Cinareo
Cinareo is a cloud-based capacity- and resource-planning platform for contact center operations, focused on staffing, budgeting, and resource allocation across short-to-long planning horizons. It is positioned as a complement to existing WFM platforms rather than a replacement, sitting in the strategic / long-range planning layer for workforce management.[1]
Overview
Cinareo Solutions Inc. is a Toronto-based company, founded in late 2022 and co-founded by Karen Elliott (CEO) and Dr. Mark Alpern (COO), a contact center practitioner with several decades of operating experience.[2] The platform supports capacity planning from roughly one week to three years ahead, spanning the gap between operational scheduling and multi-year strategic planning, and reports adoption across financial services, healthcare, BPO, and telecommunications.[1] Cinareo won the 2023 SheBoot competition grand prize, became a premium application in the Genesys AppFoundry in 2024, and raised US$1 million in pre-seed funding in January 2025 (led by BDC's Seed Venture Fund).[2]
Capabilities
Reported capabilities include:
- Capacity planning across a one-week to three-year horizon, including multi-location planning across physical and virtual sites.
- Scenario modeling with rapid iteration for comparing staffing and budget options.
- Erlang X calculation — an Erlang X calculator that accounts for customer abandonment and retry (retrial) behaviour, rather than the abandonment-blind Erlang C.
- Multi-skilling — balancing workloads across channels and skill sets.
- Recruitment and training planning — anticipating attrition and sizing hiring and training pipelines.
- Financial planning — budget-requirement modeling and cost analysis tied to the staffing plan.
Positioning
Cinareo targets the strategic and resource-planning needs of labor-intensive service operations, and explicitly markets itself as complementary to operational WFM tools — handling the longer-horizon capacity, hiring, and budget questions while leaving real-time scheduling and intraday management to the WFM suite. Its inclusion of an Erlang X engine places its staffing math in the abandonment- and retrial-aware family of queueing models. For the broader category and alternatives, see Strategic Workforce Planning.
See also
- Strategic Workforce Planning
- RealNumbers
- Anaplan
- Erlang X
- Capacity Planning Methods
- Long-Range Forecasting
