Workforce Automation: Maximize Your Workforce Management Investment

The many disciplines that fall under the broad science of WFM (workforce management) are garnering much attention from retailers. The store-level improvements associated with effective WFM implementations are many. Here, AMR Research Director Rob Garf, LSI Consulting President Bob Haworth, and WorkPlace Systems Chairman and CEO Ian Lenagan share their thoughts on the topic.

How can retailers maximize their workforce system investments?
Garf: Retailers must first develop the metrics that define poor and excellent performance and ensure that store associates use those measurements to influence results. To ensure consistent and high store performance, retailers must train, schedule, prioritize, and empower associates, leading to increased efficiency and productivity. A key component to achieving employee productivity and overall store performance is balancing labor demand (forecast derived from multiple factors including home office-driven tasks, customer service, and supply chain and inventory activities) with various constraints (including employee preferences, job classifications, and credentials) to forecast and produce optimal schedules. When the most qualified employees are executing the most appropriate activities, retailers increase operational efficiencies, ensure customer intimacy, and ultimately drive profitable differentiation. Preparation is required. To gain maximum long-term benefits from new WFM software investments, retailers must create a safe and efficient store environment and develop activity-based labor standards as foundational components for the overall initiative.

Haworth: We look at workforce management from a holistic, strategic labor model perspective. In addition to the labor management software components, a comprehensive workforce management environment also includes a common set of store processes and procedures that reflect industry best practices, engineered labor standards that clearly define the time it takes to perform these processes, and a store management team that has received the proper effectiveness training and clearly understands its performance expectations against a set of metrics.