Vermont Country Store Implements Scheduling Solution To Improve Store Efficiency

Vermont Country Store purchased Pipkins' software in 1997. They were previously using Excel spreadsheets to create schedules. Consequently, scheduling was very labor intensive, inflexible, prone to error, and required extensive manual calculations. Also, they could not get the best staff efficiencies for scheduling adherence for vacations, lunches, or breaks with Excel. Pipkins provides historical data and the "what-if" scenarios predict how many additional staff are needed for their busy season, which helps ensure that the right people are in the right place at the right time. Pipkins has made the daily interval forecasting better since it uses the actual history by interval. It also eliminated the time needed to gather the daily interval numbers and manually input them into Excel spreadsheets from ACD reports. Supervisors saved about a day's worth of work preparing a schedule by using Pipkins' software.

Since installing Pipkins, Vermont Country Store has increased their number of employees. In their non-busy season in 1997 they had approximately 115 employees compared to 175 today. A savings in payroll and reduction in overtime hours was also experienced since it took less time to produce a schedule and agents were scheduled more efficiently.

Visit Vermont Country Store at www.VermontCountryStore.com.