Hang on a minute… Avaya Aura Workforce Optimisation R12… what is that all about?
You may be forgiven for not being aware of the launch of the Avaya Aura Workforce Optimisation R12 product suite.
After a brief delay, it appeared to sneak out of the back door at Avaya’s product house on 29th July 2013 and vanished off into the night with a brief GA announcement and nothing much more. So I thought it only fair to take the initiative and shine the spotlight on this new release and offer an opinion.
Well, the first point to make is that this is a significant release. More significant than the move from V7.x to R10 and perhaps even greater than the previous major step from V6 to V7. So why, what has changed?
R12 is the very latest incarnation and the fruit of around 3 years of intensive development to truly combine the Verint and Witness products. The outgoing R10 and R11 versions offered similar functionality to most businesses and were commonly considered (certainly by me) as market leading in the world of unified workforce optimisation. R12 builds on this, however, adds a fresh new QM user interface, ports all WFM functionality to the web interface and offers greater administrative simplicity and technical consolidation.
So please let me draw out a couple of examples of enhancements delivered by this release:
Quality Monitoring
As previously mentioned the QM tool has been significantly revamped. The attractive new interface offers stronger workflow for assessors, a “smart inbox” for collecting contacts for assessment and can act on Speech Analytics categories. It also retains all of the powerful dynamic evaluation form and calibration tools in the preceding versions. If you are a R10 QM user, this is different, but also familiar at the same time, and should be a positive step.
Coaching & eLearning
Lesson management and content production tools have existed for a while, but with the development of the system the coaching functionality has also been enhanced to permit team managers to use a WFO workflow to drive the review and action following an assessment and can track the impact this has on performance.
Workforce Management
Numerous enhancements have transformed a market leading WFM solution to one that is truly pioneering. Yes sure the whole system is now available through the web (as well as retaining the client for those that want it still), but this should not be understated and has been executed very well using a series of clever views, menus and UI design to efficiently migrate the depth of functionality without losing anything. There are practical enhancements this brings such offering off-line scheduling and reducing the demand on the client workstation.
Performance Management
The scorecards have been enhanced to support intraday measurement, desktop gadgets, powerful dashboards, an additional dimension on the scorecard view itself and greater simplicity.
Speech Analytics
Rapidly gaining momentum, but no longer a separate component, this is now embedded in the WFO framework, pre-integrated with QM and scorecards and depending on the size of your operation could even be delivered on the same datacentre hardware.
Administrative Simplicity
R10 and R11 offered a single user-interface for operational users and to undertake most of the configuration, R12 offers one system to administer and maintain and this inevitably simplifies this process and also reduces the effort required to implement a new system.
Technical Consolidation
Consistent support for server virtualisation, current OS and DB support, less servers, less DBs, less clients, greater density; all makes good reading for CIO’s and technical architects.
So in summary, R12 offers a great deal. It is a major release, with significant functional, technical and management enhancements, this all translates to increased business benefits and lower total cost of ownership for you. If you hold a current upgrade advantage maintenance contract (or equivalent contract which provides software upgrades) you are entitled to R12 for no s/w cost. A point to note is that with the introduction of R12, R10.x retires and so further expansion on this version is no longer automatically available.
So if you would like to take advantage of this new version, or just explore your options and you would like the assistance of an organisation that can offer significant operational guidance, unique flexible training as well as design and commission the enterprise technology itself, please contact at [email protected]. We are one of a few selected Avaya and Verint partners in EMEA to offer value around Avaya WFO R12 and have already built a wealth of experience.
