We've got Blue Pumpkin for our 150 seat call center. We're on a G3R r8.3 EAS and CMS too. It does a decent job. I've heard a rumor that it's algorithms are not as great when it comes to multi-skilled agents but we've not noticed this, and many of our agents have 3-6 skills.
The forcasting is fairly correct, but you need a decent workforce manager (or some fairly competent supervisors, if that's who's operating it).
The best part about it is that it is that we set it up on MS SQL, which leaves the tables open to us if we need custom reports, etc. Of course I say this since I'm a developper and like to get my hands dirty with data...
As far as staffing, we originally had each team make their own schedule. Then we went to BP, and got a designated Work Force Manager.
Now we've gone away from having the WFM make all the scheduling decisions. The supervisors enter their agents daily info, and they are trained to look and see if agents vacation requests will be service impacting. As each team knows its people best, we think its better this way, rather than have a single WFM who only deals in numbers and thinks of agents as a number decide who should get vacations and when.
We still have a single individual designated as the administrator for BP, but this person's main tasks is to generate the schedules (based on supervisor inputed data), analyze trends, and help upper management with making decisions.
Does using this save us costs? That's a hard one. I don't think anyone has ever gone back to evaluate if the original cost benefit analysis is valid or if there is an actual savings in today's environment. Our call center has changed so much in the last 2 years since we implemented it that it is very difficult to judge any costs savings.
One thing I can say for sure is that when the forcasted call volumes are correct, and we staff according to the BP schedule, our service objectives are pretty much on the mark. The only time we get really off is due to large numbers of agents not showing up (ie public transportation failures, weather, etc), and abnormal spikes in call volumes due to some unpredictable business specific issues.
Since we have made so many changes in the CC, we use BP alot to predict the impact of changes (ie: merging queues, changing shifts, operating hours, etc.)
So overall, it's a good tool if you can afford it. It depends a lot on your call center operation specifics. At my last call center, we did it all by hand based on CentreVu Supervisor numbers, but most agents had 1 skill, our call volumes were pretty stable, and we did not go through too many changes.
