If you’re trying to manage a call center workforce, we don’t need to tell you that accurate forecasting is critical to achieving the results you can. It’s not like understaffing or overstaffing are really all that different from each other in the long run, both stink.

A good recent blog post from Monet Software discusses this issue, pointing out that to avoid the twin bugaboos of under- and overstaffing, “you need methods that precisely predicts how many agents are needed to handle the center's contact volume.”

And to do that, here’s Madame Sosostris with her crystal ball. Yes, it’s a challenge. Hey if you could predict the future you’d be lying on a beach somewhere with a million bucks in the bank, right? What do they expect?

The Monet post mentions a DMG report in 2010 where survey participants listed what they saw as five forecasting challenges, stop us if you’ve heard of these before -- the need to forecast for multiple skill sets, changing business needs negate the usefulness of historical volume data, volume-driven by external events, not controlled by company -- or volume is seasonal and varies greatly, and volume patterns change frequently, making projections difficult.

Read more here.

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The first question, of course, is why bother with expense report management software at all? Isn’t it just an added layer you really don’t need?

In all actuality, this software is vital to businesses and at this current time, for many companies expense reporting is a standalone manual process that is not integrated into accounting or ERP platforms. This makes it extremely difficult for the rest of the organization to benefit from any possible intelligence to be gathered from it.

However, if you convert that manual data entry process into an automated process with expense management software, you can lower costs, increase compliance, accelerate reimbursement cycles and reduce the cost of every expense report transaction.

Another problem with manual expense report entry is that it generally goes along with manual approval, manual sending to accounting, manual this or that. Manual, as you know, of course, is always more expensive than automated.

Read more here.

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You may have noticed that there’s a lot more mobile communication capability in the healthcare field now. You would be correct.

Not surprising, seeing as how the field was the one that popularized the idea of being available 24/7 -- remember when theaters just asked doctors to please turn off their pagers?

A recent survey, noted in industry journal Mobile Health News, conducted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, confirms the ubiquity of mobile as well -- amazingly, according to the survey, five of the 164 mostly hospital-based respondents said that no group of professionals in their organizations used mobile devices to access information necessary for their everyday activities.

The surprise, of course, is that there are as many as five. And even more astoundingly, the survey found that of those five, “one was an organization with no plans to offer mobile access to IT systems.” Really makes one wonder exactly who they are and how to avoid them.

Read more here.

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Officials of Accedian Networks recently detailed some of the highlights of their service assurance demarcation products.

Powered by Accedian Network's High Performance Service Assurance platform, company officials say, “our EtherNID, MetroNID and MetroNODE 10GE family of demarcation and OAM aggregation devices enable end-to-end service provisioning and assurance with carrier-grade performance.”

One defining quality of the offerings is that they offer comprehensive remote test and performance monitoring functionality, service creation and traffic management capabilities for services backed by assured service level agreements.

New to the lineup is the Accedian's V-NID product suite, described by company officials as “an application-oriented performance assurance” product for end-user experience of specific applications. It works by simulating real application traffic flows across the cloud.

Read more here.