Driving Retail Business Performance Through Workforce Management

Transcription

1 Driving Retail Business Performance Through Workforce Management Author: John T. Anderson Retail Industry Manager Kronos Incorporated

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary 2 Workforce Management in Retail 4 The workforce as strategic resource: challenges and opportunities 4 Plan versus actual: If it s not planned properly, it probably won t happen 5 Increasing Performance Through Better Workforce Management 6 Forecasting: Because you don t know what you don t know 6 Scheduling 7 Happier employees equal happier customers 7 Best practice: 15-minute and cross-job scheduling 7 Time and labour 9 Close the productivity loop 9 Best practice: Enforcement of schedules 10 Analytics and decision support 11 Put real-time information in the hands of decision makers 11 React to today s results today 11 Align store performance with organisational objectives 12 Conclusion , Kronos Incorporated. Page 1

3 Executive Summary Is your operation facing declining sales and declining profitability due to increased competitive pressure and rising costs? If so, you re not alone. The retail business environment is currently experiencing major shifts in the competitive and economic landscape, and much of this is due to the success of a single U.S. business: Wal-Mart. Founded in 1962, Wal-Mart is now the world s largest company and employer. It alone accounts for over 25% of total U.S. food, consumer staples, and drug store product sales, and over 15% of all sales of books, magazines and apparel. The retail industry has been dumbfounded by Wal-Mart s staggering growth from 1,400 stores in 1990 to more than 5,000 stores worldwide today. In 1999, Wal-Mart acquired the third largest UK retailer, ASDA. The company s 2003 revenue, which was in excess of $250 billion, is no small feat, either. The combination of Wal-Mart s superior supply chain and dominance of multiple retail segments has enabled it to achieve an unprecedented, sustainable, competitive advantage on the basis of operating costs. Wal-Mart has redefined traditional retail cost structures from building new stores to sourcing the products that fill them to hiring, training, and paying the employees who serve their customers. This Wal-Mart effect is so profound that a 2002 McKinsey & Company study concluded that Wal-Mart itself is responsible for as much as 25% of the recent productivity gains in the U.S. economy. Even as Wal-Mart dramatically changes the retail landscape, the industry is grappling with various other challenges. The costs and risks of workforce deployment continue to increase at an alarming rate. Turnover rates of hourly employees continue to exceed 70% in most segments. The U.S. Employment Cost Index in the retail industry (a measure of employee wage and benefit costs) is up more than 17.8% over the last five years, while over the same period of time the consumer price index has increased only 12.1%. At the same time, an increased emphasis on legislative labour law compliance across the world has also been complicating store operations for many retailers a trend that even Wal-Mart has recently struggled with. Increased competition, high turnover, stable prices, spiraling labour costs, heightened exposure to labour law liability: welcome to retail in the twenty-first century. 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 2

4 The implications for retailers are clear adapt and differentiate or else. There are three objectives that retail organisations need to achieve in order to thrive in this new environment: Improve store productivity: The combination of revenue growth and cost reduction is a magic bullet. When costs decrease as a percentage of sales, profitability increases and provides fuel for further investment. Effective productivity initiatives are key to any strategy that attempts to level (or change) the competitive playing field. Focus on the customer experience: It s been said that it is cheaper to keep the customers you have than it is to acquire new ones. Satisfied customers shop more frequently and purchase more. The quickest path to better productivity is to increase the average transaction amount the more a customer buys, the less your fixed costs take out of gross profit. Now more than ever, customers need a reason not to take their business somewhere else. Align store operations to achieve bottom-line results: Assess all your resources to determine requirements for better aligning both store operations and your physical resources, such as equipment and technology. Most important, optimise alignment of your workforce with the work to enable your associates to deliver on the most critical objectives: store productivity and customer service. This paper will reveal how retailers can accomplish these three critical objectives through implementing a workforce management solution. The ways workforce management can specifically benefit retailers and the key components and benefits of a workforce management solution will also be discussed. 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 3

5 Workforce Management in Retail Workforce management solutions enable retailers to balance the needs of their businesses, customers, and employees by increasing productivity, improving employee satisfaction, and aligning employee performance with organisational objectives. Retailers who implement a workforce management solution can better align the efforts of their employees with their organisations objectives. The workforce as strategic resource: Challenges and opportunities Organisational resources that provide high potential for strategic value are often coupled with a high cost and/or risk of deployment. This no pain/no gain principle applies to everything at the store level. From a cost perspective, commodities such as fixtures, utilities, and even most products are simply bought and sold. Truly strategic resources real estate, POS infrastructure, the employee workforce are not so easily acquired, managed, or retired. Leveraging Store Resources Technology Employee Workforce Strategic Value Products Equipment Fixtures Utilities Deployment Cost/Risk 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 4

6 When you think in terms of the value that all these resources deliver, there is a similar trend. Commodity resources are a fact of life. They are essential to business, but they don t set you apart from your competitors. The impact of strategic resources such as the employee workforce extend far beyond maintenance of the sales floor and stockroom. They actually affect the entire operation, including product availability, quality of customer service, and ultimately overall business profitability. For the retailer, management of strategic resources is further complicated by the distributed nature of the retail enterprise, which even at the best of times is more like many businesses than one. Workforce management provides a framework for the automation of employee-centric processes; the standardisation of productivity measurement and improvement; and the overall optimisation of store labour. Plan versus actual: If it s not planned properly, it probably won t happen Ultimately, all retail performance depends on store sales. Accurate sales planning the single most important business indicator is essential to profitability. Since workforce costs are largely customer driven and are both a major controllable expense and a strategic resource, a common best practice is a store productivity process that combines the management of sales and labour. This process typically begins with long-range planning of revenue and workforce costs at the corporate level, and is integrated with the weekly store-level forecasting, scheduling, and time and labour process. At the core of this workforce management process is one basic requirement: store managers must gain sufficient visibility into the needs and status of their constantly changing business to make the right decisions about the use of their workforce resources. Regardless of the methods used in your stores today whether it s all manual, or partially or fully automated a look at the workforce management process identifies opportunities to increase this crucial visibility at every step. 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 5

7 Increasing Performance Through Better Workforce Management An effective workforce management solution can help retailers automate inefficient processes that prevent their employees from focusing on revenue-generating activities. Such a solution also engages employees by making them active participants in the solution, and empowers managers to make real-time decisions to ensure optimal store productivity. An ideal workforce management process for retailers consists of forecasting tools, effective scheduling, the utilisation of time and labour data, and analytics tools for concise reporting. Forecasting: Because you don t know what you don t know Does demand for customer service in your stores vary dramatically by time and location? The foundation of any automated scheduling process and the baseline for any effective productivity strategy is a thorough understanding of the individual workforce drivers that impact store productivity. Knowledge of the workforce drivers relationship to production and customer service needs and a set of reasonable metrics or standards for converting driver data into a forecast of required labour are also crucial. Although many workforce drivers and productivity metrics will be common across an enterprise, in retail it s common that no two locations are exactly alike. Any variances in operating environments can severely affect true store productivity. A good example of this is self-checkout technology. Industry adoption is widespread at 30% and growing, but for many retailers, ROI has been difficult to accurately quantify and measure. Cost savings are entirely dependent on customer usage patterns, which vary significantly on a store-by-store basis, and also by day of week, time of day, and time of year. The common approach to estimating ROI for technology such as self-checkout is to estimate the impact of the technology on productivity and to adjust the standards of all stores accordingly. While this cookie-cutter approach may be quick and will inevitably result in fewer hours scheduled, it s far from accurate. Self-checkout needs to be treated like another department in the store an independent business unit with its own shopping patterns and staffing needs. 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 6

8 Retailers can gain new visibility into customer usage patterns by using forecasting tools that allow the identification and forecasting of business by POS terminal groups selfcheckout, customer service, pharmacy, express lanes as independent elements that roll up to a front-end or checkout department total. This visibility is automatically translated into a better labour forecast and schedule through the application of appropriate standards for each area. The beauty of this approach is that it is responsive to actual customer demand on a store-by-store basis, and it self-corrects by reacting to changes in customer demand over time. Scheduling Happier employees equal happier customers How effective are you when you don t want to be at work? Having the right person in the right place at the right time is a great start. But if an associate had hoped not to be there in the first place, the probability of obtaining acceptable service levels for the shift if the employee shows up at all are sharply diminished. Of the many factors that can potentially impact employee productivity, perhaps the most commonly overlooked are employee work/life balances. Employee requests for time off used to be a relatively simple matter. However, such requests are now quite frequently complicated by decreased overall associate availability and the need for many associates to work in multiple jobs, departments, and/or locations. Implementing automated processes that allow each employee to request preferred workweek scenarios for total hours scheduled, availability, and job assignments sends a strong message to the workforce: Your satisfaction matters to us it s important to the success of our business and critical to the satisfaction of our customers. Best practice: 15-minute and cross-job scheduling Too many employees, not enough work. Many retailers perceive scheduling as the greatest opportunity for savings and rightly so yet it can be the hardest area to quantify, since scheduling is so dependent on the current state of each store s labour environment. In an effort to ensure adequate coverage and meet necessary requirements such as employee availability, legal shift durations, break placements, and shift start/end times, retailers often end up adding cost to their operations by over-scheduling. 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 7

9 Over-scheduling occurs when any part of an employee schedule results in excess capacity. There can be many causes for this, including inaccurate labour forecasting and manual scheduling practices. However, the two most frequent causes are 30-minute schedule granularity and the inability to optimise employees across multiple departments. Scheduling granularity is the level of detail at which employees are scheduled. With almost all manual and many automated systems, 30-minute granularity (each shift starting or ending at :00 or :30) is the norm. Although the potential payback here can easily exceed 1% of labour costs, taking scheduling to the 15-minute level provides additional opportunities for better workforce utilisation. Let s look at the numbers: A store that operates 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. has 26 possible start and end times for shifts and breaks in a 30-minute scheduling environment. If the duration of a legal shift is between four and eight hours, the nine possible legal shifts result in a total of 135 potential shifts from which a schedule can be created. In a 15-minute environment, these constraints increase to 52 possible start/end times, 17 legal shifts, and 297 potential shifts. The lower level of granularity exponentially increases scheduling flexibility. The result is a schedule that uses fewer hours, more closely matches business and customer demand, and provides maximum service at minimum cost. Scheduling Granularity (30 minute versus 15 minute scheduling) Workload Demand Ideal labour 30 minute scheduling 15 minute scheduling 12:00 AM 6:00 AM 12:00 PM 6:00 PM 12:00 AM Time of Day Total hours scheduled Ideal labour minute scheduling minute scheduling Variables Average cost per hour of labour $10.00 Number of stores 100 Days open a year 360 Percent improvement from 30 minute to 15 minute starts: 3% Annual labour savings: $3,924, , Kronos Incorporated. Page 8

10 In many retail environments, employees are capable of working multiple jobs. This is great for store productivity because it allows the retailer to cover more of its operating needs with fewer employees. However, employees who work multiple jobs often work in different departments for managers who write separate schedules. An employee may end up scheduled for a minimum shift in both departments when a combined shift across both departments would have been more efficient. Tools that automate 15-minute scheduling of employees across multiple jobs, departments, and locations take the heavy lifting out of labour scheduling and enable true optimisation of the workforce. Time and labour Close the productivity loop The essential productivity question: What actually happened? As much you depend on your managers to maintain store operations and service levels, their value to the organisation ultimately depends on their ability to make good business decisions which depends on the availability of some sort of actual time and labour data. Time and labour has long been viewed as just part of the payroll process. But through leveraging the time-clock and calculation of hours worked, retailers can automate and streamline repetitive processes and improve visibility on productivity. This can result in reduced costs, increased productivity, and empowered managers who are able to make better decisions. For example, managers know that as difficult as it can be to manually create next week s store schedule, it s often even harder to manage the one on the wall. When an employee calls in and says he or she can t make it, a manager using a manual scheduling system has much to do: update the schedule to indicate the call-in, update the timecard to record the absence, and most important, find a replacement to ensure proper coverage. When scheduling and timekeeping are integrated, the manager s responsibilities are consolidated into a single edit. An automated system ensures that the schedule and the employee s timecard are always in sync. The same system can simplify the manager s dilemma by identifying the best replacement based on skill, availability, and actual hours worked. 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 9

11 The payment of unauthorised work time, or payroll inflation, remains a primary source of unproductive labour costs and is another issue that can benefit from the integration of timekeeping and scheduling. Payroll inflation occurs for a simple reason: it s not reasonable to pay an employee for fewer hours than are recorded on his timecard. Since employee clocking transactions are typically rounded to the nearest quarter-hour, employees who clock in a little too early or clock out a little too late effectively can add time to their paychecks. This problem is eliminated when timekeeping and scheduling systems are integrated. This way, the terminal collecting actual employee clockings knows the time each employee is scheduled to begin and end a shift and will restrict any clocking that falls outside the shift. Best practice: Enforcement of schedules Pay employees for time actually worked. Restricting clockings at the clock allows retailers to strictly enforce schedules by preventing early or late clockings from inflating actual hours worked. This practice is most common in environments where employee schedules have varying start/stop times and shift lengths, and the schedules are generated based on detailed business and labour forecasts. The high degree of accountability for managing actual hours worked against hours forecasted and scheduled underscores the substantial benefits of schedule enforcement at the clock. For large retailers, this practice can amount to significant annual savings. In fact, schedule enforcement is frequently cited as a primary ROI driver, as full project ROI is often realised in less than one year. In a report on retail workforce management, AMR Research states: Integration between time and attendance and scheduling can save significant labour costs. One grocer saved $300 per week per store more than $1M in savings per year by enforcing labour schedules through an integrated time and attendance system. The savings accumulated by preventing early punches*, a minor leakage that store managers had allowed. (Source: Robert Garf, Lindsey Sodano, Greg Girard, Stretched Store Operations Find Relief with Workforce Management, April 10, 2003.) *clockings 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 10

12 An additional benefit of this functionality is the ability to strictly enforce applicable young worker labour laws. The potential violation of labour laws related to young workers has been a big problem for retailers to solve over the past several years. Restricting clockings at the clock ensures that no young workers are working more than their allowable hours. Analytics and decision support Put real-time information in the hands of decision makers Make real-time decisions with real-time data. Weather, skill level mix, promotions store managers need to react to a myriad of changes in their environment every day. These managers make decisions based on their experience, their intuition, and the knowledge they have at their fingertips. The amount of knowledge that managers have to draw from has dramatically increased with the automation of workforce management. Analytics and decision-support tools convert sales and labour information into actionable data that helps managers make better decisions. This ability of a software package to analyse data almost as quickly as it enters the system is called real-time performance. The data is transformed into configurable reports, key performance indicators, intelligent suggestions, and exception-based alerts, which help managers navigate a sea of current data, historical data, and corporate standards. Managers are then able to generate concise information that identifies issues and assists with the decision-making process for the day-to-day operation of their stores. As a result, more time is spent on issue resolution rather than on labouring over identifying the root cause of the issues. React to today s results today Solve problems as they occur instead of in hindsight. The value of real-time performance to retail management is in two areas. First is the ability for software to uncover subtle trends and alert managers long before the trends turn into major issues. The second area of value is that real-time availability of the data allows managers to correct issues now rather than having to look back at a week s or month s performance before being able to react to it. 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 11

13 For example, a regional manager at a large department store receives alerts on a Wednesday that warn of actual sales below forecast since Monday in four stores. Through her management desktop, she reviews the scheduled to actual labour trend and notices that the stores have not scheduled enough hours to support the forecasted normal demand. The regional manager calls a store manager and finds out that the local schools have opened two weeks early, so part-time student workers have dramatically reduced their available hours. Because of a corporate drive to reduce costs, the store manager was hesitant to pay overtime to have other employees cover the shifts. The regional manager makes the call to cover the open shifts and maintain customer service at a higher cost rather than risk losing sales and potentially driving away loyal customers. When real-time performance metrics and decision-support tools are incorporated directly into the application that a manager uses to make decisions, the benefits are dramatic. For example, a manager can see yesterday s sales and labour performance and drill down to find the root cause of success or issue. He can then move into his current schedule and make manual adjustments for the rest of the week. These adjustments could create a work-rule violation, which causes an alert to be sent. The manager can immediately correct the violation by using a scheduling assistant that identifies all the qualified potential replacements available for the open shift. This lightning response improves customer service while accurately matching labour costs to sales volume. Align store performance with organisational objectives Establish the productivity platform. A retailer s sophisticated customer-focused workforce management process is not always in alignment with its corporate budgeting process. This happens if the fine-tuned system of metrics that accurately determines everything from Monday stocking hours to Saturday cashier requirements is not consulted when corporate management gears up for the annual budget cycle. This potential disconnect can have a dramatic impact when corporate management signs off on a set of financial objectives, but stores schedule to an unrelated set of productivity standards. 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 12

14 Standardisation of the budgeting and scheduling process across a single productivity platform solves two problems: the expectation gap between various levels of management is eliminated, and the overall accuracy of the enterprise workforce budget is improved. When planning for a workforce management system implementation, retailers need to seize the opportunity to assess their process for labour budgeting and its relationship to employee scheduling and performance measurement. Conclusion Costs are rising and competitive pressure is increasing. Workforce deployment is becoming riskier and more expensive, and store operations are being complicated by increased labour law compliance. To succeed in this challenging new environment, retailers need to achieve three main goals: Implement effective productivity initiatives to cut costs and increase sales Enhance the customer experience to increase satisfaction and average purchase amount Align store operations with equipment and technology, and the workforce with the work Direct employee wage costs will always represent the retailer s largest controllable expense. This reality is only magnified by challenging market conditions or during an economic lull. The underlying irony is that in-store production needs do not contract proportionally with declining sales, nor does customer demand for service decrease as department staffing is scaled back. Establishing a productivity-focused workforce management process across the enterprise standardises employee-centric processes and drives overall business performance, regardless of current market conditions. 2004, Kronos Incorporated. Page 13

15 About Kronos Kronos Incorporated is the most trusted name in workforce management. Kronos helps organisations staff, develop, deploy, track, and reward their workforce, resulting in reduced costs, increased productivity, better decision-making, improved employee satisfaction, and alignment with organisational objectives. More than 20 million people use a Kronos solution every day. Learn more about Kronos solutions at Kronos Systems Limited, Fairfield House, Carey Road, Wokingham, Berkshire RG40 2NP Tel: / ukinfo@kronos.com , Kronos Incorporated. Kronos Incorporated. Kronos and the Kronos logo are registered trademarks, and Improving the Performance of People and Business is a trademark of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. All other product and company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be the trademarks of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA Rev. B