cost effective workforce management for the retail & leisure industries

At Shopworks we recently completed the roll out of our Work Force Management system into a chain of 20 or so shops and their monthly staff costs went from a Pre-Shopworks £99,600 to an average £92,300 in the first two full months after implementation. That’s a saving of over 7% on the staff cost for a product that cost nothing to install and around £8 per shop per week. This is something we find whenever we do an installation, the Work Force Management system gives a near instant saving in staff costs. However the improvements in a businesses profitability don’t stop there; the longer the customer uses the system the better the profitability of the whole business.

In this blog article I thought I would outline the top ten reasons why Shopworks customers who take both the reporting and staffing modules experience an improvement in profitability.

1. Only pay for the hours people have worked: You would be surprised how often operators without a Work Force Management system pay twice when someone is off sick and a replacement is brought in. Staff will always complain when they aren’t paid for a shift, but it is probably not surprising how often they fail to own up to a shift they didn’t work. A Work Force Management system has a single database, not several different versions of a rota, staff are asked to confirm their hours at the end of each day and before the pay run. Shopworks won’t allow you to pay twice for the same shift.
2. Spend less on head office management: Shopworks ensures that shop staff act as self service agents for the accounts department, end of day numbers are always 100% accurate because the check sums in the end of day forms point out errors as they occur and they are easier to correct. Payroll is right first time every time and day by day. With a 40 shop estate, the shop managers are checking and correcting 1,200 staff and accounting records a month. This massively reduces the requirement for head office accounts staff.Ultra accurate accounts and payroll numbers will also reduce the cost of your audit and make a review by HMRC a doddle.
3. Review the week by week P&L as it happens: Shopworks customers get highly accurate profit and loss numbers for every shop every day. These allocate staff costs to the shop they have been incurred in, to the penny. If a staff member moves to a different shop for the afternoon shift, Shopworks allocates the costs accordingly. A lot of shop chains estimate staff costs at the end of the month and this prevents them being able to focus on the true P&L of each unit. Having more accurate data has a positive effect on the profitability of a group of shops.
4. Get your managers to write a report each week: Shopworks reporting package generates a weekly report template for managers, it brings in the most recent P&L numbers, staff costs and compares them against budget. The shop manager enters comments in a number of boxes such as Overview, Marketing Activity and Competitor Activity. Our customers find that by focussing on the profitability of the shop on weekly basis, managers take more responsibility for the shops results and over the long term it improves group profits.
5. Review your shop opening hours: When was the last time you went through all your shops and looked at the opening hours? Taking an hour or so out on the Shopworks Work Force Management system feeds instantly into the rota and guarantees that the savings come through in the next working week.
6. Review your shift patterns: An extra member of staff on a Saturday afternoon, 15 minutes overlap between shifts, 30 minutes pre - opening up time, generous lunch break rules. All of these add to costs, yet a simple change to the Shopworks system and the savings come through within a week. Nearly all our new customers take the opportunity to tighten up on shift patterns when they first implement our system.
7. Report every shops staffing cost against budget on a weekly basis: Before a rota becomes official within Shopworks and the staff receive their text confirmation of next week’s shifts, each shops staff costs is compared against budget and a manager needs to approve any over spend. With a 100 shop chain spending around £7.5m a year on staff costs shouldn’t all of that expenditure be pre-approved?
8. Review trends:An accurate week by week P&L, compared against budget and with a managers weekly report gives senior management hitherto unprecedented information and allows rapid reaction to developing trends.
9. Improve efficiency: With a Shopworks Work Force Management system, you should never book a staff member into a shift whilst they are also booked on holiday, you should never leave a blank slot on your rota. The staff will come to know that their pay will always be accurate, they will get to input into their rotas and they will be promptly informed by text of their rota and any changes. Staff like it, the disciplines a Work Force Management system imposes set the tone for an efficient business and your customers will notice the difference.
10. Spend less on post: we know of operators without a Work Force Management and reporting system who are filling out a weekly record sheet, sending it in to head office, where it gets entered into a spreadsheet. At 46p per stamp it soon adds up! A Shopworks system would certainly bring these operators into the 21st century.

By Mike Hennessy Thursday 05th January, 2012