Manage full time equivalent profiles

If you are using the strategic planning and vacation features, you must create full time equivalent profiles and assign agents to these profiles. WFM uses full time equivalents profiles when creating strategic plans and analyzing vacation requests.

A full time equivalent (FTE) is equal to the number of total scheduled person hours divided by the number of hours per week that constitute a full time person (for example, 40 hours or 35 hours). An FTE might consist of several part time individuals whose combined work hours in a week equal the full time person, but might not incur benefit expenses.

For forecasting and planning purposes, you need to establish the number of hours an agent is paid per week (for example, 20, 35, or 40 hours). WFM uses this value to determine the number of FTE agents required for a forecast. If the number of paid hours is 40 and the forecast calls for 80 hours, you need two full time agents.

EXAMPLE   A contact center has 100 agents. An FTE is 40 paid hours per week (160 hours per month), and an FTE agent earns $3,000 per month. All agents are required to take eight hours of training this month. That is 800 hours of training for the month (100 × 8). If you change the number of hours of training to FTEs, you would need five FTEs (800 ÷ 160), which corresponds to $15,000 spent on training for this month (5 × $3,000). By using strategic planning to determine costs in advance, managers can ask for fewer training hours in relation to their budget or spread the training out over a period of two or three months.

Field descriptions

Use the Full Time Equivalents Profiles page to create, edit, and delete full time equivalent profiles.

The fields on the Full Time Equivalents Profiles page are described below.

Field	Description
FTE Name	A unique name for the FTE profile.
Minimum Hours per Week	The minimum number of paid hours per week for this profile.
Maximum Hours per Week	The maximum number of paid hours per week for this profile.
Assign Agents	Assign agents to this profile. This is required for vacation planning. An agent cannot request time off unless the agent is assigned to an FTE profile.