Future Meetings

Non-members welcome, no charge is made. After the talk, you are welcome to join us and the speaker for a meal. For further information please contact MidlandsORSociety@live.co.uk

Abstract

The management of call centre performance relies heavily on queuing theory work first carried out by Erlang in the early 20^th century and much elaborated since.  But this approach requires copious and detailed forecasting of future demand and resources and while it is excellent for short term performance management HMRC has found it less suitable for medium to long term performance planning of their call centres.  Part of the problem, which any call centre under pressure faces, is it is difficult to establish how much demand the call centre has to handle.  The work described here outlines a novel way of measuring the real demand faced by a call centre.  This measure turns out to be intimately related to the performance of a call centre and allows the building of extremely accurate models of medium to long term call centre performance.  HMRC adopted this model for managing call centre performance from April 2011 and, with the assistance of the improved understanding of demand and performance the model brings, went from handling 48% of calls in 2010-11 to handling 74% of call in 2011-12.  This performance has been sustained in 2012-13 with performance in the later part of the year regularly achieving 90% + calls handled. The model was the primary tool supporting the recent decision to reprioritize £34m of HMRC funding into contact centre investment at a time of austerity in Government financing.

Non-members welcome, no charge is made. After the talk, you are welcome to join us and the speaker for a meal. For further information please contact MidlandsORSociety@live.co.uk

Abstract

Life as a practitioner is full of interesting questions: how do you start off negotiations with a  new client? How do you get to grips with the client's business area and problem fast? How to decide on the most appropriate approach to take/model to use and how to persuade the client that your model will help to solve their problems? What do you do if the client doesn’t think an analytical approach will help or even if the client doesn’t realise that they have a problem? How best to manage client expectations and relationships? And finally, how best to finish off an assignment to everyone’s satisfaction? These issues will be addressed via a selection of consultancy projects and there will be time for discussion on any aspect of working as an OR practitioner.

Non-members welcome, no charge is made. After the talk, you are welcome to join us and the speaker for a meal. For further information please contact MidlandsORSociety@live.co.uk

Abstract

Florence Nightingale (from Lea, Derbyshire) is well known in mathematical and statistical circles for her graphical representations of data. But what exactly did these diagrams show and what other diagrams and statistical methods were being used at the time to analyse data? This talk will look in detail at Nightingale's graphical representation of the causes of mortality during the Crimean War. It will demonstrate how these were used by Nightingale and others to show that preventable diseases contributed to the army's high mortality rate and how the use of this data led to dramatic changes to nursing practices in Army hospitals.

There is a flyer available to download for this event here.