Description

One of Anago’s clients is an international Sales & Service Center within the airline industry. The client delivers services related to the facilitation of reservations, website support, loyalty and additional services. Being the daughter company of a big airliner it deals with travel agents and works with clients directly in 19 European countries, delivering its services in 11 different languages.  Every year a budget survey is completed which assesses what agents and which skills will be required in the upcoming 1,5 years.

State of Art

In order to determine the budgeting in the best way possible, the client makes use of a spreadsheet application. In the course of time this application has grown significantly due to the fact that various budgets on detail level also had to be assessed. However, the client was not capable of reporting the services at the correct level.

• The use of the spreadsheet technology has led to the following bottlenecks:
• The number and size of the spreadsheets, as well as the linkages between them cause the system to crash frequently.
• The application delivers one general service level for the entire department, which makes it impossible to report on a specific target level.
• The addition of a new budget year becomes highly error-prone and time consuming, above all because various formulas will have to be copied. 
• The application has been created on a monthly level, which does not match the requirements for short term planning on a weekly level.

Migration

The Sales & Service Center has considered various alternative options, but it had to be concluded that none of the standard software available met the requirements. The implementation of a customised system would not only lead to a long trajectory but also decrease the flexibility. Therefore the center’s consultant recommended the use of Anago in order to assemble the software.

Anago solution

Through a number of workshops with the client the requirements could be mapped in a functional design. Following, this design was discussed by a larger group of business experts in order to increase its capacity. The feedback that was received during this discussion was then processed within the functional design.

Part of the functionality was already included in the standard modules of Anago. The additional functionality has been modeled using standard building blocks in Anago Assemble. The application contains the following functions:

• Volume forecast based on linear regression  
• Availability planning
• Long term planning

By making use of specific connections it is possible to read data from other systems as well, including call data, e-mails, queues and agent information. Also, with regard to the long term planning, the required number of agents per skill group per week can be calculated. Furthermore this assignment is taking place in a highly advanced way which provides the opportunity to take into account small flows of calls. Furthermore, vacancies can be added and the effects on the service levels can then be calculated for the upcoming 78 weeks.

As opposed to programmed customised systems the Anago solution naturally provides a number of required functionalities:  exporting to Excel and pdf; data importation; turning and tilting of tables; logging of changes in the data; back-up; authorisation and connection with different systems.

Profit

The Anago application ensures that the expected service levels of the long term planning meet the specific service level requirements, in order to facilitate reporting on a correct level.

Furthermore, using this application is more efficient in several ways, compared to the original situation:

• The budgeting is rolling 1,5 years in advance, rather than having one extra budget year at one set moment per year;
• The application is connected to a data warehouse, which makes manual copying unnecessary;
• The long-term planning can now be compared to the short-term planning, through the conversion of the planning to a daily- and weekly level.

Because the users of the Anago application are also trained in using Anago Assemble they can now expand the application concerned with additional financial applications.

 

Would you like to know more about this specific client case or about the implementation of customised application using Anago Assemble? Contact Thomas de Nooij telephonically under the following number +31 (0)30 657 2613, or through e-mail: tdnooij@anago.nl.