Logile Archives

Frank Reynolds, Sales, UK
Steve Bevan, Business Development, UK

Highly proficient workforce management (WFM) software remains the cornerstone of efficient and effective retail organizations. Modern businesses cannot function without flexible and integrated technology that intelligently helps manage the complexities of planning, modeling and optimizing your workforce.

Simplify your present, secure your future

Choosing the right solution partner is imperative to your commercial success, and building a relationship with the right provider is pivotal in ensuring your sustained competitive advantage.

A wide functional range of fully integrated modules removes the burden of having to rely upon multiple vendors. This provides you with the ability to manage processes, reporting and analysis in one system and enables you to make strategic decisions quickly and confidently, improving your ability to react to the challenges of the modern retail environment.

This article examines key considerations in one platform for workload planning, workforce management and store execution. Highlights include the benefits of effective labor planning, WFM lifecycle touchpoints, AI and machine learning forecasting to continually and automatically improve accuracy, and ultimately building a far more successful customer/provider relationship.

10 factors that help optimize performance:

wp:list {“ordered”:true,”type”:”1″} –>

Accurate standards and processes
Automated and intuitive forecasting
Machine learning and AI to optimize business outcomes
Working plans that match requirements
Task management
Comprehensive employee and management engagement tools
Integrated time and attendance
Performance analysis
Integration with third parties and working alongside existing systems
Customer/provider relationship

Accurate standards and processes

Industrial engineering standards and operational excellence play a critical role in a retailer’s success. In an industry characterized by intricate supply chains, diverse product assortments and evolving consumer demands, adhering to and maintaining precise industrial engineering standards ensures that resources are optimally allocated, processes are efficient, and costs are minimized. This, in turn, enables retailers to provide better value to their customers through competitive pricing and superior product availability.

While every effort is made to manage and adapt standards in line with the current environment, the systems available and the in-built complexity can mean that the engineering standards that underpin a retail business can be out of date and subsequently have a significant impact on the downstream accuracy of your processes.

For streamlined performance and synergistic results, partner with a provider that 1) can deliver the necessary WFM software to improve your business processes and address evolving industry challenges and 2) has the in-house engineering standards expertise and experience to ensure that all aspects of the labor management process can be modeled and optimized.

Automated and intuitive forecasting

All too often, the solutions and processes relied upon by retailers to understand and forecast their future labor requirements are focused on back-office functionality and requirements and do not reflect the day-to-day issues faced by frontline managers and the flexibility they require.

While labor forecasts generated by core teams strive for highest-possible accuracy, external factors continue to place pressure on the ability to produce correct and reliable predictions. Ongoing and understood issues such as seasonality, employee turnover and data quality can be reasonably factored in, but other less predictable events, employee availability, changing customer behavior, competition etc. can cause major issues when trying to accurately predict labor demand.

Using a proven solution that automates the creation of labor plans using state-of-the-art AI and machine learning and that delivers impeccable accuracy at the day level means that your business can focus on delivering other value-added operations.

Machine learning and AI to optimize business outcomes

AI and machine learning have revolutionized schedule creation by providing data-driven and efficient solutions. These technologies analyze historical sales data, footfall patterns, employee performance metrics and more to generate optimized work schedules.

This automation not only saves time but also enhances overall workforce management and productivity in the dynamic world of retail. However, the way AI is utilized is different for every system.

Different technology providers vary in their approaches to the use of AI. The more robust vendors not only use open-source AI algorithms but additionally develop their own. These algorithms are then used to optimize labor forecasts as well as schedules. Based on real data, the solution automatically selects the most appropriate algorithm to match the demand required by a specific business. This not only improves accuracy – with systems capable of 97% forecast accuracy at the day level – but also reduces workload and cost.

Working plans that match requirements

One of the most difficult things to manage in any business is balancing the availability of your workforce with the specific demands that need to be managed on a day-to-day basis.

A retailer’s focus on creating and managing schedules purely based on the requirements of the business can have a significant impact on their workforce. Indeed, a recent McKinsey & Company study illustrated how employees placed a higher importance on flexibility and control over their working patterns than how much they were paid.

The outcomes and impacts of a scheduling process that manages the business requirements but does not incorporate ample consideration for the employee can be quite significant and far-reaching:

Work-life balance: When employees are unable to balance their work responsibilities with their personal lives, it can lead to stress, burnout and feelings of being overwhelmed.
Predictability: Ad hoc schedules or frequent changes in working hours can make it difficult for employees to plan their lives outside of work.
Job security: Employees who have irregular or inconsistent working patterns and schedules may feel insecure about their jobs.
Health and well-being: Inflexible schedules may prevent employees from taking adequate breaks, getting enough sleep or maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Teamwork and collaboration: When employees have varying working hours, it can be challenging to coordinate teamwork and collaboration.
Professional development: Changing schedules can also impede employees’ ability to participate in training, workshops or educational opportunities that could enhance their skills and career prospects.
Work engagement: Employees who feel their working schedules are inflexible or disorganized may become disengaged from their work. This can lead to absenteeism and turnover.
Retention and turnover: Inflexible and ad hoc working patterns can result in higher turnover rates as employees seek more accommodating opportunities elsewhere.
Communication and feedback: Inconsistent working hours can make it difficult for managers to provide timely feedback and support to their employees.
Perceived fairness: If employees perceive that working schedules are assigned unfairly or that some employees receive preferential treatment, it can erode trust within the organization.

Leveraging an automated, intelligent scheduling solution that enables you to create employee working patterns and schedules that are flexible to reflect both employee and business needs while also being accurate, prompt, compliant and reliable can have significant positive outcomes on employee satisfaction, decreased churn and overall reduced costs.

Task management

In a highly competitive market, retailers that prioritize task management gain a significant advantage in delivering a seamless and satisfying shopping experience to their customers.

From a workforce management perspective, retailers can sometimes focus too much of their effort on labor planning and scheduling, with the systems and processes that manage the “what and when” being somewhat neglected. Solutions that are used to deliver this functionality can be unintuitive and difficult for employees and managers to interact with, leading to a lack of adoption and employee engagement.

The other significant failing of systems that manage tasks is their standalone nature. Their inability to provide complete integration with a scheduling solution means that corners can be cut, and processes are not managed with as much detail as required.

Benefit from a complete and integrated workforce management platform that extends to delivering comprehensive, user-friendly task management. This integrated facility means that your managers access both scheduling and task-based requirements in one system, giving you real-time control of day-to-day issues, improved adoption and ultimately reduced cost.

Comprehensive employee and management engagement tools

Every day, people around the globe are accustomed to using technology to gain immediate access to information on any subject quickly and easily. It is therefore sometimes frustrating that this same level of accessibility is not available when it comes to information and resources that are needed as part of an employee’s work life.

A recent study conducted by Retail Week in conjunction with Logile highlighted a number of common issues faced by retail employees in the UK. The feedback from this survey identified that 29% of employees found that communication from the business was ineffective, 14% found it difficult to keep up with the digital transformations taking place in their business, and 19% felt anxiety about these changes.

While technology alone cannot alleviate 100% of the issues faced by retailers, it is imperative to empower the connected worker and provide both your business and your employees with the right tools as well as access to information, guidance and resources that make their daily work lives easier. A proper communication and rollout strategy combined with real-time, mobile, transparent solutions to view and manage work messages, schedules, availability and tasks, make requests, consult resources and more, set an essential foundation to operational success, employee engagement and retention.

Integrated time and attendance

One of the most everyday yet under-managed issues faced by businesses of all shapes and sizes is payroll accuracy. All too often the systems and processes used to manage employee working hours create exceptions that must be managed by both front- and back-office users and have a significant and negative impact on the working morale of your employees. Indeed, the frustrations that employees have with the accuracy of their pay packet is one of the main reasons that they look for alternative employment.

This impact is felt even more acutely in the retail sector with a higher turnover of employees in general, much more complex working patterns and numerous contractual agreements.

For this reason, integrated workforce management systems are more important than ever. While a retailer can have the most well managed and accurate schedules, this will not eliminate the requirement for an accurate and functional time and attendance system. Incorporate an integrated time and attendance solution which links seamlessly with your automated scheduling module and links with third-party payroll systems to give you the control, confidence and accuracy that modern forward-thinking retailers demand.

Performance analysis

In the retail industry, access to key performance indicators (KPIs), dashboards and visual representations of data is paramount. These tools provide invaluable insights into sales trends, inventory management, customer behavior and overall business performance. With real-time access to KPIs and intuitive dashboards, retail businesses can make informed decisions swiftly, adapt to market fluctuations and optimize their operations. Visual representations of data simplify complex information, making it easier for teams at all levels to quickly grasp critical insights.

This data-driven approach not only enhances strategic planning but also enables retailers to deliver a more tailored and satisfying customer experience. In today’s competitive retail landscape, leveraging KPIs and data visualization is not just advantageous – it’s a necessity for staying agile, responsive and successful.

Industry-leading reporting capabilities within an integrated system allow you to analyze forecasting, scheduling and their execution quickly, easily and visually, and reinvest that data in the planning/modeling and WFM optimization process. Integrated modules eliminate the requirement for data to be exported to other systems for modeling purposes. Providing access to this integrated information allows retailers to identify problems, respond quickly and ultimately mitigate issues which impact profitability.

Integration with third parties and working alongside existing systems

In the modern retail world, a multitude of specialized tools and software systems are used for various functions like inventory management, point of sale, e-commerce, customer relationship management and analytics. Integrating these disparate systems with any new workforce management solution is essential for creating a seamless and efficient retail ecosystem.

Successful integration delivers operational efficiency, enhances the customer experience, and empowers retailers to make data-driven decisions, making it a critical component of any retail software implementation strategy.

For the best implementation experience, flexibility and versatility, look for a provider whose modules have all been designed to work in conjunction with any existing tools you might have in place.

Customer/provider relationship

The number one reason that customers look to change solution providers is in some way, shape or form related to a breakdown in the customer/provider relationship. This can be for numerous reasons but usually relates back to how effective the provider performs in ensuring that the software used by their customer is optimized continually through the lifetime of the product.

This boils down to either issues with solution support or the functionality of the software itself. Effective customer relationship management mitigates both issues by 1) focusing efforts on dealing with support issues quickly and efficiently, and 2) ongoing communication with the customer to understand their changing requirements and how that affects the development cycle for new functionality (standard or bespoke).

While it is commonly known that a happy customer is likely to extend and expand their relationship with their supplier, it is not necessarily something that all solution providers make a priority.

A solution provider led and staffed by individuals who have worked directly for major retailers will be intimately aware of the potential customer relationship failings of software suppliers and can channel that experience into going above and beyond when dealing with customer support issues. They can also identify from firsthand experience functional improvements that can reduce costs and generally make retail life easier for their customers.

In conclusion, optimal performance will depend upon all of the above 10 factors working together in synchronicity as a start. If your organization is encountering WFM challenges, a good solution provider can help in identifying where the weaknesses lie and help you address them. The best experts can help define the best processes required – bespoke to your wider vision and aspirations – to ensure they help strengthen and solidify your future organizational success.

Every company sets their vision and mission statement. Whether the strategy is customer experience, lowest price or differentiated goods and services, it is intended to define the company and how it will operate. Most companies spend a lot of effort defining themselves and outlining how to archive their desired outcomes. All too often, however, these statements and strategies are created without thorough circulation to the entire organization. How many retailers can you walk into and ask an associate for her employer’s mission statement without getting a blank stare?

Why is it important for the entire workforce to know the company’s mission? Isn’t it enough for people to just show up and “do their job”? If the workforce doesn’t know what is most important or how to focus their effort, they can spend a lot of time focusing on non-value-added activities that aren’t as important to the overall company objectives.

I once worked with a retailer who defined a new sales model that focused on customer experience and cross-selling high-margin products. Although employees had been trained on the new model, little attention was given to it. It ended up as another poster in the backroom with a catchy phrase. Upon observing store operations, I noticed associates were focused on helping customers find their product quickly and getting them out the door as fast as possible. From the associates’ perspective, they were doing a great job—customers were promptly buying product and the store wasn’t spending more labor than needed. This was top-of-mind because the company cut labor several times during the past few years. Nonetheless, the associates weren’t supporting the mission of an enhanced customer experience by cross-selling.

As important as it is for company leadership to establish objectives and strategies, it’s even more important for the workforce to be aware of these and take ownership of their installation. Although this retailer provided associate training and backroom posters, the workforce overlooked it as the latest fad. Also, corporate leadership expected associates to spend more time with customers without providing more labor hours to the store—a common gap between leadership’s expectations and associates’ reality.

Imagine how much more impactful this prior strategy would have been if, in addition to training, the retailer modeled the effort required for an enhanced customer experience while providing labor hours to each store. Then, imagine how incentives based on such cross-sales could add even more value. This, of course, is easier said than done or every retailer would get it right the first time. Below are some thoughts on solving this complex issue by answering a couple common questions using the sales program example.

How do you design and implement training programs?
Thoughtful training design considers associates’ needs at each phase during implementation. This process begins with questions like: what are the backgrounds, roles, skill-levels and struggles of the associates? What are the desired outcomes after training? Answering these questions leads to effective training strategy. Let’s consider an example training schedule. Maybe the first phase includes a face-to-face lesson for store managers detailing the “why,” “what” and “how” of the program. Perhaps the second phase kicks off the roll-out to associates. Every store is given access to an e-learning course (with additional labor hours) and an online quiz to measure retention. The third phase could be an in-store training for associates led by store managers to model expectations and review KPIs. The last phase might include a program trial with incentives, evaluations and marketing for all involved.

How do you provide recognition and rewards during and after the program?
Research on human behavior shows that positive feedback can increase the motivation to achieve. This supports using rewards systems in training implementation. To increase associate ownership, leadership can provide opportunities to celebrate associates when they apply their new skills. Examples of recognizing employees must come across as authentic and well-timed. In the sales program model, leadership could offer a tiered reward system based on performance indicators (e.g., customers engaged, coupons distributed, management observations, etc.) for customer experience and cross-selling.

How do you track and evaluate the training during implementation? How do you quantify success at its end?
Evaluating the training gives store managers feedback to course-correct associates during the pilot. At the same time, it offers leadership data to develop better programs in the future. Tracking must be simple to use on-the-fly for store managers and associates. Technology providers offer mobile solutions for task-management and tracking, which can be incorporated to measuring adherence to the trial’s KPIs. Thinking about the sales program, associates could complete daily checklists on mobile devices to update KPIs which are rolled-up by department and store. Program success might be meeting leadership’s KPI goals by the end of the trial.

How do you create an internal and external brand-awareness campaign for the program?
Brand awareness is important for customer-facing programs. If customers are going to be affected, they will benefit from knowing about the new sales program. They might wonder why they are being approached more often by associates with coupons. In this case, maybe the retailer wants its customers to know how valued they are. Sharing this message internally with associates (using training and reinforcement) and externally with customers (using signs, slogans, etc.) unifies the parties involved.

Information is the lifeblood of any retail organization and keeping the flow of mission-critical information fast and healthy is essential. When the cloud phenomenon first took off, the big question among retailers was whether to jump to the cloud or stay on premise, to maintain their existing solutions or invest in new technology. They were faced with a big decision about what could and what couldn’t be moved into the cloud.

On one side of the argument you have a contingent of information technology professionals already reaping the benefits of cloud computing. They assert that the future of information technology is in the cloud – that companies need to get on board by moving their applications to the cloud now. On the other side you have old-school information technology professionals with an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. They rightly point out that these traditional applications are often the backbone of a company’s business and argue that running them on dedicated infrastructure seems to be working just fine. So why tinker with a good thing?

A cloud platform deployment has a lot of advantages:

Convenience and Availability. Customers and employees have anywhere-access to the managed infrastructure, including licensed operating systems and applications. Need to pull a report while on a business trip? No problem – the access to a vast amount of information from multiple sources is at your fingertips.
Lower Operating Costs. The total cost of ownership gives cloud deployment a distinct advantage over the traditional software model. Information technology costs are dramatically reduced as the cloud provider is responsible for the cost of software licenses, technical support and training fees.
High Scalability. With the cloud infrastructure, a process to scale up or down to support seasonal peaks, organizational growth, downsizing, usage patterns and other factors is just a few clicks away. There is always more power and space available without having to own it.
Fast Deployment and Instant Upgradeability. Provisioning new servers is quick and uncomplicated, facilitating faster deployment. With a cloud-based management system, a service provider can automatically push application updates and perform remote management.
Guaranteed Uptime and Disaster Recovery. Most cloud providers are technology behemoths like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. They can provide unparalleled uptime (99.95 percent and above) uptime for mission critical applications. Most cloud providers have disaster recovery policies and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster.
Highly Trained Support. Major cloud and service providers have very experienced staff managing the organization’s servers, typically 24x7x365. They can provide managed cloud support like automation of backups and monitoring, standardization of recovery procedures.
As retailers move to provide access to their customers and employees on mobile platforms, the simplicity of cloud deployment simply trounces the complex on-premise environment with multiple levels of firewalls and passwords to gain access.
Security. This is where technologists simply disagree the most. One side touts on-premise as the bullet-proof method of choice. Others believe cloud is the way to go. Data breaches and system compromises have happened in both environments. Cloud providers have a vested interest in providing a high level of security for their customers. Their livelihood depends on it.

For all its convenience, flexibility and scalability, the cloud platform also comes with some pitfalls:

Security Concerns. Although hosting providers are putting tougher security controls in place, traffic between an organization and the cloud is still across a public internet, and this leaves some organizations skeptical about data security. After all, you are trusting a third party to host your data. This fear is so widespread that many information technology leaders believe that these powerful internet services are a security nightmare.
Cloud solutions require reliable internet access for you to remain productive.
Outages. Hosting provider outages often have repercussions across all customers.
Lack of Industry Standards. Cloud hosting providers do not operate under a uniform code of standards. Their features and service offerings often fluctuate.

Many agree that the benefits of cloud computing outweigh its risks. But should you simply jump into the pool with the others? A careful strategy to re-engineer your applications platform into the cloud could have significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. It may be beneficial to conduct a “Total Cost of Ownership” analysis before making such a strategic decision.

And maybe this kind of binary, all-or-nothing, lift and shift debate does not do justice to the complexity companies face when they weigh cloud adoption. Maybe a middle path that takes a smarter, longer-term view of enterprise cloud adoption and cloud competence is a better approach, and a good software and technology partner should be able to help your company understand and evaluate cloud computing so you can determine whether to incorporate it into your information technology strategy.

Anyone supervising hourly employees would be familiar with “Buddy Punching,” one employee punching in or out on behalf of a co-worker allowing them to arrive late, leave early, or even be absent for a shift while getting paid for that time away from work. There is also an unintentional form of this where an employee accidentally types an incorrect ID that happens to match someone else, causing a missed punch for the person at the timeclock and an errant punch for the matching employee.

Employers can combat these issues in different ways, each having different costs and degrees of success:

Replacing keypresses with assigned badges (or fobs) eliminates unintentional Buddy Punching, and can provide some relief against the intentional kind, particularly when those badges are to be worn as identification and not stored together in a rack near the timeclock. However, in addition to the material cost of a badge management system, supervisors must also deal with forgotten or misplaced badges causing lost productivity.
Entry of a Personal Identification Number (PIN) to authenticate an employee ID is a low-cost approach to help eliminate mistyped ID numbers, but does very little to combat intentional Buddy Punching since complicit employees would be just as willing to share their PINs with each other as they would share their employee IDs or badges.
Biometric authentication ensures the person performing the punch at the timeclock is indeed the person matching the employee or badge ID. By far the most common biometric authentication method uses fingerprint comparison. The employee is asked to place a finger on a sensor which captures a fingerprint then converts it into a digital template to be compared against previously enrolled master templates for that employee. Hand geometry, finger vein patterns, palm vein patterns, and even iris or retinal scans are examples of other biometric formats, each providing different degrees of uniqueness and associated costs. Such systems can be expensive to initially deploy, and maintenance involves enrolling new hires, periodically cleaning the sensor, and handling specific employees whose physiology generates poor templates and/or who individually object to fingerprint capture and storage. In fact, several U.S. states (Illinois, Texas and Washington) have enacted legislation governing commercial use of biometrics, requiring written employee consent as well as imposing strict data security and retention policies upon employers.
Video Surveillance may just be the most cost-effective way to manage intentional Buddy Punching, particularly if the timeclock can be placed in an area that is already covered by existing security equipment. Captured video can be reviewed in specific instances where intentional Buddy Punching is suspected. Generally, cameras cannot be placed where employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and employees must be notified of the surveillance, yet that can be a very strong deterrent just by itself.

Deciding which approach is best for your company depends on many factors, but a reasonable low-cost low-maintenance arrangement could include keypad entry of the employee ID followed by PIN entry to validate that ID, combined with a rather conspicuous warning about video surveillance (real or imaginary) would effectively reduce both unintentional and intentional Buddy Punching.

Why is the WHY so important?

Who, What, Where, When and WHY… the 5 W’s we all learned in grade school. The questions we ask when solving a problem. What the teachers didn’t tell is how important the WHY is.

I know when I was younger, anytime I asked WHY, it was the hardest thing for adults to answer. “Because you have to”, “Because I said so”, “You need to do it or else”, were some of the answers I received. Not fully understanding the power of Why, sometimes I would do what I was asked to and sometimes I decided not to do it to see what would happen. There were times things didn’t go so well and I didn’t know why? What I have learned is how important WHY is.

I have learned over the years that for a project to be successful more focus needs to be put on the WHY. If your company is currently on or thinking about starting a Workforce Management (WFM) journey I urge you to stop and think about the WHY. Not only the WHY regarding taking the journey but the WHY for everyone affected by the journey. Answering the WHY means knowing the end result. Knowing what the goal or target is will be important to obtaining it, but why the goal is set is what connects all the pieces.

Here are 3 C’s that helped me articulate the WHY when executing corporate initiatives.

Communication, Culture, Change Management

Communication of the WHY needs to happen at the start of the journey. It then needs to be communicated throughout the journey with regular re-enforcement. Two-way and bottom up communication is needed in case anyone loses sight of the WHY.

Culture in a company is like the heartbeat of the company. A strong, honest and open culture with no sacred cows is most likely to succeed. They have the culture that everyone and everything matters.

Change management – this is arguably the hardest part of any project. Identifying the change needed (the WHY) is much easier than instituting the change. Stay the course… Long term sustainment… the stickiness of the change… Call it what you want but it is hard to accomplish. Why is it so hard?

Time try something fun. Everyone fold your arms in front of you. Everyone has their way to fold their arms. There is no right or wrong way to do it. But everyone does it their way every time. Now I ask you to fold your arms the other way. The hand that is tucked under now must go over the arm and the one that is over must be tucked under. Sounds simple and it is simple when you think about it. You are just folding your arms a different way. I bet some of you struggled and some of you may have had to try it a couple of times before you got it right. Once you were able to do it I’m sure it felt weird or unnatural to you.

How many of you went back to folding your arms your natural way already? I bet most of you did because I didn’t give the reason WHY you needed to fold your arms differently. This is what happens to projects that fail. Without the WHY everyone goes back to what’s natural to them or how they have always done it.

If you are thinking about your WHY think about it as your motivating factor for everyone involved.

Your journey in evaluating centralized scheduling may have you believing that it is the right decision for your organization. You have carefully considered the benefits… it makes sense financially, makes sense operationally, makes sense in terms of efficiency. If there is still something holding you back from taking that leap though, maybe it’s a feeling… or should I say an emotion. I touched upon this in a prior blog evaluating centralized scheduling:

Moving from decentralized scheduling to centralized scheduling is change management… change is uncomfortable…

So, there we have it. Change…it’s not easily embraced. Your employees aren’t looking to pull down a change to their scheduling. You certainly don’t feel prepared to push down a change to scheduling. But why is there so much emotion involved in scheduling?

We need to TAKE EMOTIONS OUT OF SCHEDULING. Focus on scheduling for business needs!

Just when this line of thinking becomes obvious, a no-brainer, and everything seems to make sense about centralized based scheduling, the uncomfortable feeling sneaks back in. Scheduling to the forecasted demand and not teammates’ availability is a huge part of the change management needed when moving to centralized based scheduling. This is where the best companies, with the best employees, get uncomfortable.

Taking emotions out of the scheduling process should never be confused with taking the individualism out of the teammates. We are merely talking about scheduling to the forecast demand, not teammates’ availability. Be honest with your teammates, from that first interview… they have a job because your company needs to deliver goods and/or services to your customers. Sounds simple, right? Your teammates either need to be available to work:

During the times your customers need a good/service or
During the times it takes to produce that good or service

To pay them for work during any other time would not be considered improving operational efficiency and customer service. Once your teammates realize that when the customers win, you all win, the idea of a team of centralized scheduling specialists doesn’t become so uncomfortable. The more satisfied your customers are, the more they frequent your organization, the more you grow, the more hours of work that are available to your teammates, the happier they are, and so the cycle continues…

So, I guess we aren’t taking all emotion out of scheduling, just the emotions tied to negative connotation. We need to redirect the emotions of fear and loss that some may associate with being scheduled by an unknown entity…a centralized scheduling team. Focus on what ownership is still to be had with one’s schedule.

Integrating employee self- service (ESS) is a solution in making both line teammates and department managers feel empowered in the scheduling process still. ESS allows teammates to manage their availability, request time off, request additional work, view their schedules all at their own convenience. Likewise, managers still have control of approving availability changes, requests for time off, who is swapping shifts or picking up additional work shifts, etc. What once was a manual process is now streamlined, documented, quick and easy.

I will leave you with another win-win to recognize. Enforcing scheduling regulations, workgroups and minors’ rules compliance, etc. is a necessity in the scheduling world. If your company operates in multiple states or regions, you already know that you also must handle multiple scheduling regulations. Some examples are:

Meals and breaks rules
State-by-state minors’ rules for in-school session and out-school session

Having a scheduling system that can accommodate these regulations is key, but having a centralized scheduling team keep up on these regulation changes (federal, state, local) and ensure that teammates are scheduled according to law and internal policies is priceless.

I hope this gives you a perspective of centralized scheduling that you haven’t considered before.

Please follow future blogs in your evaluation of centralized scheduling. Is it right for your organization? It can be!

Centralizing scheduling for your company may sound overwhelming, intimidating, maybe even more work than it is worth. But why?

The centralized scheduling model, decreases the number of persons in charge of your current scheduling of employees. Centralized scheduling is a model in which one or few persons oversee the scheduling for all employees in the organization or worksite. Isn’t that great?

So, let’s talk this through. Why wouldn’t every company want to adopt a model for centralized scheduling if a small team could accomplish the task currently assigned to every manager in your company every week?

Well for starters… Moving from decentralized scheduling to centralized scheduling is change management… change is uncomfortable…it brings you into the “unknown zone.”

Here is what your company may believe to be the “comfortable zone”:

Store Management better knows their employees
Department Managers are closest to the work
Store Management knows which days and times of day bring the largest increases in traffic
Department Managers know what shifts their teammates prefer to work and this keeps their team satisfied

I’m not convinced that these statements are accurate, at least not all the time. Not where it matters most for your company. If you could improve operational efficiency and customer service, wouldn’t you?

Here are a couple of key benefits in adopting centralized scheduling:

Have an individual or small team of scheduling specialists oversee scheduling for all teammate

Someone that has a better vision of the big picture. Someone that knows that scheduling is more than assigning a teammate to a shift. Someone that understands while scheduling is personal to the teammate, it’s anything but personal to efficiency and customer service in your organization. Someone managing the right scheduling tool to produce a great schedule every time without also having to worry about the day-to-day operations of the managers “closest to the work.”

Having a team of scheduling experts that understand scheduling across multiple store formats, has visibility of teammates that are cross-trained in secondary departments or even secondary stores is invaluable.

Consistency in schedule writing and training of scheduling specialists

If store management knows their employees the best, then what happens when the manager leaves? What happens when this manager moves on from the store or department and another manager takes their place? Turnover in staff is inevitable. It’s going to happen. How well does your company handle change management?

How well does that new manager know these same teammates? I think we can agree the level of this knowledge decreases dramatically. Having a scheduling specialist in these cases is no longer more uncomfortable than being the new manager.

In the world of centralized scheduling, the level of knowledge does not change. The scheduling system holds employee data such as:

1) What labor tasks can the teammate perform?

2) What areas of the department/store can the teammate work?

3) What availability does the teammate have?

4) How many hours per day and week can the teammate work?

This transition in management becomes much smoother when the new manager does not have to concern themselves right away with this level of detail. They can continue to focus on business, building sales and customer service.

I hope this gives you a perspective of centralized scheduling that you haven’t considered before. There is no better feeling than feeling comfortable knowing that your company is running efficiently. Centralized Scheduling does not have to be intimidating! This is a time that less is more!

Please follow future blogs in your evaluation of centralized scheduling. Is it right for your organization? It can be! Next up we will explore taking the emotions of out of scheduling.

Some would say there is no difference between the two. I would disagree as there are many differences. Every company starting an engagement process for new software or new technology has heard one or more of the following phrases:

Out of the box solutions: Sure, you can use the software right out of the box. However, what they don’t tell you is the only way you can use it is to change one or more of the following: Your corporate go to market strategy, policies, procedures or processes to use the software.
Customizable software: Core functionally is in the software that then is customized to your company. The catch here is that customizable leads to costlier. You must pay for every change big or little that is added to the software for your company. While you could end up with software that would work for your company today, changes needed in the future will always cost you more.
Completely configurable software: Take “out of the box” and “customizable,” mix them up over many years and clients and you end up with configurable software. This is software that solves issues and allows your company to configure the way you want to use it to meet your goals.

There are good reasons for why a company might select any of the software types above since every software company can sell one or all 3 types of software. In my experience, if you use out of the box software you often won’t use more than 15 percent of the software purchased. That percentage increases to around 25 percent with customizable software. The usage percent could increase higher, but the customization is so costly companies often run over budget. The highest percentage of usage is with the configurable software. Companies can get as high as 50 percent usage until they become overwhelmed with configurations. Why are most companies not even using 50 percent of the software they purchase? That’s a good question and each company will offer different reasons.

So, what are the benefits of selecting a software solution partner you ask? To start, in my experiences, a company’s utilization of the software they purchase can get as high as 90 percent. How is that possible? Software solutions providers work with your company to find the best fit of their offerings to merge/integrate with your current software. They allow you to continue capturing benefits from your current software investments while enhancing your capabilities with new software. While the solutions company’s road map contains many modules, some may be redundant to what your company is happy using, you have the option to purchase just the modules that fill your gaps. That’s what happens with out of the box solutions; you end up with redundant unused software.

Another benefit of having a solutions partner is they will ask what your company’s desired outcome is. What problem are you trying to solve with software? They work with your company to develop a road map of current and new software. They build integrations and develop new functionalities that will help your company to reach the desired results. Partners work as a team with a single goal and that is achieving your company’s desired results. As partners they work with your company though configurations and implementation while closing any gaps uncovered. You won’t hear “Us versus Them,” but instead, “How can we do it?.” They provide training, coaching and experience to your company. They transfer their knowledge to help you reach your goal with continued support.

You always want to find the right software solutions partner as working together makes it easier to reach your company’s goals.

A common trend in successful companies is that they each have a clear and focused idea of how they intend to make money. Whether your company is providing a good, a service or some combination of the two, your company should share this mindset. To make your company more profitable, you must continually seek ways to raise the value of your products and/or services.

Value is defined as the attractiveness of a product or service relative to its price. Value of a product or service comes by way of decreasing the price or increasing the quality. If you can provide your customer with a lower price without reducing the quality, you have now increased the value. Understanding how you can competitively produce and distribute products and deliver services is a major challenge in any industry. Ultimately, the goal is to do this at a low cost while meeting the ever-changing requirements of your customer. How can your company approach this problem?

Throughout the evolution of increasing operational efficiency, businesses have introduced concepts such as just-in-time production, total quality control, lean, six-sigma and countless others. Nearly 30 years ago a name was given to the holistic grouping of these concepts: Business Process Reengineering (BPR). BPR is an approach to improving business processes that seeks to make revolutionary changes as opposed to small, iterative changes. BPR does this by taking a fresh look at what the organization is trying to do in all its business processes, and then eliminating non-value-added steps. Compared with most of the other ways managers try to stimulate growth, innovations in operations are reliable and low cost, relative to other business improvement initiatives.

BPR focuses on removing non-value-added processes through complete process redesign. In industrial engineering, these non-value-added processes are classified by Lean as Muda, or waste. The eight wastes include transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over processing, defects and underutilized capabilities. Performing Lead Six-Sigma value analysis is a great way to start this practice, allowing you to identify each component of the process, classify it as value-add, value-enabling or non-value-add (waste), as well as determine the size of the prize in eliminating the steps through BPR.

BPR evolved throughout the early aughts into Business Process Management (BPM), borrowing the main principles of BPR but putting an increased emphasis on utilizing technology to identify opportunities in efficiency to achieve the end goals of removing non-value-added processes from operations. Over time, BPM evolved to put equal emphasis on people and technology processes, and is now viewed as a critical component of Operational Intelligence. Operational Intelligence aims to provide real-time actionable information to key decision makers in an organization to identify inefficiencies and improvement opportunities as well as suggest operational solutions.

Putting the concepts of BPR, BPM and Operational Intelligence together yields how businesses leading in operational efficiency will operate going forward to increase the value of their products and services. For example, take one of the eight wastes of Lean: overproduction. Overproduction leads to many negative business outcomes depending on the industry your business is in. Within retail, overproduction often leads to increased shrink, causing a loss not only in the materials used in the overproduction, but also the labor costs that were required to facilitate that production.

An example of how Operational Intelligence would address this situation would be a combination of processes and technology. First, a process would be in place at the point where shrink is occurring to systemically capture the waste, such as having an employee scan merchandise that will contribute to shrink and record the reason for the shrink (e.g., overproduction, damage, etc.). Next, this data would be tracked to define a baseline as well as to benchmark it against best-in-class data. It would also be monitored over time to identify how it is trending.

This system or combination of systems would also be able to leverage data on labor requirements to produce the shrink items, material costs of the shrink items and attributable overhead to estimate the true cost of the overproduction. Based on the data, trends, and known history of these types of issues in the past, recommendations would be made on the root cause of the issue (e.g., inaccurate forecasts, poor execution against plan, etc.) and the appropriate steps to mitigate those root causes. Finally, the system would automatically communicate the issue to operational leaders through a dashboard or real-time alerts so that corrective action can be taken swiftly.

Just as BPR evolved to BPM which eventually became part of an approach to managing operations through Operational Intelligence, the way that your company combines processes and technology to improve operational efficiency will evolve and become smarter over time. Even before your company evolves to the point where a tightly integrated suite of systems delivers real-time identification of operational improvement opportunities, applying BPR and BPM concepts to your operations can continually identify ways to add value to your products and/or services, the result of which is an increase in value to your customers. These processes and tools aim to address the age-old question – is your customer willing to pay for this? – and eliminate as may of those processes where you answer ‘no’ as possible.

The old adage ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ is as applicable when it comes to managing your business as it is to managing your health. The window to address potential threats to your business – new competition, evolving market demands, increasing customer expectations – is getting smaller and smaller in today’s business climate, where customers have more choices and news of a misstep travels faster than ever.

This adage has never been more applicable than it is now when it comes to information technology (IT) security. According to a study by IBM and Ponemon, costs associated with data breaches alone are estimated to reach $7.4 million across the United States just this year. Additional attacks, such as the 2017 global WannaCry ransomware attack are estimated to cost companies as much as $4 billion.[i] When you consider the rise in these kinds of attacks and the fact that more and more companies are utilizing cloud hosting themselves or software-as-a-subscription (SaaS) offerings from third parties, your business may be more vulnerable than ever.

What is even more concerning is that in a 2016 survey by IBM of 2,400 IT professionals, 75 percent said that their company did not have a formal cybersecurity incident response plan.[ii] Business technology and applications are becoming ever-more accessible due to the convenience and business potential of bringing them online, but this also increases the opportunities for hackers and cyber criminals to expose vulnerabilities and attack businesses.

There are numerous vulnerabilities that hackers and cyber criminals can exploit to gain access to your data and the systems that you use to manage your business. Even if your IT team and third-party vendors have exceptional security tools, programs and protocols, your employees remain one of the biggest risks when it comes to providing malevolent actors with unwarranted access. This can come in the form of phishing attacks via email, embedding malicious software within downloads that appear to be legitimate, projecting Wi-Fi networks as deceptive public networks or many other options available to these parties. One of the most common failure that grants access though is through weakly user-generated passwords.

While businesses and software vendors can put controls and restrictions in place that require users to develop more secure passwords (e.g., passwords that contain symbols, scheduled password changes, etc.), people tend to still store these passwords in very vulnerable locations, whether on a note on their desk or an unsecured file on their computer. There is a more secure method for granting access to your business systems that remove this basic vulnerability, and it is called Single Sign-On (SSO).

So what is SSO, and how does it work?

Single sign-on is a user authentication service. This service allows a user to utilize one set of login credentials to access multiple applications. The service authenticates the end user for all of the applications that the user has been approved to access. It also eliminates further prompts and processes when the user moves between applications during the same session.

Some SSO services use protocols such as Kerberos (which is a protocol that authenticates requests between trusted hosts on an untrusted network) and the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).

The website TechTarget provides the following explanation of SAML:

SAML facilitates the exchange of user authentication and authorization data across secure domains. SAML-based SSO services involve communications between the user, an identity provider that maintains a user directory, and a service provider. When a user attempts to access an application from the service provider, the service provider will send a request to the identity provider for authentication. The service provider will then verify the authentication and log the user in. [iii]

While SSO eliminates the need for users to manage login credentials, which is unquestionably a weakness is security protocol, some technology security personnel believe that SSO can create additional security risks. The biggest concern is that if there is one method of access across databases then the login credential is only secure as the weakest point of system security. There are many aspects of SSO that offset this concern:

Password Security: With one login credential, and one that the user does not have to manage, it is less likely that the user will use unsecured methods to recall this data (i.e., writing passwords down, saving them on their computer, emailing their credentials to themselves, etc.)
Employee Turnover: Centrally managed systems like SSO enable organizations to quickly remove access to all systems from a single change, rather than removing access from numerous systems
Less Secured Environments: If a company has environments that are not as secure as they would hope, they can be excluded from the SSO structure entirely. Most enterprises are multi tiered and wouldn’t require every system to participate. Multifactor authentication can also be used in addition to SSO for less secured environments.
Help Desk Support: SSO greatly reduces the amount of support end-users require when it comes to username and password recovery and reset. This both reduces the volume of support companies must provide, as well as the inherent security risk that may come with transmitting login data regularly.

Securing access to your data and business systems through removing employee password management addresses one of many vulnerabilities that your company has when it comes to shielding it from cyber criminals, but it is a great place to start. Challenge your IT departments and software vendors alike to enable a program like SSO, and if they cannot you may have much larger gaps in your system security than you even imagined. Given that cybercrime is on the rise and more vulnerabilities exist today than ever given the rise in enterprise applications accessible over the internet, that ounce of prevention may actually be worth significantly more than just a pound of cure.

wp:paragraph {“align”:”left”} –>

[i] Ponemon Institute LLC, 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Overview, June, 2017, https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=SEL03130WWEN&

wp:paragraph {“align”:”left”} –>

[ii] IBM Institute for Business Value, Cybersecurity in the Cognitive Era: Priming Your Digital Immune System, Executive Report – Security, 2016, http://www-07.ibm.com/sg/pdf/Cybersecurity_in_the_Cognitive_Era.PDF

wp:paragraph {“align”:”left”} –>

[iii] Tech Target. “Definition: single sign-on (SSO).” http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/single-sign-on