OptForceTM
Strategic Workforce Optimization
OptTek Systems, Inc. is developing a software product designed to support strategic workforce optimization. The product fills the gap in existing software to help organizations identify optimal portfolios of investments to achieve desired workforce composition. The software is structured to integrate with organizational objectives such as financial goals, productivity goals, diversity goals, and human resources goals including recruitment, talent management, employee engagement, and retention. The software is designed to add important strategic functionality to current human resource and business planning applications. The functionality is achieved by simulating and optimizing the workforce over the employment life cycle from recruiting to retirement. Analytics provided by the software spans a variety of processes including hiring, onboarding, talent management, performance management, compliance, and professional development.
To effectively manage personnel costs and satisfy strategic requirements, organizations must be able to forecast and evaluate the impact of human resource program investments on their workforce to achieve organizational objectives. They must be able to manage the risks and uncertainty of external shifts in the economy, their changing customers’ needs, competition, business process improvements, and the variability in the technical and non-technical skills of the labor pool. Questions gaining prominence in executive planning now include:
- How to tie workforce planning to long-range revenue targets and forecasts in both a positive as well as in a down turned economy
- How to determine the resources a business unit will need based on how much revenue it generates
- How to deal with an aging workforce, more competition for limited talent, and increasing pressure to manage costs and customer expectations
- How to allocate employee benefit and compensation options as health care costs increase and personnel requirements change (as a result of shifting workforce demographics, new government regulations, and increasing international competition)
- How to identify key positions and competencies required in a variety of geographic locations both today and in the future
- How to maximize profits with the best combination of workforce skills
- How to reach diversity goals within budget and time constraints
Under an innovative research and development award from the United States National Science Foundation we are developing a prototype of the software. The software simulates and optimizes program investments to obtain workforce readiness and diversity goals for an organization’s workforce, taking account of how these investment decisions affect the retention and recruitment behavior of individuals with different demographic attributes. It demonstrates the ability to optimize the selection of investment decisions for recruiting and retaining individuals. The software accounts for realistic constraints including budgets, relationships between decisions, time frames, and government regulations. Based on the performance outcomes for each period simulated, the software determines the optimal portfolio of investment decisions to maximize readiness and diversity for a given budget.
OptTek expects a working prototype to be ready in the second half of 2009. We are now engaged with several large private corporations who have agreed to provide data and requirements to test and verify the software. We are planning to deliver the software under the software as a service model (SaaS). We are also seeking channel partners interested in providing OptForce within their own software or services offerings.
OptTek is the leading provider of optimization technology to the simulation software industry. OptQuest®, the company’s flagship software product, is integrated into over 95% of the simulation software products that are sold today; it has been licensed to over 70,000 users and is the optimization standard for simulation modeling. Channel partners for OptQuest number over 20 and include Rockwell Software, Halliburton, HP, Oracle, CSC, Flextronics, Dassault, CACI, Alion, and Lockheed Martin.
For additional information read Strategic Workforce Optimization: Ensuring Workforce Readiness with OptForce
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