Workforce remains top of mind for business leaders because it’s become clear that there’s no end in sight for today’s labor challenges. There are more than 11 million job openings in the United States, and 35% of businesses are experiencing unsustainable turnover rates between 11% – 30%. Companies across the spectrum are scrambling to attract and retain quality talent to maintain service levels, achieve productivity targets and mitigate costs associated with high turnover rates. That’s why businesses are investing in modern workforce management solutions like Blue Yonder’s WFM, just named a Leader by Nucleus Research’s WFM Value Matrix 2022 report.

The report cites the importance of organizations optimizing labor spend, automating labor scheduling, improving employee engagement and keeping up with constantly changing compliance regulations. Blue Yonder’s WFM delivers all these benefits and manages everything from time and attendance and scheduling to long-range staff planning with innovative new features that help meet the needs of the modern workforce. As a Leader, Nucleus Research found Blue Yonder to be leading the way in terms of system functionality, usability and the value delivered to customers.

Our WFM solution has unique features that attributed to its leadership position. We’ve found that our enhanced scheduling flexibility, which allows organizations to build schedules that consider each employee’s work preferences, increases employee satisfaction and ensures there’s the right staff available to do the required work. Being able to provide this flexibility can help companies stand out as a preferred place to work by prospective employees. With such a tight labor market today, this benefit can be the difference between finding new workers and remaining understaffed.

Overall, Blue Yonder’s WFM helps reduce labor spend by more than 5% and helps simplify increasingly complex labor regulations through configuration, not customization. Even when regulations change or a new labor contract is adopted, a simple configuration update can be applied to impacted sites so future schedules remain in compliance.

To make the system more open and adaptable, more than 1,300 API expansions have been recently added. Blue Yonder’s WFM is offered exclusively on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, which delivers state-of-the-art security protection and unique threat intelligence to fight today’s rising cyberthreats.

A few other notable updates to Blue Yonder’s WFM mentioned in the report include:

  • COVID-19 employee health attestation with clock-in validation
  • Mobile punching with geofencing location validation
  • Additional compliance features to support labor contracts
  • Mass editing of shifts to simplify significant schedule changes

To further strengthen our WFM capabilities, Blue Yonder partnered with Microsoft to digitally transform the employee experience with a seamless integration between Blue Yonder’s WFM and Shifts in Microsoft Teams. With this new connector, employees can access WFM self-service capabilities with the same familiar Teams interface that promotes communication and community across the organization. This two-way sync empowers frontline workers to view and manage schedules while on the go.

In speaking with Nicole Herskowitz, VP, Microsoft Teams at Microsoft about this new integration, she shared: “This integration between Blue Yonder’s WFM and Shifts in Teams enables managers to spend less time on administrative tasks, keeping their focus where it belongs – on working directly with customers, and coaching and mentoring employees.”

This solution comes at a great time; there has been Teams growth in every segment, and frontline worker usage is up year-over-year, two times what it was the previous year.

We’re aware of how important it is to maintain a productive and empowered workforce in today’s tough climate. It’s important to have the right tools to provide employees the flexibility they desire, give management optimized staffing to meet demand, and to foster community across the entire organization. Blue Yonder’s WFM enables all this and more, and we continue to invest in new innovations to ensure our solution keeps leading the way in delivering WFM value.

To read the full report, click here.