad hoc work groups differently. Private companies often pull employees together into “project teams”. Military, public safety, and even humanitarian organizations run exercises, deployments, missions, and task forces. COVID called for hospitals to constitute special wards and makeshift teams. The Accelerator allows organizations to bring together groups of personnel to accomplish specific tasks or missions:

• Work Groups are created to bring people from throughout the organization together from a start date to an end date so that you know who is doing what, and why
• Work Group Roles represent specific assignments within a Work Group; whatever makes sense in your context like “Project Manager” or “Supply Clerk” or “Lead Instructor”
• Work Group Role Requirements allow you to specify competency, training, and more for each role so the Accelerator can suggest matches based on employee profile and availability
• Work Group Milestones provide a timeline of events or a series of objectives to be accomplished while the Work Group is active
• Work Group Templates allow managers and planners to template typical scenarios or combinations of Work Groups, roles, role requirements, and milestones so you don’t have to create everything from scratch each time

Equipment and Inventory

The “kitbag” is a major cost to control but an essential part of employee success. The Accelerator integrates asset management with employee readiness, which enables tying kit requirements to specifi c job roles so gear can be issued on assignment and collected on departure and inventory levels can be matched to workforce size.