GMT Corp. has launched the “Lanier” version of its GMT Planet designed to provide a  number of customer and market-driven enhancements, significant performance improvements and new product capabilities.

 

The Norcross, Georgia-based global provider of enterprise workforce management and performance optimization solutions said the workforce optimization suite is immediately available.

 

“With this latest version of GMT Planet, GMT continues to differentiate and distance itself from competitors and reinforce its well-deserved reputation for delivering accurate, powerful, easy-to-use solutions that drive productivity improvements and reshape enterprise business processes,” said Simon Angove, chief executive officer of GMT.

 

GMT's enterprise workforce optimization solutions combine precision forecasting and efficient scheduling with powerful performance analytics to deliver a better customer experience at lower cost.

 

The latest version of its extensive workforce management solution, the GMT Planet suite, is in use at a number of leading contact centers, retail banks, back offices and distribution centers throughout the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to accurately forecast workload and intelligently schedule resources.

 

The latest version of the GMT Planet suite, Lanier, is highly configurable to the specific requirements of each client, ensuring accurate scheduling and significantly reducing ongoing operating costs.

 

“The new features available in Lanier reinforce our company’s commitment to providing technology that companies need to run their entire business effectively--from frontline tellers to call centers to back offices. This is especially true in today’s business climate,” said Angove.

 

The company’s product line combines precision forecasting and intelligent scheduling with powerful analytics and performance management tools – together delivering a complete solution that can be deployed throughout a company’s contact center, branch office, and back office departments and is priced to deliver rapid return on investment.

 

For the solution, GMT was active in soliciting input from experts in the contact center and retail banking industries, including power-users, industry analysts and partners in an effort to ensure that Lanier includes a broad slate of new features that address real customer needs.

 

The major enhancements and new capabilities offered in Lanier include:

 

Forecasting Enhancements 
The enhanced forecasting engine provides the ability for a user to review and analyze the available historical workload demand data and for the system to automatically identify the best forecasting methods and parameters to create the best-fit forecast, improving the client’s ability to match supply and demand.

 

Skills Scheduling Enhancements 
For skills-based contact centers, Lanier offers new features and improved functionality. These enhancements include improved ability to cross-utilize across skilled positions; new displays showing service levels for skilled positions; and enhancements to calculating and managing shrinkage and shortages in skilled positions.

 

AutoScheduler Features 
Lanier includes a number of significant improvements to its scheduling capabilities through the addition of absolute and cascading task priorities, which allow the user to define the order in which work must be completed. This is a new competency-based scheduling feature that ensures the right employees are scheduled based on their qualifications and preferences. In addition, schedules are created significantly faster through improved multi-threading.

 

Workflow and Usability Enhancements 
In keeping with GMT’s reputation as being easy-to-use, many routine functions, operations and user-definable parameters have been organized in a logical fashion to streamline routine tasks and administration of Lanier. The organization of these features helps to reduce administrative overhead and facilitate front-line adoption.

 

GMT QualityLink
 Newly introduced to the GMT the product line, GMT QualityLink provides an open systems framework to integrate GMT Planet with commercially available call recording and quality monitoring solutions. This integration framework allows data to be freely shared between systems to enable contact center management to quickly and easily view agent activity–from schedule adherence to quality scores and interaction recording–and act on the available information.

 

Technology Infrastructure 
Lanier also includes support for a number of contemporary infrastructure technologies including Microsoft’s .NET (News - Alert) 3.5 framework and SQL Server Reporting Services as well as the Vista operating system.

 

The Lanier is designed for helping contact centers and retail banks that are facing pressure in trying to ensure proper staffing levels without incurring unnecessary expenses.

 

With this release of Lanier, GMT is extending its workforce optimization solution to balance often-conflicting requirements. Lanier will begin shipping to new clients immediately.