SACRAMENTO, Calif. – This summer everyone's getting into thepool on the teller line at SAFE Credit Union. They're not gettingall wet, though. The $1.2 billion CU is beta testing the latestversion of the Exametric Workforce Management Suite, including anew pool feature designed to help streamline scheduling amongmultiple branches. “We have 14 branches and our managers do theirown scheduling, but I'm in charge of the floating people, so I'mreally excited about the new pooling feature,” says KathleenHarless, assistant vice president for member service administrationat SAFE CU. “With this, I'll be able to simply go out into thesystem and see what branch needs the most help and with just thetouch of a button, send them who they need.” SAFE CU(www.safecu.org) has only been an Exametric client since March,replacing manual scheduling with Exametric's automated solution ina process that involved sending the company a year's worth of dataand then one day of training, Harless says. “It was very simple andvery easy,” she says. In addition to pooled scheduling, theupgraded version now in beta at SAFE CU includes improvedauto-scheduling capabilities and a customizable interface, saysElaine Therrien, director of product management at San Diego-basedExametric Inc. (www.exametric.com). The 4-year-old company hasabout 20 clients, including four credit unions. Some of thoseclients are quite big: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Bank of NewYork and Huntington, for example, and the Exametric WorkforceManagement Suite is scalable to handle a credit union with four orfive locations or a mega-bank with 6,000, Therrien says. “The onlyreal difference between those large customers and our credit unionsis in our delivery mechanism,” Therrien says. “For the creditunions we provide a managed, hosted service that we configure anddeploy for them, as well as forecast analysis. “We importtransaction data for each one of their branches and we produce amonthly forecast for them to help them plan where and when to placetheir staff. And now, the pooling feature is particularlyattractive to credit unions with a regional or local focus, sincetheir staff can more easily float from branch to branch.” Therriensays the Web-hosted version requires nothing more than a Webbrowser on the client side and, to get things started, extracteddata from which to build a history. “It doesn't matter who theprocessor is,” Therrien says. “We have customers using Metavante,Fiserv, Jack Henry, the entire gamut.” She says the typicalcustomer begins seeing a positive ROI within 12 months. At SAFE CU,Harless says the goal is to be able to reduce FTEs by about 5% in12 months while improving member service. “This system allows us tostaff our branches according to what we can predict will be memberdemand. For instance, the first of the month is on a Wednesday. Weknow which branches will see the most business, and when, and wecan schedule our staff in half-hour increments,” she says. “It'sparticularly helpful for efficiently scheduling part-timeemployees, to make sure we have the right people there at the righttime. And our IT staff has had no problems with it.” -

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