Our work with Acas

Background

The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service are also better known as Acas. Although they receive government funding, they're an independent public body that provides free and impartial advice to employees and employers: supporting them with employment rights, best practice or policies and helping to resolve workplace disputes. They also offer paid for services such as mediation and training.

The service was provided within the Government Digital Services framework, using an agile approach.

Problem statement

• Managing agent capability, availability & capacity in Acas was an inefficient and mainly manual process.​
• Data was recorded in three disparate systems and two supporting spreadsheets.​
• This resulted in a large manual overhead as well as risk of error and omission when copying data between systems.​
• The process for calculating availability and capacity was not well understood, leading to concerns around transparency, accuracy and fairness.​
• In addition, data supporting key business critical processes was not mastered in core systems

Solution

• Wyser re-platformed all the capability to manage agent capability, availability and capacity from legacy systems and spreadsheets into Acas’ core MS Dynamics System.​
• In addition, Wyser enhanced the solution to:​
  • Dynamically recalculate availability based on changes to working patterns.​
  • Dynamically recalculate remaining agent capacity in response to a case being allocated.​
  • Allow managers to input and manage their own team’s working patterns.​
  • Provide a dashboard to give Acas leadership greater visibility of agent availability and capacity across the organisation.​

Outcome

• All data is now mastered and managed in one place reducing errors.​
• Real time updates, means case allocation now takes place on latest available data.​
• The overhead involved in managing the processes manually has been minimised.​
• Significantly improved MI and Insight supporting workforce management.​
• Reduction in 3rd party support costs and overhead.​
• Facilitation of automated allocation.
• Avoided cost, and improved customer service levels.