Armatis is a company specializing in the outsourcing of customer relations and customer relationship management (CRM) services. Founded in 1989, it offers a complete range of customized solutions, from handling telephone calls to managing social media for its customers. Thanks to rigorous recruitment and training processes, Armatis guarantees a high quality of service. With contact centers in several countries, the company offers multilingual support.

In addition to its outsourcing services, Armatis develops innovative technological solutions to improve its customers’ operational efficiency in the field of customer relations. Under the banner of “Your Customer First”, Armatis is recognized as an industry leader for its commitment to operational excellence, innovation and exceptional customer experience. A “Made in France” company with an international dimension, the Armatis group has 21 production sites representing almost 9,000 positions: 11 sites in France, located in 7 regions, 8 nearshore sites and 2 offshore sites.

[Ouahid El Hedjaj]: “For over 10 years, Armatis had been using the same planning solution, but over the years this solution had shown its limitations in terms of taking into account customer, social and organizational issues. These limitations increasingly led our WFM teams to work outside the planning tool on scenarios and schedules for the most voluminous and/or complex activities, then to re-import this work into the tool to edit the schedules. This manual management of planning had become far too time-consuming, tedious and resource-intensive, with mixed results”.

That’s why Armatis decided to acquire a new planning tool to meet all the challenges it had identified.

The chosen solution had to fulfill three core criteria:

• Customers (optimization of load coverage under SLA constraints using adapted planning models)
• Social (absenteeism and occupancy rates linked to the compatibility of private and professional life cycles, consideration of individual constraints/preferences, etc.)
• Organizational: the emergence of COVID (integration of remote working)

In a multi-site, multi-country context, with decentralized planning management, the new solution sought by Armatis had to respond to organizational issues (notably multi-site/multi-time zone account management), integration issues (notably with Time and Activity Management and payroll), and the group’s social issues (employee commitment and work-life balance).

[Ouahid EL HEDJAJ]  “The specificity of the project lay in the fact that it had to be integrated into a wider project to transform the WFM sector within Armatis (centralization of planning in order to develop homogeneous practices based on more robust methods) coupled with an overhaul of the information system supporting this sector (technical architecture/security, automation of input/output workflows, remote access via smartphone…). From a business point of view, it quickly became apparent that there was a considerable need for training to understand the logic of the new tool and how to configure it, on the one hand, and to understand the planning process and associated methods, on the other”.

Armatis chose the Calabrio WFM solution, which offers a rich functional base in SaaS mode, a range of native integrations and an intuitive, user-friendly interface.

[Ouahid EL HEDJAJ] ”The deployment of Calabrio has made it possible to :

• Take better account of the loads generated by the various contact channels and develop planning models that are more closely aligned with the needs to be served.
• Significantly reduce manual tasks for planners, who have more time for higher value-added tasks (analysis and optimization of planning models).
• Contribute to employee commitment by making them active players in their own planning, thanks to a mobile application that allows them to consult their schedule, request shift exchanges or flexible working hours, or offer their availability for overtime, without waiting to be on site.
• Participate in Armatis’ environmental commitments via its carpooling module (carpoolers are identified so that they can be scheduled on identical times).”

To ensure smooth adoption of the WFM solution, Calabrio partner and WFM expert, Activeo proposed a participative approach, led by a mixed technical-functional team.

[Ouahid EL HEDJAJ] “The choice of a small team of experts in project management and WFM, with complementary skills and the strong involvement of an Activeo partner, enabled us to provide comprehensive and effective support throughout the project. Activeo’s team helped to map out the risks and opportunities involved in implementing the Calabrio solution, and to maximize the implementation timetable while securing the weak points identified. Activeo also skilfully managed the friction points inherent in this type of project and found the necessary compromises without incurring additional costs.”

[Ouahid EL HEDJAJ] “Deploying Calabrio has enabled us to revisit the value chain of the planning process in depth, and to eliminate the elements that led to non-performance, while automating low value-added tasks as far as possible. In the near future, Calabrio will enable us to move from a decentralized structure with 24 employees to a more efficient centralized structure with 12 employees.”

The solution’s promising developments, particularly in terms of Artificial Intelligence, will enable Armatis to further automate certain repetitive tasks, improve calculation accuracy and predict fluctuations more accurately – all in the service of ever more efficient operational management and ever more effective planning!