Small Staff Scheduling for Convenience Stores Park City Group, Inc.
Convenience Stores - ALERT [A SPECIAL REPORT FROM Park City Group] Perspective LABOR MANAGEMENT A SIGNIFICANT OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL SIZE OPERATIONS Conventional wisdom has always attributed the need for labor scheduling to places where there are significant number of employees working on an hourly basis. This has translated into the use of automated labor scheduling solutions that were developed for hotels, grocery front-end staff (baggers, cashiers and customer service), full service restaurants, railroad staff management and even ones that adopted manufacture s time and motion studies into mathematical calculations. While software vendors have taken those solutions and modified them to work in a retail environment, they really haven t addressed the needs of convenience/gas store operations they simply provide a solution that seems like overkill. Being a convenience/gas store operation today is not an easy job. You are juggling the need for an expansive inventory of products, a tight national economy that is just now in recovery, a wealth of competition from value retailers and grocery stores who previously were not even interested in the convenience world. There are probably numerous initiatives that have taken place in your company to improve upon merchandising and inventory needs or getting more from tobacco and gasoline. While these activities usually provide a significant improvement and have had a positive impact on your bottom line it s only half of the equation because the other big controllable expense in convenience/gas operations is your labor! Wait just a minute! we hear you say, I have been working on managing my labor and right you are store and field managers carefully scrutinize those monthly reports looking for labor percentage of sales that look out of whack. Budgets are defined and passed along to store managers to execute hold down those labor costs is the mantra. All reasonable activities that have been taken and they have provided some help but you need to ask yourself at what cost? Insights There may have been a higher cost to you than you might have imagined. We suggest that its time to do a labor management check-up. If at the end you are comfortable that you have done all you can to control labor costs well, that s terrific. If you have a little room for improvement, well here are a few questions you need to ask and some things that you might want to consider: I only have a few people working in the store at a time why use a labor scheduler? This is probably the single most frequently asked question about labor scheduling from convenience/gas store operators. Why? Because it seems like it doesn t take much knowledge and even less time to schedule 2-6 staff resources, and it would certainly seem like there isn t a whole lot of that an be done in staffing during operating hours, but have you considered? Small Staff Stores Suffer Large Task Stress Yes, you are doing it with less staff and likely the store manager really manipulates the schedule to get coverage and to get all the tasks completed. A small staff store has the same merchandising, cleaning, organizing and operational requirements but many fewer people to do it. Park City Group, Inc. Page 2 of 5 8/12/2008
Is everything getting done? Does it fall on the manager to do all the tasks that can t be allocated to staff? This simply masks the problem. Having the Best Resources When It Counts It s easy to slip into the same as last week except for a couple of changes mentality. When was the last time the manager looked, really looked at who is working and when? Do you have your best customer service oriented person, the one with the highest productivity or sales numbers, the one that can get the just a couple more items into the sales through good suggestive selling? This is often an overlooked aspect of good labor management because if you find a schedule that seems to meet with everyone s approval, it might be putting valuable labor at the wrong time. Do you really need to have three people at 9:30 a.m. or are you just accommodating the employees who want to work a 9 to 5? Visibility and Reaction Time Impacts Small Staff Stores More Small staff coverage, usually identified with minimum coverage is very typically impacted by a down turn in sales. Even if you have a reasonably stable sales forecast from day to day one bad day can impact your labor budget and labor as a percent of sales for the week, but does a store manager know that from day to day? Likely not and so how can they fix an impending problem without visibility to how they did yesterday? A good store manager will know they have a problem, but what about the rest of the managers, will they know? If they do find out, it s likely they will react cut labor at the end of the week for a problem that occurred in the beginning of the week. Just what we don t want less labor when we are anticipating the most customers and sales. Is Every Day the Same? Probably not, but so many of the labor solutions, including the manual process, start from that point divide the labor into the days and go from there and now we re dependent on good knowledge and experience from the manager which sometimes you have it and sometimes you don t. It s Not Just the Week or the Day, It s Intra-Day Most forecasts provide you with a gross number for the day or maybe the week but what about during the day? If you could manage the use of the limited resources that you have to put more people in the high sales times and fewer staff and perhaps even having the staff multi-task wouldn t that be a better deployment of scarce resources? The schedule hardly ever changes. What I do today is fast and easy and takes no time, so can a labor scheduler beat that? This is not a myth but a reality. Many organizations have gotten the labor scheduling down to a few minutes for the process (can you relate to copying last week s schedule, using a little whiteout a few arrows and posting it back on the wall?). If that is your process then time-wise, a labor scheduler may not be able to beat that. What a labor scheduler can and would do is keep you from making potentially serious mistakes, forewarn you of errors as they are happening and keeping you legal. Now that has to be worth some consideration: Lulled into Sameness - Don t think that every day in your business is the same or that every week, year-over-year or for a rolling 4-6 weeks in the same either. Even a minor fluctuation in a convenience/gas location can mean the difference between meeting and not meeting your goals. It s as if you are looking at the business from 10,000 feet everything looks OK until you get into the details. In Park City Group, Inc. Page 3 of 5 8/12/2008
this economy every lost chance to make even a minor adjustment means a sales opportunity lost, or a customer dissatisfied and who can afford that? Are You Meeting All the Rules If you are like a majority of the convenience/gas store operations in the U.S. then you might have one or more minors working in your location. Are the very restrictive and locally based rules being addressed? Are they scheduled for their breaks after 5.5 hours? Are they scheduled when they should be in school? Can they run that fork lift? Work past 10 o clock on a school night? What about your locations that calculate overtime on a daily rather than a weekly basis? How about European regulations? There are an awful lot of rules to remember and is that really a store manager s job? Legality and Liability the Labor Gotchas Very few customers put breaks, both paid and unpaid, into the schedule why? Because the breaks are normally given when there is a lull in business activity. Of course this is a practical idea but what if that disgruntled employee decides to challenge you on the breaks they earned but weren t given and you get to face the local labor board and have to prove that you really did give them the breaks they earned? Or how did you decide to have Jimmy fill in for Susie when she was ill did you know Jimmy would be getting overtime? Why didn t you offer Sally that same opportunity? Is it because you like Jimmy more than Sally? Can you demonstrate the objective decision making process used? Is there a reasonable Return-On-Investment with labor scheduling and are there other benefits that can be achieved? Let s face it, evaluating labor scheduling alone makes it difficult to build a substantiated ROI. Many of the benefits achieved from labor scheduler are not easily quantified in hours or dollars and in some instances, hard to attribute specifically to labor scheduling. For example, if there is an improvement in sales when you have matched your best sales person into the day and timeframe where you have the most customers, is the sales improvement due to better merchandise, a special event (Mother s Day for example), or just that Susie is a better sales person than Jimmy and by putting Susie in that time slot, you improved your sales? You will achieve an ROI in situations where integrated solutions for Time and Attendance and Scheduling are deployed together or when tasks that need to be accomplished are scheduled into slow periods during the day so that you are maximizing the labor you have available. Regardless of the ease or difficulty of quantifying the economics of scheduling, you should consider: A Few Minutes Here and There Results in Big Bucks as noted above the integration of time and attendance (time clocking) and scheduling can help to identify situations where unauthorized overtime is impacting your labor budget. A system should make sure that the infamous 7.5 minutes doesn t happen to your store. Just remember that just a few minutes a day for a number of employees even making minimum wage for a mid-sized chain every day, every week all year long adds up fast. Shared Resources a Dream Come True for the convenience/gas store operations with a number of stores in close proximity, a scheduling system that Park City Group, Inc. Page 4 of 5 8/12/2008
can tell you of the availability of other resources and in some instances uses the pool of resources for the stores to build the best schedule possible? How about filling in without causing overtime for the borrowing or lending stores? Seeing a full schedule, even when your employee is working at another location is possible. This type of capability is especially important for resources with specialty skills an alterations person, a product specialist an assistant manager from a location with more than one. Best Practices Getting It Out of the Head of a Few and Into the Hands of Many There are a select few in your whole organization who know the right thing to do under almost all circumstances. That knowledge always seems to be in that manager s head. It is in your best interest as a business to share that decision making process so that from the best to the worst the thought process and hopefully, the eventual outcome are the best they can be. Just remember you may not be giving that superstar any additional support but think what that knowledge is doing for your average to below average managers. Staying within the Law Whose Job Is It Anyway we talked about this before, but one good adventure with a state s legal system will help any customer understand the pain of accurately keeping track of the laws and regulations, adhering to them in your labor management and being able to demonstrate that your systems have and do record and report legal compliance. It isn t the job of the store manager to know every applicable rule and regulation and there should be help and notification if such requirements are being ignored or violated. Objectively applying those laws is important as well, so this benefit is more of a preventative one. Summary There s more to labor scheduling than a piece of paper on the wall notifying employees of their shifts. There are more things to think about, to worry about and keeping current is quite a chore. Matching the best skills, abilities and priorities with a meaningful intra day forecast may mean the difference between meeting your goal and beating it. How did you do in this check-up? Are there opportunities to investigate? Can you see the possibilities of improvement? We suggest that you take advantage of technology designed, built and delivered to the needs of convenience/gas store operations for managing the second largest business controllable that s a smart decision. Park City Group, Inc. Page 5 of 5 8/12/2008