Overview

Owned by Andrea Bianco
Last updated: Aug 10, 2023 by XCALLY Knowledge (Unlicensed)
4 min read

 

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What is XPLANY?

XPLANY is a workforce management software designed by Xenialab for helping organizations in planning, managing, and tracking employees' work.
This solution offers a variety of features that enables companies, as Contact Centers, to reduce workforce management efforts.
Work scheduling can be a very complex and tedious task, but with this software the entire employees shifts process can be automated and optimized, minimizing the impact on time and resources.

Planners often organize their teams' work using spreadsheets, but this mode results in a large amount of work, with a high probability of error and limited ability to forecast and plan, lacking the live feed of call data. XPLANY is a tool to meet requirements for forecasting, scheduling, monitoring and optimisation to handle business hours and a highly volatile volume of inbound calls.
The software can also support multi-site scheduling and can map virtual structures. Moreover it is stable, reliable, scalable and it is designed to integrate with XCALLY suite.

You can use the web cloud interface to use the XPLANY application. You can also access the REST API to create a custom user interface as necessary.

Key Benefits

The benefits of implementing XPLANY are embedded in the major features:

 

Cloud-based

With the web cloud interface, XPLANY guarantees flexibility, automatic update, cost saving and data security

Scalable architecture

XPLANY is a scalable software, conferring stability and reliability

Integrable to XCally

The platform is designed to integrate with the XCally Suite

Multi-Tenant

Multitenancy offers fast deployment, multiple customers management, ongoing maintenance, shared analytics, privacy
and security compliance

SLA Compliance

With XPLANY, it is possible to meet service levels more consistently with demand-oriented and fully enhanced scheduling

People-centric

The software considers employees’ requests, vacations and absences, minimizing over- and understaffing issues.
Plus, it gives visibility to employees of new schedules through notification

Work Scheduling Optimization

XPLANY offers the possibility to combine different workforce management methodology:

  • Manually create shifts and assign resources

  • Automatically assign employees to manual-generated shifts

  • Optimize Contact Center schedules according to historical data, in order to determine how many/which employees
    are needed at a particular time and day

  • Set a rotation pattern for shifts and employees.

The employees allocation considers several variables to reach the optimal shift roster and maximize productivity:

  • Number of employees

  • Volume of spots

  • Type of contracts (based on maximum working minutes per timeframe)

  • Employees’ unavailability and desired/undesired shift preferences

  • Skills required to perform specific activities (i.e. language, market knowledge)

  • Score level of a scheduling planning problem with respect of Constraint Satisfaction Programming

Architectures and Requirements

XPLANY is developed on Cloud AWS, with a microservices-based application architecture that allows ease of understanding, fast and flexible deployments, improved isolation in case of fault, scalability and the possibility of adding microservices based on different technologies without affecting existing ones. 

In fact, with his web cloud interface, XPLANY guarantees flexibility, automatic update, cost saving and data security.

Xenialab uses Node.js technology to touch the techniques of the future and to stay updated with the latest technologies.
On the client side, XPLANY use Angular to create an high-quality dynamic web application with captivating design and top performance.

Optimization Algorithm 

In order to optimize shift scheduling for maximum efficiency and fairness for employees, XPLANY uses a framework to combine optimization algorithms (metaheuristics) with score calculation by a rule engine.

  • A rule engine is great to calculate score of a solution which can have planning problem

  • An optimization algorithm is great to find new improving solutions for a planning problem

The solver iteratively run phases and when a new best solution is found, the solver generate an event called "Best Solution", so the algorithm ends and responds with the solution found.

What is a planning problem?

A planning problem has an optimal goal, based on limited resources and under specific constraints. Optimal goals can be any number of things, such as: 

  • Maximized profits: the optimal goal results in the highest possible profit

  • Minimized ecological footprint: the optimal goal has the least amount of environmental impact

  • Maximized satisfaction for employees or customers: the optimal goal prioritizes the needs of employees or customers

The ability to achieve these goals relies on the number of resources available, such as the number of people, amount of time, budget and physical assets (vehicles, computers, buildings, etc.)
Specific constraints related to these resources must also be taken into account, such as the number of hours a person works, their ability to manage certain services, or compatibility between pieces of equipment. 

XPLANY solve constraints satisfaction problems efficiently, combining optimization algorithms with very efficient score calculation.

Usually, a planning problem has at least three level of constraints:

  • A (negative) hard constraint must not be broken. For example: required skill for a spot.

  • A (negative) soft constraint should not be broken if it can be avoided. For example: undesired time slot for an employee.

  • A (positive) soft constraint, or reward, should be fulfilled if possible. For example: desired time slot for an employee.

These constraints define the score calculation of planning problem. Each solution of a planning problem can be graded with a score.

Furthermore, these constraints can be customised for each tenant and in this case the contrant will be applied to all employees and spots connected to that tenant.

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