Resources

AI in Capacity Planning: Moving Forward with Intention

By Karen Elliott, CEO/Cofounder, Cinareo AI is starting to show up more in workforce management and capacity planning. As new capabilities emerge, it is clear that the industry is exploring how these technologies can enhance planning workflows in practical ways. This is an exciting development. At the same time, capacity planning sits in a unique category of decision-making, one where precision, transparency, and repeatability are essential. Planning models inform real-world

When Plans Drift: Why Problems Are Often Seen Too Late to Fix Easily

Small changes rarely break a plan. It is how they accumulate and surface that creates the real problem. The plan did not fail overnight. It stopped holding quietly. Nothing obvious broke. Forecasts were still within range. Staffing looked reasonable. Service levels had not collapsed. On paper, everything still appeared under control. But something had shifted. A small change in demand. A slight increase in handling time. A hiring delay that did not seem urgent at the time. In

Why Capacity Plans Fail in the Real World (And What Leaders Do Differently)

Capacity planning often looks solid on paper, yet breaks down when real-world pressures are applied. As complexity increases, timelines compress, and executive scrutiny intensifies, many organizations find their planning outputs no longer inspire confidence or hold up when decisions matter most. This session brings together executive and practitioner perspectives to examine why capacity planning struggles in practice and how experienced leaders respond. Rather than focusing o

Why Workforce Plans Breakdown: Closing The Gap Between Planning And Execution

A practical discussion on why workforce plans fail in execution and how standardizing processes brings control and predictability back to operations. What You'll Learn Even the best workforce plans can fail in execution. Forecasts are accurate, spreadsheets look sound, yet service levels still slip and teams end up firefighting. In this webinar, Cinareo’s Mark Alpern and industry advisor Daniel Piper explore why this happens and how standardized workforce management pract

Erlang still dominates contact center staffing. Abandonment and retrials are where many models break down.

By Mark Alpern, COO, Cinareo. This article reflects patterns we see repeatedly when reviewing real-world staffing models across contact center environments. In many of these environments, the largest source of staffing error is not forecast accuracy, but how abandonment and retries are treated, or ignored, in the underlying model. Despite decades of technological change in contact center operations, Erlang-based staffing models remain the de facto standard for determining f

Why Workforce Plans Break Down: What Executive Decision-Makers Actually Need

Key Insights from Cinareo’s Recent Conversation with Industry Experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper This article is the fourth and final part in our series exploring key themes from Cinareo’s recent conversation with workforce planning experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper. Workforce plans often lose traction the moment they reach executive leadership. Not because the work was wrong, but because leaders are being asked to make decisions on information that does not clearly tran

Why Workforce Plans Break Down: Bridging Planning and Execution

Key insights from Cinareo’s recent conversation with industry experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper This article is the third in a four-part series exploring key themes from Cinareo’s recent conversation with workforce planning experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper. Workforce plans rarely break because the work was done poorly. They break when decisions made after the plan slowly pull operations in a different direction. Not all at once, but through small, everyday choices that