The Care Quality Commission’s single assessment framework was introduced with one clear purpose: to raise care standards across the sector. A goal shared by every provider. Delivering this level of change at scale is complex, and while the ambition is right, the transition has brought challenges such as registration delays, inspection backlogs, and increased documentation demands. These issues reflect the size of the task, not a lack of commitment from the regulator. 

The CQC is actively working to address these challenges following independent reviews, but providers still face operational and financial pressures. Understanding these pressures, and planning for them, can help providers stay focused on what matters most – delivering outstanding care. 

Registration delays remain a challenge

Registration delays continue to impact providers as the new framework beds in. For example, CQC performance data shows 54% of pending registration applications exceeded the 10-week target at the end of 2023–24, up from 22% the previous year. Industry reports suggest applications can take up to six months to process. These delays often mean new care homes sit empty and funding is held back until registration is confirmed, adding pressure for providers and the regulator alike.

While the CQC’s intention is never to stifle care capacity nor quality, these delays highlight the challenge of balancing rigorous standards with the urgent need to bring new services online.

Re-inspection backlogs create prolonged uncertainty

Inspection backlogs add further complexity. According to the Homecare Association, 70.3% of community social care providers either have never been rated or have ratings that are 4–8+ years old, up from 60% in August 2024.

The average wait for re-inspection after a ‘requires improvement’ rating is now 360 days — a 153% increase since 2015. For homecare, uninspected locations rose 64% in 14 months between June 2024 and August 2025 from 2,879 to 4,727. At current inspection rates, the backlog will continue to grow.

These delays have real consequences for providers, but they also affect care seekers and commissioners who depend on current ratings to make confident, informed choices. When ratings are outdated or missing, it can restrict options and make decisions harder. Which is clearly something the CQC is committed to improving through transparency and timely assessments. At the same time, these challenges underline the scale of the task facing the CQC as it works to deliver a more consistent, modern regulatory approach.

Framework complexity reflects ambition

The single assessment framework introduced significant complexity, requiring structured approaches to evidence and documentation. Independent reviews have highlighted these challenges.

Professor Sir Mike Richards’ review stated the framework “is far too complex and, as currently constituted, does not allow for the huge differences in the size, complexity and range of functions of the services that CQC regulates.” Initially, the framework required six evidence types for each quality statement, up to 204 evaluation points, though this was simplified in December 2024.

Even with revisions, compliance remains demanding. This reflects the CQC’s ambition to raise standards and drive best practice across the sector. While the process can feel challenging for providers, the intention is not to penalise or create unnecessary burden, the ultimate goal is to ensure safer, higher-quality care for the people who rely on these services. Providers therefore need systematic ways to organise evidence and maintain audit trails to align with this shared mission.

Understanding the broader impact

While £50,000 is the maximum penalty for compliance failures, the bigger challenge lies in maintaining standards amid reduced inspections and extended delays. Inspections have fallen sharply from around 16,000 in 2019/20 to approximately 6,700 in 2023/24, making progress harder to evidence.

Financial impact goes beyond fines: in the residential care home sector, Knight Frank research shows that inadequate-rated homes operate at profit margins of around 22%, compared with 34% for outstanding-rated homes – a significant disparity that compounds over time. Occupancy rates also drop when ratings remain outdated, as families and commissioners seek higher-rated alternatives.

In a competitive market, this new framework can ultimately have a positive impact by creating more robust standards and building trust among care seekers. It also provides a clearer roadmap for providers needing improvement, helping them demonstrate progress and raise their potential over time. While it may not feel that way pre- or post-audit, the intention is to lift quality across the sector. These pressures highlight why proactive compliance planning is essential, not just for providers’ commercial stability, but to support the shared goal of improving care quality.

Regulatory improvements underway

The CQC acknowledges these challenges and is implementing improvements following reviews by Dr Penny Dash and Professor Sir Mike Richards. These include stabilising its regulatory platform, upgrading the provider portal, and refining processes to make compliance smoother.

Dr Dash emphasised that effective regulation “can identify failings in the delivery of care and assist providers in making improvements,” while Richards recommended a fundamental reset, noting success depends on recruiting and training sufficient inspection staff with sector expertise.

These steps will help, but the single assessment framework, with its 34 quality statements and comprehensive evidence requirements, remains central to compliance. Providers will still need robust systems to organise evidence, track compliance, and maintain audit trails.

How Certa supports providers through regulatory complexity

Certa helps providers turn compliance challenges into manageable processes:

Streamlined evidence preparation: Generate comprehensive inspection-ready reports quickly, reducing stress and saving time.

Real-time compliance monitoring: Track essential checks like DBS, right-to-work, and care plan reviews, with alerts to prevent non-compliance.

Communication logs: Capture compliments, complaints, and key interactions with full audit trails for inspection evidence.

Advanced medication management: Electronic MAR integrated with NHS Medicines API ensures accuracy and visibility, with alerts for missed doses.

Conclusion

Beyond compliance, Certa gives providers a competitive edge. By combining regulatory tools with care planning, scheduling, and family engagement in one platform, Certa helps providers stay compliant, protect revenue, and deliver exceptional experiences that set them apart in a crowded market. Regulatory complexity doesn’t have to be a barrier – with the right systems, providers can focus on what matters most: outstanding care.

Discover how Certa can enhance your regulatory readiness and operational excellence at: www.caci.co.uk/software/certa

Caerphilly leads a Shared Lives scheme of eight local authorities in Wales. Discover how it uses Cygnum to support adult care

Shared Lives is a form of community support for adults referred to Caerphilly by social services or the local health board. Caerphilly leads a Shared Lives partnership of eight, comprising six other local authorities and two health boards.  

It records carers from the community to support adults (over 18) with care and support needs. All care takes place in the carer’s home for a set period of time which is variable by carer. It ranges from daytime care, which might mean a couple of hours during which the person with support needs visits the carer’s home, through to one arrangement in Caerphilly where the carer has been providing full time support for 40 years. Shared Lives relies upon the commitment of ordinary people from withing the community who are trained, assessed and approved by the scheme to provide care to those who need it. 

“We support, monitor and train every carer,” explains Martin Thomas, Shared Lives Business manager at Caerphilly County Borough Council. “We then deal with referrals that are made to us and match people with appropriate carers.” 

How Shared Lives operated before

Prior to going live with Cygnum in 2024, Caerphilly’s Shared Lives scheme used a system that was designed for it at its inception in 2011. It had been using the system since 2012. “It was a standalone, bespoke system,” says Martin. “It served us well over the years but there was no scope to develop it. It had been designed and built by a freelancer who had moved on, and Caerphilly’s IT team didn’t want to touch it. They system started to fail, which prompted us to look at other options.” 

Why Cygnum? 

“We needed the flexibility of a system that could expand with us,” explains Martin. “For example, if new local authorities join us in future, we need to be able to integrate them quickly. Cygnum offered that flexibility and I can alter so much in the system myself, such as fee levels, local authorities joining or leaving and the people who come and go grom the scheme. 

“It was also important to me that we could become autonomous in our system usage and not reliant on outside help to set things up and function. With Cygnum, we can make the changes we need without assistance from the team at CACI.”  

How the Shared Lives team got up and running with Cygnum 

As part of onboarding, CACI provides project management, training, go-live and ongoing support with Cygnum. “The whole end-to-end process was good, from initial conversations through to the design and build that we needed” says Martin. “Samppa and the rest of the CACI team captured our needs really well in the full delivery of Cygnum. I had a very clear view in my mind of what I wanted and CACI captured that. We’re a bespoke service and the system suits our needs. It can be complicated, but it works and CACI adapted the system for us.” 

One area that always causes concern when switching to a new system is change. Change management is a vital step in any project. Effective training is a central component of this. “The training, led by Odette, was excellent,” says Martin. “It was intense, but it made it easy for us to get started with Cygnum.  

“This meant that we could manage to the transition from the old system to Cygnum well. With each step, it enabled us to develop a strong working relationship with CACI, too.” 

The final stage was to go live with Cygnum. “After testing and training, we were ready,” explains Martin. “Our in-house go-live saw our team of 32 start using Cygnum. I was a bit nervous because I was expecting some reluctance to it all, but everyone has taken to it better than I had hoped. We rolled out delivery so that some of us were using it first and getting things set up, but this meant we ended up rolling it out to a team who were immediately comfortable with Cygnum.” 

The role of Cygnum in Caerphilly’s Shared Lives scheme

“Carers are set up on Cygnum and we can easily access what sort of care they can provide, for example if it’s respite, shorter term care, or long-term care where someone will move in with them,” explains Martin. “Similarly with referrals, we can get them into the system and understand their needs quickly. Our team can use the wallchart in Cygnum to see who can provide what and match them to the people who are referred to us. It makes it easy for us to add people, both carers and referrals, and understand their needs and availability. We can then understand the needs of the person being referred and the availability, skills and training of the carers in the system. 

“As part of a more gradual roll out, we will be increasing the functionality available to the team as we go. To start with, however, Cygnum has delivered the essentials that we need; managing caseloads, managing referrals and ensuring that carers are paid on time. To that end, Cygnum has delivered exactly what we needed and I’m excited to roll out more functionality as we go.” 

What’s next for Cygnum and Shared Lives?

As Martin and the team expand upon the early success of their use of Cygnum, it will deliver increased efficiency and time savings as they go. “I’m excited to build upon our use of the system,” he says. “We will be able to use it for things such as DBS record checks, contacts database and reporting. 

Conclusion

“Working with CACI has been a real pleasure,” concludes Martin. “The project ran as smoothly as I could’ve hoped and, essentially for us, it ran on time and on budget. The communication from CACI was good throughout. 

“I’m excited that Cygnum gives us the opportunity to deliver our Shared Lives services to our communities in the way we need.” 

You might explore home care software based on a specific pain point or set of needs. But what else are you missing out on? Our blog explores. 

Many home care providers select their home care software based on a specific need. It might be a need to implement a friends and family portal, digitise their services or more efficiently handle financial management. But home care software can carry a multitude of benefits to home care providers. Whilst addressing specific needs is important, taking a step back and considering the while picture can result in tangible benefits being delivered across your care services. This blog will examine the top 7 features you should look for when examining home care software solutions. 

What is home care software? 

To begin with, what is home care software? It’s the software that should support every area of your home care delivery. Where client records were recorded and stored on paper, home care software makes the process digital. This makes your services more agile, with the ability to record information on the go, interact with care workers and their schedules, create friends and family portals for your clients and record and share data easily. 

Why do I need home care software? 

Home care software can deliver a multitude of benefits to your home care services. Perhaps most importantly, however, your clients expect a modern service. Being able to offer outward facing services such as a friends and family portal, updated with real-time information, helps to reassures your clients and their loved ones. 

No less important is the consideration of data security. Our previous blog explored the topic of cyber security for home care providers. In short, keeping the data process safe is important from a GDPR and CQC inspection standpoint.  

Not only does the CQC want evidence that you’re processing and storing data safely in line with its data security and protection toolkit, but the regulator will also need straightforward access to your data to perform inspections. Being able to easily generate accurate and up-to-date reports from your data is something home care software can support. 

What if I don’t need a home care software solution? 

Home care software is an important consideration as your business grows. If you’re only caring for a small number of clients with a small number of care workers to manage, then the outlay might not make sense for your business. 

As your business grows, however, the complexity of your operation will grow with it. With more clients, more carers and more considerations, it becomes increasingly unmanageable where you rely on manual ways of working. Staying on top of finances, client needs, scheduling, reporting and maintaining an outstanding level of care provision can quickly become overwhelming. Home care software can help you by automating swathes of your business, supporting effective communication and the ongoing delivery of outstanding care. 

What you need from a home care software solution 

1. Care planning 

From onboarding clients into your services to being agile in the face of their shifting needs, your home care software solution should support you in creating, revising and delivering person-centred care plans bespoke to the needs of each client. Being adaptable is key. Demands can change in an instant, so your service needs to be responsive. Your carers also need up-to-date information on each client, ensuring they deliver the right care at the right time, 

2. Scheduling your care workers 

Once your care plans are established, you need to schedule care workers to deliver them. Home care management software can remove much of the guesswork in scheduling, helping you to respond instantly to short-term changes. This keeps your services on track, makes the most efficient use of your resources and delivers your care plans in the most effective way. From matching the needs of the client to the skills and experience of the care worker, home care software can support you in delivering continuity of care by ensuring that the right people are in the right place at the right time. 

3. Record information and communicate in real time 

A good home care software solution should provide you with a care worker app. This can be easily downloaded onto the carer’s mobile device and used to complete care visits. As well as equipping your carers with vital context and information on each visit, a care worker app should further support lone worker safety and provide real-time information back to the office. This supports care workers in going about their tasks with confidence, whilst also supporting them in capturing and recording outcomes as they go, removing the need to write up notes and manual data entry. 

4. Complete financial management 

Having confidence that your care worker pay and funder billing are accurate is essential to the financial health of your home care service. By linking to your care plans and care worker schedules, understanding what has been delivered, home care software can support you in maintaining accurate records of who has done what, when. You can further create timesheets for your care workers, making it easy and accurate for them to log care visits and any travel expenses incurred. By automating much of the process, home care software can reduce friction and human error in your financial management. 

5. Create reports on your care services easily 

Being able to easily and accurately report on your home care services provides valuable insights on your business. It’s also important for CQC inspections, not least as the first stage of most inspections will be virtual. A good home care software system should provide your service with bespoke dashboards for each user, enabling them to interact with the information they need. When you need insights, they should be easy to obtain from the data you hold across your care services. 

6. Friends and family portal 

Communicating with your clients and their loved ones is an important and reassuring aspect of modern care delivery. By linking to your care plans and schedules, care software systems can create bespoke, real-time portals through which your clients and their loved ones can see the schedule of their care visits, care due to be administered and care administered.  

7. Support, security and compliance 

It’s important to consider the team behind your home care software solution. What security certificates do they possess? What ongoing support will you receive with the software? What’s the system uptime availability? How will your data be handled? Given the importance of selecting the right home care software solution, it’s imperative to consider the whole package and select a partner that can support the needs of your business. 

How Certa from CACI can support your care service 

Certa from CACI is a complete home care management software solution designed to support every facet of care delivery. Whatever support you need in enhancing the delivery of your care services, Certa can help. 

Delivering tangible benefits to homecare services by making compliance, consent, auditing, reporting and care plan provision straightforward and streamlined, what difference can Certa make to your homecare services? 

You can find out more by booking a no-obligation demo of Certa today. 

Turn insights into impact: activate your data in real time for faster results

In a world that moves at digital speed, timing is everything. It’s not enough to know your customer—you need to act on that insight while it still matters.

Data activation is the process of turning insights into timely, targeted actions, across channels and in real time. It enables brands to move from passive analysis to proactive engagement, driving relevance and results.

For many brands, the challenge isn’t collecting data. It’s activating it. Right person, right message, right moment? That’s the dream. But a lack of integration, channel connectivity, and data agility turns that vision into delay.

At CACI, we help brands bridge the gap between insight and impact by enabling real-time data activation—powering better experiences, smarter marketing, and faster growth.

The reality: data without action

Your analytics team knows who abandoned their basket. Your CRM knows who hasn’t opened an email in months. Your loyalty system knows who just hit VIP status.

But if these systems don’t talk to each other—or worse, talk too slowly—then those valuable signals go unused or arrive too late to make a difference.

The consequences?

• Delayed personalisation
• Missed conversion moments
• Campaigns running on outdated data
• Frustrated teams with siloed tools

The CACI approach: real-time activation, delivering real business impact

We help brands unlock their data’s full potential by ensuring insights flow seamlessly into the systems that matter, when they matter most.

Here’s how we do it:

• Connected ecosystems:  We build and enhance integrations across your marketing, CRM, loyalty, and analytics platforms to ensure data can move fast and freely.
• Dynamic audience segmentation:  We enable you to build and refresh customer segments in real time, based on behaviour, triggers, or lifecycle changes.
• Channel activation: Whether it’s email, app push, social, web estate or in-store, we make sure your data feeds directly into the tools that deliver experiences.
• Event-based triggers: From cart abandonment to product interest, we help you automate actions at the moment they matter—not a day later.

Why real-time matters

Today’s consumers don’t wait—and neither should your data. The brands winning in customer experience are those who’ve moved from “reporting” to real-time reacting.

By activating data instantly and intelligently, you can:

• Increase conversion rates
• Improve customer retention
• Reduce media waste
• Boost ROI on your technology stack

Want to see where you’re losing time (and value)?

Let CACI help you uncover how your digital estate is performing. We’ll identify where your data flows—or doesn’t—and show you how to speed up your insight-to-action journey.
Don’t let valuable signals sit idle—activate them, in real time, with CACI.

The latest findings from our Cost of Living consumer survey are in, and we’re taking a look at the insights through the lens of the leisure industry. 

With over 2,000 respondents surveyed in November, we asked consumers about their thoughts and priorities in the lead up to Christmas to help brands understand how their customers may be behaving. For companies in the leisure space, being able to predict the movements, intentions and spending patterns of customers is key at this time of year, especially in the current economic climate. 

So, what did we find? 

Nearly half of consumers still want to socialise and spend despite the impact of the Cost of Living

With 46% of respondents agreeing that the increased Cost of Living will not impact their intended Christmas social plans (up from 40% in 2022), leisure brands can expect to benefit from people wanting to attend and spend on events out of the home this year. 

While this is reflected in general financial fears dropping since the late summer, there seems to be a generational divide with Gen X, Millennials and Boomers feeling more confident. Gen Z, on the other hand, reached a new peak of concern at over 50%. 

Their concerns relate to their personal finances as opposed to family finances or the national/global economy, which could affect brands reliant on young adults to boost their seasonal profits. 

Energy fears remain high as the cold moves in, leading to potential cost-cutting in other areas for some groups

With energy costs becoming more of a focus as temperatures drop, some demographic groups are having to cut down on other costs to keep warm this winter – with one in three among the Low Income Living Acorn category expecting to have to do so. 

The impact decreases as we climb the affluence scale but remains fairly significant, with over 20% of the Established Affluence category also considering cost cutting for this reason. 

Spending on food and drink at home remains a priority, but the importance of entertainment and leisure at Christmas is growing

With a significant 79% of people considering spending on food and drink at home to be important this festive period, there is further optimism for the leisure industry as our latest survey has also detected a shift back towards entertainment and leisure as a source of importance. 

While consumers report that most other areas of spending are reducing in importance, entertainment and leisure is trending in the other direction, with 59% of consumers surveyed classifying entertainment and leisure as either somewhat or very important to them this year, which is up from 53% in 2022. This is supported by 47% of respondents identifying that socialising outside of their homes this year is important, which is a slight increase from 2022. 

Overall, the social planning picture is a lot less negative than last year

When we consider the contrast between pre-pandemic and Cost of Living crisis behaviours versus consumer attitudes now, it’s fair to say that people continue to exert caution in the lead up to Christmas. Nonetheless, we’re seeing less negativity year-on-year, which shows that there’s opportunity for leisure brands in the coming weeks. 

Brands may still want to consider how different demographic groups are going to drive success this Christmas, as levels of concern and caution seem to be directly related to affluence. The findings show that the Established Affluence category appear to place the most importance on maintaining their food and beverage spending and socialising this year. 

When taking age into account, we found that a surprisingly large pocket of younger respondents actually prefer New Year’s Eve to Christmas Day as a celebration. So, this could be something to consider when rolling out engagement strategies post-Christmas. 

Apply these insights to your consumers and stay in the loop as you strategise

We work with a range of market-leading brands in the leisure industry, helping them to identify, understand and locate their customer base to drive value for their businesses and inform successful estate optimisation and growth. If any of our demographic or location-focused data is of interest to you, or if you’d like to dive deeper into our survey results, please get in touch to discuss this with us. 

Ongoing training and competency management efforts are vital for organisations in maintaining effective service delivery. Keeping staff competent, via mandatory ongoing training for their role, is often a regulatory issue. Offering staff opportunities to expand upon their core competencies makes the same process beneficial to the development of your workforce.

Training management

Certain training courses are mandatory in most professional environments. For example, offices require a number of trained first aiders and fire wardens. Such training needs refreshing every three years, so having staff with those competencies in the office requires them to be trained on an ongoing basis.

In more public facing and safety critical roles, ongoing mandatory training in aspects of health and safety is required. Not fulfilling these training obligations leaves firms at risk of staff carrying out their tasks improperly.

Keeping on top of these courses is vital. A central system helps firms to set reminders and book in mandatory courses for their employees. Such a system can also help to keep track of attendance, ensuring that courses have been attended and completed.

Using the same system, organisations can also make their training courses open to their employees for them to book onto when it suits them. This makes your training management more flexible and opens up training opportunities to employees who may find them interesting. By offering the opportunity to expand on their professional interests, training management can help with staff morale and career development.

If you can train and bolster the competencies of your existing workforce, it makes life easier if you need to move staff around tasks to keep project and service delivery on track during times of strain.

Running training courses also incurs an expense. It makes sense to monitor attendances and interest in certain courses, so that you can offer tailored and more relevant courses to your workforce. Where spaces are likely to be free in arranged courses, having robust oversight of this enables you to open course registration within your organisation, or even sell spaces to other industry firms, the employees of which also need to attend such a course.

Competency management

Competency management is closely, even inextricably, linked to training management. Where it differs in the first instance is in the recruitment of new employees. If an employee says they have the necessary qualifications to fulfil the role for which you are employing them, competency management is the simple act of ensuring that they are indeed appropriately qualified.

For example, if you’re employing someone to do a driving job, it’s prudent to check that they have a driving licence. Where competency management would link with training management in such a scenario would be if you need that employee to further their driving credentials at a point in the future. So, for example, you may need to enhance their competency and send them on an advanced driving course.

Ongoing training plays a crucial role in competency management, too. As mentioned above, in many industries ongoing training is mandatory. This keeps your workforce competent for the tasks that you need it to be competent for.

Where competency management extends this is by linking to performance. If a certain employee is involved in a certain number of similar incidents, it can be a good idea to try and find out why and assign them to an appropriate training course. This means that you are taking reasonable steps to provision for both employee and customer safety, whilst also keeping your services running smoothly.

Assessing staff competencies on an ongoing basis, therefore, is crucial. In the same way that you would schedule an employee, assessors need to be scheduled to staff members and teams to periodically check their work. On the rail network, for example, such assessments take the form of an assessor conducting a ride along with a train driver to check that they are carrying out their job appropriately.

If all is well, this can be logged instantly in a central system. Similarly, if errors are detected, these can be logged instantly, with any follow-up tasks, such as another assessment or the requirement for further training, being actioned straightaway. This helps to ensure that the competencies of your staff are covered, whilst linking directly to your training management for mandatory and remedial courses.

Maintaining a central database of your workforce and its competencies fundamentally helps you to ensure that your have the right people performing the right tasks. A robust competency management framework benefits your scheduling efforts, too, since your administrative teams responsible for scheduling can assign tasks with peace of mind that those employees being rostered are appropriately qualified and/or experienced for the role to which they are being assigned.

Furthermore, a central competency management system feeds into other areas of your organisation. In being able to swiftly and accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce, you can make informed decisions in other areas such as recruitment.

Training management and competency management for your entire organisation

The benefits of having robust training and competency management across your organisation are clear. Fulfilling mandatory ongoing training obligations whilst at the same time opening up opportunities across your workforce to expand upon their competencies is hugely beneficial.

Keeping staff competent is one thing but offering career progression boosts morale and helps to keep staff working for your organisation rather than having to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Ultimately, your workforce is your point of project and service delivery. Maintaining and understanding the array of skills and experiences drives effective and efficient delivery. Plugging this into other areas of your business, such as scheduling, enables your organisation to be agile in the face of short-term changes and responsive in remedying medium and longer term issues which are more easily identified with a bird’s eye view of your workforce.

Getting your training and competency management frameworks to dovetail will help drive understanding of your workforce, which in turn will help effective and efficient deployment to projects and services.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

Deploying modern technology systems is vital for the growth and prosperity of any modern business. They help to drive efficiency and create transparency, underpinning business growth and operations. Making reporting easy and having a holistic view of your organisation identifies areas of strength and weakness. Deciding on a technology provider, however, is almost the easy part. What happens once the contracts are signed and the technology is implemented?

Post-implementation is the most important step in any relationship. Things change, so keeping pace with that change is vital. There will be staff turnover, new business rules, external pressures and changing targets over time. To meet this challenge, it is vital that your technology can adapt and evolve to suit your changing needs.

A technology partnership

The implementation of a technology solution into your business never really stands still. Once it is adopted, getting the most from your investment is essential. Too often technology is decided on, purchased, implemented and then just left to drift as the initial excitement cedes to apathy. The way to avoid this is to have a longer-term plan that goes beyond just getting the technology live.

How will your teams utilise the technology? What will they gain from it? This is why viewing your technology provider as a partner is so important. Considering how the partnership will play out in future should be part of your roadmap. From implementation to training to ongoing support, it’s a partnership that needs to adapt and evolve over time.

Change is inevitable in any business. Your needs and requirements will shift over time, meaning that your technology infrastructure will need to be agile to your demands. Working with a technology partner that understands your business helps to facilitate the evolution of a solution.

Interoperability

Aspects such as interoperability also need to be considered. A ring fenced or unopen software solution will be unable to work with other systems that you currently use. Perhaps more pertinently, it will be unable to work with other systems that you may wish to use in the future. By working with open architecture solutions, you can get your technology solutions to work with one another to deliver a holistic solution to your requirements.

This has the added element of creating efficiency. Where systems can interact and work together, it reduces manual efforts in aspects such as reporting, since data can be gathered seamlessly from multiple sources.

Again, making a technology provider a partner means that you can develop a future roadmap of implementations with them. They can also provide help and support in developing links between their software and others that you would like to include in your technology ecosystem.

FUSION

A clear roadmap towards success helps both parties and all individuals involved in understanding what they need to input to a project such as implementing new technology. At CACI, we developed our FUSION delivery methodology to help not only your team in successfully delivering a project, but also ours in getting to understand your bespoke needs and how we can deliver a solution tailored to them.

This helps to keeps minds focussed and provide an evidence trail of desired outcomes. Post-implementation, we understand that business needs evolve. It’s therefore vital that we provide ongoing assistance to keep your investment in our technology relevant to deliver a return on it.

Ongoing assistance scheme

As part of our partnership with you, CACI deploys an ongoing assistance scheme (OAS) to book in and guarantee time between our team and yours. This helps to support ongoing development of your deployment of our software. It is also useful for completing ad hoc tasks and can cover knowledge gaps at points such as staff turnover. Our team can step in to fulfil roles, for example setting up and establishing reports, helping to take the strain off certain tasks.

The OAS days work really well for us in our ongoing use and development of Cygnum. It guarantees us time with CACI to focus on enhancing how we utilise the system. The consistency of the support makes it very easy to plan around and our point of contact, Odette, is really knowledgeable on both Cygnum and our operational needs, so it’s something that’s really beneficial for us. Odette feels like an extension of our team within CACI – we have a great relationship and it adds value to how we use Cygnum.” Norfolk First Response, Norfolk County Council

Our OAS days are designed to be flexible in terms of delivery and scope. Being booked in advance, they are offered at a discounted rate. Block booking them upfront also means that the procurement process is negated. When you need support, our team is on hand.

Using OAS days to scope future requirements is a vital step towards our customers continuing to get the most from our technology. In effect, our team members become part of your team, understanding your bespoke requirements and mapping out how we can support them.

Not only does this deliver ongoing customer success with our technology, it also aligns our strategy to yours. With a more intimate knowledge and understanding of how your business works and what your team needs to achieve, CACI can be a proactive partner.

Modern technology sits at the heart of any business. Selecting a technology provider is one thing, understanding how they can partner with you is another. Investing in technology is an expensive process, in terms of price, but also time. Getting the most from that investment will determine the success or otherwise of it. Partnering with the right provider is fundamental to realising the objectives your business needs.

For more info on Cygnum, please visit https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Scheduling in prisons is vital across the entire infrastructure. Scheduling officers to rotas, scheduling inmates to activities and then monitoring and reporting on all activities opens a whole new level of insight. At present, much of the scheduling in the UK prison system is a box ticking exercise based on availability. But what if it could be more than that?

Assigning staff and inmates to jobs and activities is only one side of the coin. The other is data analysis and understanding. Has the best use of an officer’s skills and experience been made? Are prisoners involved in suitable activities? What are the outcomes of the decisions made?

This blog takes a closer look at the benefits of scheduling staff and prisoners across the prison system. How can having a central system, offering a bird’s eye view of the entire network, work to the benefit of the system? How can it underpin an improvement in outcomes for everyone?

Prison officers

Fundamental to the running of any prison are the staff who work there. Understanding the skills and experience of the prison officer workforce is the first step. Having a holistic view of the officers in a single prison, as well as the wider prison network, instantly provides a view of the entire workforce.

Being able to factor in the skills and experience of a prison officer instantly means that schedulers and administrative staff can assign tasks not only quickly, but more appropriately. Randomly assigning officers to tasks within a prison fails to best utilise their skills and experiences. Different prisoner profiles require different approaches. Considering an officer’s preferences when assigning them to jobs is likely to improve morale, too. If an officer has worked closely with certain profiles, e.g. offenders struggling with substance abuse, and has experienced success in that area, it makes sense to utilise those skills and that experience appropriately.

According to statistics from Statista, the number of prison officers working in England and Wales has fallen by 3,000 since 2010. This means that it is crucial that prison officers are appropriately assigned to role. Guesswork leads to mistakes and disillusionment.

It is also an issue which the Ministry of Justice is acutely aware of. In its December 2021 white paper, Prisons Strategy White Paper, the MoJ outlines its intention to boost prison officer numbers by some 5000 by the mid-2020s. Retention is another key aspect of the MoJ’s staffing intentions, to tackle a leaving rate of 11.1% in the year preceding 30 September 2021. “Enhancing professional skills: improved training, supervision and qualifications,” is central to this.

Technology can help. Not only can it instantly match skills and experience to available roles, it can also inform the training needs of the prison guards, thereby enhancing professional skills. Mandatory ongoing training is a prerequisite, but what about expanding training management efforts to open new skills and experiences to the workforce? This has the twin advantages of increasing the skills available across the prison, whilst also offering career enhancing opportunities to staff. A deeper pool of resources across your existing workforce is useful in times of strain, something we’ve seen during the Covid pandemic.

This also ties in with creating a broader understanding of the prison population. The population is transient by nature in certain prisons. Having oversight of the profile of prisoner in the facility enables better provision of resources to their needs. For example, matching prison officers with experience of dealing with and helping inmates with substance addiction.

Prison inmates

As the focus of any prison, understanding the needs of each prisoner helps to improve outcomes for them during their sentence. What makes for a good outcome? Hopefully a successful rehabilitation of the offender. Reoffending costs some £18bn.

Management and scheduling of prison activities is central to their success. The need for demand modelling is also clear. What profile of prisoner is in the prison at a given moment, and what courses and activities are required and how will spaces be allocated? The management of this can be complex. There are staffing resources, rooms and equipment to be factored in. Activities can clash, so what’s the order of priority for a prisoner? Managing waiting lists for activities is another consideration. Then there’s scheduling prisoners, where applicable, to tasks within the prison. You need to consider the jobs they need to carry out, as well as their activities.

All of this requires careful assessment and management. Prison staff resources must be allocated to the necessary background checks and assessments. Then those staff need allocating to the activities as appropriate.

Where this can be further complicated is the need to factor in a prisoner’s attendance at court. Prisoners need to attend their relevant hearings, and, in some cases, they must be escorted to and from court by prison staff. Understanding the impact of having staff off site for such visits must also be factored into the overarching prison schedule.

Prisons must also consider external visitors. From those delivering training courses to lawyers visiting inmates, all activities and their participants need to be carefully monitored and provisioned for. Each prison has its own interpretation of the rules around visits, so a degree of flexibility is required. There is also a need to communicate visiting hours with friends and relatives who wish to visit inmates.

Key ways to improve scheduling ofprison officers

Scheduling within prisons is a complex affair. There are several moving parts and resources can be strained. Having a system in place to provide a holistic view of activities, staff and prisoners can significantly help.

Understanding the skills and experience of your staff, then matching that to the needs and profile of your prisoners can help to drive improved outcomes for all parties. Leaving this to guesswork and random scheduling based solely on availability fails to make the best and most efficient use of available resources.

A central system enables schedulers and administrative staff to instantly account for each scenario. This removes the guesswork from scheduling and auto-matches the supply of staff and their skills and experiences, to the demands of the prison population.

It also facilitates effective reporting on activities, the prison population and demand forecasting going forward. Rather than being reactive to changes and scheduling, it facilitates a proactive outlook based around supply and demand.

Automation of scheduling in certain circumstances also frees up time to focus on planning. In an environment where time is so often at a premium, this can deliver tangible benefits to the training, activities and management of a prison.

The focus, however, is always on outcomes. Improving outcomes for staff and inmates alike results in a more efficient – and more effective – prison.

For more information on how Cygnum can underpin your workforce, planning and training requirements, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

What happens when a child is excluded from school? How is their educational journey completed? What can schools, parents and professionals involved with children in education do to intervene sooner, to help prevent exclusions? What is the profile of children excluded from school? Can we do more to support groups who are more likely to face exclusion?

Schools play a vital support role in the lives of children and young people, a role brought sharply into focus by the Covid pandemic. Bringing data together, we can join the dots in each student’s journey, linking their education to their circumstances to help improve their outcomes. For more context on the statistics provided in this blog, please take a look at our related white paper, which you can download for free.

Disadvantaging the disadvantaged

When we take a closer look at the numbers behind school exclusions, it becomes clear that children already born into disadvantaged circumstances are further disadvantaged by the education system. Children from the 10% most deprived areas of the UK are more than twice as likely to experience exclusion from school as other children (7.1% of these children experiences exclusion, compared to 3.4% from elsewhere). This extends beyond those areas, too. In 2017/18, 13.65% of children eligible for free school meals were excluded from school.

It’s a clear pattern. These children, too, are far more likely to be identified with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). 25% of children with identified SEND are also eligible for free school meals. The link between their circumstances and their education is obvious. If you’re from a deprived background, you’re far more likely to be identified with SEND and far more likely to be excluded from school. The already disadvantaged face a greater uphill battle than their peers.

In 2019, some 78,150 children were looked after in England. Alarmingly, that number has risen 28% over the previous decade. 56,160 were officially placed with foster families. When factoring in children living with relatives, e.g. grandparents, this number rises to much closer to 200,000.

How can education help?

Besides the obvious point around providing stability, structure, relationships and food, the role of schools requires careful consideration when it comes to supporting vulnerable members of society. The school admissions process can be haphazard and manual, with children missing spots at their preferred, often their most convenient, schools.

Failure to identify a child’s circumstances can lead to missed opportunities which carry knock on effects into a young person’s life. It’s a topic we’ve explored through Lara’s Story, which you can watch here:

Walk in their shoes – Lara’s story

Joining the dots

By creating a complete, holistic record of every child and young person, authorities and schools can join the dots in each story. Understanding this story is fundamental to improving outcomes. Where c.50,000 children are missing education across the UK, how can we identify them, those that have fallen through the gaps?

This is also in the realms of youth justice, since there are c.50,000 children involved in county lines gang activities. The similarity in those numbers cannot be coincidental.

We can easily identify, via basic data analysis, where the children who fall through the gaps are most likely to be. By extending our analysis, by painting a complete picture, we can begin to make appropriate provisions and improve outcomes for these young people.

As we can see in Lara’s Story, often innocent judgements can have severe consequences for young people and their families. As we approach a cost of living crisis, with rising energy bills and rising inflation, many families will feel the pinch. Little things like paying for the bus can quickly become unaffordable. The compound affect of this is material to a young person’s life.

Simply linking circumstances to a child’s education drives understanding. This understanding can be used to improve outcomes. And it can be done simply, too, via a central, accessible record. Where schools, parents and professionals can record and share information, joining the dots is made easy. You can then start to join several dots, creating rich data insight to inform future practices and roadmaps, understanding the best way to handle young people in specific circumstances.

Data informed practice extends from education through youth justice. Improving outcomes for young people is the combined target.

You can read our whitepaper, Joining the dots: The power of technology systems to transform outcomes for vulnerable children and young people here.

The farming landscape is one of the most heavily scrutinised industries in the UK. Regulatory bodies inspect how farms protect, enhance and preserve the environment, control diseases and pests in animals and plants, protect trees and woodland and control subsidies. The landscape is changing, too.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive has recently been announced, set to be rolled out with the addition of standards all the way through to 2025. Farmers will be able to choose as many and whichever standards they like. Better performance against each one, i.e. producing more environmental benefits, will result in higher payment. This is all part of DEFRA’s efforts to invest in the environment, productivity, farmer resilience, plant and tree health and animal welfare.

Initially, in 2022, three standards will be available; two pertaining to soil and moorlands, one to livestock farming. More standards will follow, as outlined in this DEFRA Future Farming blog. To manage these schemes going forward and validate payments, farmers will have to apply for reviews. This means that keeping abreast of inspections will be vital for both farmers and the bodies inspecting them.

These changes do, however, represent an opportunity. Where farmers have received visits from various bodies at various times, there is an opportunity to coordinate the inspection of farms across the disparate bodies that inspect them. This is particularly important when looking at cross compliance and not disproportionally penalising a farmer for non-compliance in one area.

Having a central database of all inspections and their outcomes will facilitate a far more efficient system. Inspections, at present, are siloed into the bodies conducting them. Linking these bodies together and enabling them to review the outcomes of each other’s inspections, will greatly help them and the farmers.

A number of the inspections conducted on farms are similar in nature. Preserving the environment, protecting trees and woodland, for example, are similar elements. Merging the inspections for these, as far as it’s possible to do so, will reduce the need for multiple inspectors to be onsite at a farm. Using trusted data from another body to fulfil part of your own organisation’s inspection mandate is a much more efficient way of conducting the inspections. Less time spent onsite, same result. This will greatly reduce duplication for farmers.

It also makes sense for the inspectors. Farms are big properties that take time to navigate, necessitating sometimes lengthy visits. This reduces the ability of inspectors to conduct multiple inspections in a day. If, however, information can be used from another trusted body, this will help to reduce inspection times and open up the possibility of an inspector carrying out multiple inspections in a working day. This will help to facilitate inspections of more farms in the same time frame.

Correct use of technology systems can also help to schedule inspections more efficiently. If an inspector is in a particular area, for example, it makes sense to schedule them in and around that locality to reduce dead time spent travelling.

Marrying the capture of inspection outcomes to more rules-based scheduling of the inspection activity will help inspectors and farmers alike. Reducing the amount of duplication makes life easier for all parties.

Automation is another facet of scheduling and inspections that modern technology can bring to farming and associated inspections. Being able to automatically schedule an inspection and notify the farm reduces the need for manual interventions by staff responsible for arranging inspections. This feeds into follow-up tasks, too.

Where an inspection identifies an area for improvement or re-inspection, these follow-up tasks can be automatically created at the point of them being recorded. This leaves scheduling staff with more time to focus on exceptions.

Technology allows the scheduling of an inspector to be decided on fairly using a myriad of factors. For example, geographical proximity to a farm, or inspections being conducted nearby to other farms with similar needs, or the skills, specialisms, continuity and availability of the inspector.

Technology can also enable inspectors to capture their outcomes in real-time. By equipping inspectors with handheld devices, results can be entered through mobile forms and stored immediately, rather than having to spend additional time writing up the entire visit later. This means that reporting on and understanding an inspection, and any associated follow-up tasks, can be done instantly. Farmers will benefit as this can also speed up the post inspection processes and payment processing.

If outcomes from a different inspection can be factored in, too, these can be included in any report, instantly saving time.

The layers of complexity in the process of conducting farm inspections in the UK can be greatly eased by the correct deployment of technology. A single system enables inspectors to view their schedules and make their reports, whilst at the same time notifying farmers about upcoming inspections and the results of previous ones.

This efficiency will alleviate much of the duplication currently experienced by UK farmers.  It will also make the changing regulatory landscape easier to navigate for everyone. A single, transparent source of truth will work to the benefit of everyone.

The notion of a single system and a single point of regulatory contact is an issue that we explored in our previous blog, Why England’s farmer inspectors are launching a war on duplication, which you can read here.

Your business rules, your scheduling

Everything can be completed within the boundaries of your business rules. Each organisation has its own unique ways of working, so catering for these on a case-by-case basis is vital. This can also be true of individual departments within an organisation. For example, many contracts reward staff for longer service with the provision of extra annual leave. Holidays need to be factored in, as do the rules around when a certain number of employees can be off at any given moment.

Factoring in overtime and how that’s dealt with, in terms of overrunning projects, compensation and the impact it has on future shifts, also requires careful consideration. Considering these elements in an automated fashion facilitates not only swift decision making, but also fair and consistent decision making.

External and internal regulations also need to be factored into your scheduling process. Aspects such as fatigue management can easily get overlooked when there’s pressure on to finish projects and tasks, but ignoring them can be costly.

Renown Consultants Limited was fined £450,000 with £300,000 in costs in 2020 after being convicted under the Health and Safety at Work Act. The company had failed to ensure that two of its workers were sufficiently rested to travel home after a shift in 2013. The two employees were driving from Stevenage to Doncaster after a nightshift when the driver fell asleep, resulting in a collision which was fatal to both passengers.

Travel times to and from shifts that require safety intensive work to be conducted must be factored in. Clearly, travelling from Stevenage to Doncaster is a lengthy journey – 133 miles. Again, a robust scheduling solution can help factor in aspects such as distances and potential travel times. This can help to avoid unnecessary journeys and deploy staff more intelligently based upon their location.

This also helps in plotting out schedules for staff such as district nurses. In conducting care visits, it makes sense to reduce travel times between tasks, helping to improve efficiency and complete more visits in a single shift.

Be agile in the face of change

Navigating a global pandemic has been challenging for all and sundry. With various periods of lockdown, mandatory self-isolation and people contracting Covid-19, assigning tasks and keeping services running has been a case of swimming against the tide at times.

There have been cases at airports where entire security and baggage handling teams have been taken out, and Northern Rail had to cancel services when too many staff members were forced into isolation. These have been exceptional times, but it is possible to navigate them effectively.

With a single view of the workforce, it makes it easier to manoeuvre people and keep services running. If the worst does happen, it at least facilitates swift decision making and clear communications with end users of your services. Without a central view and the help of automation, scheduling in times of stress is time intensive and manual at best; guesswork at worst.

Plug your scheduling into your wider organisation

Scheduling is vital for every company. In managing a large workforce, it is even more important, especially where vital infrastructure and healthcare services are concerned. Having robust oversight of your scheduling links closely to your efforts to deliver services and projects, recruit new staff, train existing employees and keep on top of your competency management.

It also helps in monitoring and reporting on objectives and outcomes. If projects have overrun or performed well, having a holistic view of who managed and worked on them is vital in garnering understanding that can inform future tasks.

Fundamentally, however, scheduling is central to the very core activities of any business. Leaving it to chance, guesswork and human error is a risky process. The tools exist to enhance your scheduling, by equipping your administrative teams with the tools to help them make swift, informed and effective decisions. Without the need to manually trawl through records, it leaves them free to focus on exceptions and improvements, in turn helping to move your organisation forward.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

The ability to work from home, or work remotely, has been brought sharply into focus by the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19). Most firms across the UK have been forced to shut their offices and instruct their workforce to operate from home following a government lockdown put in place to reduce the spread of the virus. So, how are you and your workforce coping with the requirement to work remotely?

The answer to that question lies in the quality of your technology infrastructure. Equipping everyone with laptops and smartphones is merely a start. How does your back-end technology function? Perhaps alarmingly give the situation in which we find ourselves, in a recent survey we conducted with Surveys in Public Sector, we found that 57% of organisations are still relying heavily on paper-based and spreadsheet methods of managing their workforce.

The pitfalls of such reliance are obvious and will become glaringly so to the 57% of organisations in that bracket during the onset of COVID-19. Not only are such methods time consuming, they often result in a lack of integration across a business, with no single source of truth. There is then the problem of Chinese whispers occurring, with misinformation, inconsistent data keying and a lack of efficiency across the entire process. With all the moving parts based in different locations, this will prove incredibly difficult to manage for some firms.

We also see in the report that organisations are already struggling to plan and manage their mobile workforce without the addition of a global pandemic, with 76% saying that they find the task difficult. Again, this is a scenario that will be exasperated by forcing even more of the workforce into a mobile situation. If it’s difficult to manage tasks during periods of normality, the stress scenario posed by COVID-19 will multiply this.

This seems to be something that most organisations are aware of, too. Responding to the question; What to do you believe are the biggest benefits when digitising resource management for your organisation?  68% replied, increasing flexibility and scalability of resources, whilst 67% replied, enable more efficient mobile or remote working.

What this shows us is that organisations have been aware of the need for change. That change isn’t just about technology, either, but about working culture, too. This has been slowly happening with advancements in technology, with laptops, smartphones and broadband making it possible to be connected 24/7.

Now that we find ourselves in the unusual position that COVID-19 has thrown up, aligning available technology with a short to medium-term culture shift is the key to business continuity.

Since flexibility sits at the heart of the process, workforce management software is designed to be just that, which means it isn’t too late to implement new software in your organisation. It has never been more important to rely on a mobile workforce and to effectively and efficiently manage them. Are you ready?

For our full report, The Future of Mobile Working in the Public Sector, please visit: https://pages.caci.co.uk/future-mobile-working.html

Our recent blog titled How much does it cost your business to replace a field sales rep highlighted the cost can be as much as €103,655 ($115,000). Once you’ve found the right person for the job, you will want to maximise your chances of retaining them.

Reps move on for several reasons, but the decisions you make when deciding where to recruit, how you adjust your territories to accommodate that recruit, and your approach to route optimisation will have an impact on staff retention.

The Impact of Recruiting in the Wrong Location

So, you’ve finally found the perfect field sales rep who has all the credentials you want but they live off patch. What would you do? Employ them? Or take a step back and consider the potential impact on their longevity, other reps, and ultimately the success of your business?

I often hear people say ‘I want the best person with the best skill set for the job’ which is of course critical to success, but recruiting a good candidate in the best location can be more effective than recruiting the best candidate in a poor location, especially if you want to retain talent.

If you decide to recruit off patch your new rep will have to spend more time driving on to their territory every day which, whilst tolerable at first, will quickly become frustrating and stressful. They might say “it’ll be fine, I’ll handle it”, but in our experience, it seldom is. Depending on your approach to commuting (let’s not open the can of worms right now on whether the drive to first visit, and home from last visit should be viewed as falling inside or outside working hours), this could mean they have little choice than to work longer hours than their peers. Call rates will inevitably suffer resulting in lost opportunities and lower sales, not to mention morale.

Over time, poorly sited recruits will cumulatively give you a headache. When several people live in the wrong place you can’t change the territories to suit the needs of the business. You are locked in a situation where you want to make change to be more efficient, but your hands are tied and you find yourself giving people too much, or too little work because there’s no other way of cutting it. It doesn’t need to be that way. Recruiting in the ideal location, or close to that ideal location can lead to sales reps having to commute 43% less than if you recruit them in the wrong location.

Do You Really Need an Extra Head?

Reassessing whether you have a drive time efficient, balanced territory structure could mean you don’t have to recruit at all. The next time you have a vacancy, it’s worth considering if recruiting a replacement is necessary. It often isn’t! Instead, take the time to review your customer base and team workloads, and crucially include a robust measure of the time reps spend behind the wheel, which is often described as the hidden workload of a sales rep. This will confirm the size of the field sales team needed before you assume you need to recruit again. Efficiency often means being able to cover more work with the same headcount and makes recruitment unnecessary.

Optimising an ideal territory scenario that is driven by where your customers are located, rather than where your staff live, can be hugely insightful and bring to light a much more cost-effective field deployment that highlights the true gaps in your field sales network.

What’s the Impact of an Imbalanced Territory Structure?

When we run data on current team deployments through our application, InSite FieldForce, we see that the average territory workload imbalance is 18%. This is the equivalent to a rep trying to fit 6 days’ worth of work into 5, which leads to the new rep having to work longer hours to achieve the KPI’s set, confounded by frustrated customers who haven’t received a visit due to the territory previously being vacant.

The biggest cause of stress at work, according to this LinkedIn survey is workload and a poor work-life balance which is a concern for more and more companies. Territory and route optimisation will help ensure corporate goals of hitting a certain number of visits per day, and personal goals of leaving and getting home at a reasonable hour, can both be achieved. CACI has investigated the effects of work-life balance and how it can affect a field sales team. If you’d like more information, click here to download our white paper.

What you need is for all your reps to be working the same hours and living on patch. Our experience tells us that that this goal is rarely achieved without leveraging an optimisation tool coupled with a solid process of change management.

Optimised Call Schedules Will Help a New Field Sales Rep Hit the Ground Running

Giving a new rep an optimised call schedule for the next call cycle will help them hit the ground running and helps ensure that your route to market strategy is delivered, and the rep maximises every opportunity.

Imagine you’re a new rep and you have been given the task of building a journey plan for the next call cycle. You must consider visit locations, call frequency, drive time, decision maker availability, and a whole lot more. Even an experienced field sales rep will never be able to achieve an optimal sequence of calls on their own – despite their insistence that they ‘know their patch’ – and their priority should always be selling. You need to ensure your reps are driving less and selling more. CACI’s route optimisation software CallSmart can reduce driving time by as much as 22% in a fraction of the time it takes a rep to do manually.

If you want to hear more about how CACI’s field force optimisation software & expertise can help your company retain field sales talent, get in touch now.