The difficulty of having perfectly aligned employee planning and scheduling with the real activity of the supermarket is evident. If a supermarket could predict the optimal sizing of employees and their skills in each task / position, every hour of the day, and day of the week, it could guarantee the best customer service with the supermarket perfectly replenished, the lowest queue-time in cashiers, and employees in the sales floor when the customer needs it. This would ensure that employees are neither idle nor overworked, which would be reflected in labor cost savings and increased sales through better customer service. How can we avoid such amount of losses, due to workforce management inefficiencies? Not to mention the reputational cost of poor customer service, or the impact on customer service of having unsatisfied employees. Planning extra hours when not necessary, may imply in losses in labor cost, planning less hours at times of maximum activity, could translate into notable sales losses. For many years, the standard planning solutions, have been used generally to plan the staff and their schedules, to manage their execution and to generate their payrolls, but none have considered neither the dynamism of the demand, nor the fluctuations in the workload.Įach point of inefficiency in staff planning and scheduling, translates at the end of the year into thousands, in some cases millions, of euros in losses. But fierce competition and customers that have become more and more demanding, have forced the most advanced supermarkets to look for new ways to improve productivity and customer service.Ĭonsidering that labor cost is one of the highest variable costs, without a doubt, one of the area’s most susceptible to improve is the workforce management, planning and scheduling. Over the past few years, leading supermarkets have dedicated great efforts to improve their processes and gain efficiency, with great results, reducing operating costs by up to 15% thanks to lean retailing initiatives. Article originally published in Linkedin by Alberto del Barrio, CEO of ORQUEST
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