Re: [Staffslug] Workforce Management FOSS

On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 11:37 PM, Tom Hill <tom(a)ninjabadger.net&gt; wrote: Hi Tom (apologies for the delay in reply). I'll leave a quick reply and see if I can be of any help. To answer your direct question I have not seen an open source solution which matches the functionality that this software appears to offer. In my experience vertical enterprise solutions similar to Aspect eWFM can struggle in the open source world possibly because of the number of customer requirements and or a lack of critical mass to get the all important community to keep a solution going. Two possible ways open source could be used for these sorts of solutions is either to write your own from scratch using open source databases and components or to take a general product and tailor it to your needs. I appreciate that you have probably thought about these and the unquantifiable cost, at this point, which could end up at more than proprietary licenses although you may end up the better 'value'. Of course I would always recommend the required anaylsis and research been done on your requirements so you know what solution you need therefore not wasting any investment but from your email I took it that you are looking to take historical staff hours and usage data and then use this data to create a forecast so you could put together a roster or a resource plan (apologies if I have misunderstood). Using the second example of taking general products you could look to take a products that can hold and analyse the historical data and then by additional (clever) reporting or customisation add the future planning part, which is of course the hard bit. I also appreciate that you probably have systems for these but on the open source side both OpenERP and OrangeHRM have modules for staff/time management. Even though ERP is supposed to be Enterprise Resource Planning and (of course staff being the most precious of resources) they often do not have great 'resource planning' tools. What they do have is good modules to record/import historical data in a reasonably structured database. What these open source ERP and HR solutions also should offer is a good open source database and access to customise to your hearts desire (if you have the skills) either via reporting solutions or a planning module. Anyway, you have my email, Facebook and Twitter (@philoakley) so please feel to contact me and tell me I misunderstood completely. I would also be interested, if you could post to the list, if anyone else you have asked knows of any other/better solutions for this issue. Phil