U-WFM - Workforce Management System - U-Source

U‑Source specialises in workforce management for the call centre industry. In 2011, they identified a clear market gap: call centres needed an affordable, web-based scheduling and forecasting system that was easy to adopt — without the complexity and cost typically associated with enterprise WFM platforms.

U‑Source partnered with Inflecto to turn that vision into a scalable product, designed for multi-tenant delivery and global rollout.

The challenge

Call centre workforce management needs to balance competing demands: forecasting volumes, building workable schedules, managing leave, and supporting day-to-day operational changes — all while remaining intuitive for users who may have little prior WFM experience.

U‑Source needed a platform that could:

• Be provisioned quickly for new customers (multi-tenant SaaS style)
• Forecast call demand using historical call logs
• Generate effective schedules at scale
• Support integrations for importing call data and exporting schedules
• Make leave and holiday management simple for both managers and agents
• Scale flexibly across on-premise infrastructure and cloud environments

What we delivered

A hybrid cloud workforce management solution with a rich JavaScript web interface and a scheduling engine designed to scale out using either on-premise servers or AWS cloud instances. The solution was built as a web-based .NET application.

Multi-tenant SaaS foundation

U‑WFM was designed as a multi-tenanted, cloud-based system offering instant provisioning, enabling U‑Source to onboard new customers quickly and reliably.

Forecasting and data interchange

The platform includes simple call forecasting driven by historical call logs, plus a basic API to support:

• Call log imports
• Schedule downloads

To fit real-world operational workflows, it also supports importing and exporting to and from Excel.

Advanced scheduling engine

At the heart of the system is advanced scheduling functionality based on a genetic algorithm, helping generate workable schedules efficiently while handling constraints and practical requirements.

User experience designed for usability

We delivered a powerful JavaScript-rich web interface for viewing schedules, built to be clear, fast, and approachable for users without specialist WFM backgrounds.

Holiday and leave management (manager + agent)

U‑WFM includes full holiday management, including calendar-based tools to organise leave easily, plus an agent portal so agents can:

• View relevant information
• Manage their own leave requests and allocations

Outcome

• Completed development phase: August 2011
• Global launch: 2012
• Operational management: Inflecto managed the system on behalf of U‑Source until 2015, before handing over to a third party to continue development.
• The company was then later bought put by Puzzel

The final system was intuitive and easy to use — even for teams with little to no previous workforce management experience — while still providing the scheduling and operational features call centres depend on.