Total Workforce Management – Lessons to Learn From Supermarket and Department Store Retail
By Allan Pulga
Food and Department Store retailers take workforce management very seriously – labour is their second-largest cost, after products. And although wireless retailers don’t require the employee base of a store like Wal-Mart, they understand that good workforce management is vital to any business.
A Supermarket News article last fall reported that as workforce management software keeps advancing, retailers are turning to increasingly sophisticated and all-encompassing workforce management systems to manage their labour resources.
It cited that in 2004, Boston-based AMR Research found that 61 per cent of retailers currently use workforce management software and 27 per cent would replace or upgrade it in the next 12 to 24 months.
Today’s workforce management software goes above and beyond your average punch-card database. Although scheduling applications – to track employee time, attendance and days off – are still fundamental features, “a new breed of workforce management technology also integrates everything from recruitment, human resource functions and labour standards to task management, training and traffic counting,” wrote reporter Michael Garry.
Garry described the case of Hannaford Supermarkets in Scarborough, Maine, which operates more than 140 stores in the Northeast, and has made broad strides with its workforce management systems.
By developing specific labour standards for their employees, Hannaford can allot certain amounts of time for various store functions. To create employee schedules, Hannaford lets its individual stores compute their own department forecasts and shift schedules, and tailor the company labour standards based on store size, layout and local competition.
All these processes are integrated within Hannaford’s workforce management system. As a result, managers have more tools to manage labour – knowing where to put resources leads to improved customer service and in-stock levels.