30 WORKFORCEMANAGEMENT
REDPRAIRIE HAILS INTEGRATED WFM SUCCESS
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edPrairie Corporation has announced that more than 45,000 stores and food service outlets worldwide
are now using its Enterprise Workforce Management (EWFM) solution. Representing 30% growth in 12 months, the global supply chain and retail technology provider attributed its success in 2011 to the continuing evolution from the traditional retailer focus on time and attendance to a broader view of labour across the entire extended enterprise. “Workforce management used to be about maintaining control and consistency at the store level, and reducing labour costs,” said Ann Marie O’Connor, RedPrairie retail industry principal. “Now it’s about empowerment and fl exibility – putting the right people in the right place at the right time across the entire enterprise to maximise the return on invested labour, improving customer service and ultimately driving revenue growth. This is a signifi cant change in how retailers think about leveraging their workforce across the extended enterprise today to serve the new ‘all-channel’ consumer.”
US-based analyst, Retail Systems
Research, examined this shift in thinking in its benchmark study “Enterprise Workforce Management Study: Redefi ning the Boundaries of Customer-Centric Retailing,” published in March 2010 by managing partners Nikki Baird and Brian Kilcourse. According to Baird and Kilcourse: “While workforce management can help retailers get a better handle on how their labour investments are being spent; the real opportunity for these tools is in helping retailers drive revenue. Winning retailers are investing in these ideas.” Historically retailers have focused on point solutions – deploying one solution for the store, another for the supply chain and a different one for the call centre. But RedPrairie said it was seeing more demand for a single, integrated suite of applications to drive workforce productivity and effectiveness across the entire retail enterprise – including stores, service centres, distribution centres, call centres, headquarters and manufacturing operations. RedPrairie EWFM includes budgeting, forecasting, scheduling, time and attendance,
Trade and retail business Avon and Wessex, a family business based in South West England serving the camping, caravan and automotive market, has become one of the fi rst retailers to employ uAttend, a new web-based time and attendance (T&A) system, together with biometric fi ngerprint recognition terminals (pictured).
“If we could have designed a system, uAttend would
be it,” commented Kevin Chard, Avon and Wessex managing director. “We ordered online and, because it is plug-and-play, it was easy to set up ourselves.” He said staff fi nd the fi ngerprint recognition is easy to use and that he can log in when out of the offi ce to see who’s in. “As a business we have saved time and money and our payroll is now accurate,” Chard added. “There are no grey areas and our team works the hours we pay them for with uAttend managing our staff hours for me.”
RETAIL TECHNOLOGY JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2012
labour standards, incentive pay task management and clienteling. “Workforce management has expanded
well beyond simple time and attendance, to include scheduling, forecasting, and budgeting, and increasingly task management, workload planning, and engineered labour standards,” said Baird and Kilcourse. “The complex relationship between these capabilities underlines the reality that retail itself is a complex collection of people, products, and services that work together to address consumer needs. This validates why a WFM solution has become so important – tasks undertaken to service the needs of customers no longer are confi ned to what happens in the store.” As of January 2012, RedPrairie’s EWFM solution had been deployed in over 20 languages across more than 34 countries worldwide. Customers include Tesco in the UK, which is one of the world’s largest retailers with operations in 14 countries, employing over 492,000 people and serving millions of customers every week, and Offi ceMax in the US, with its 30,000 associates (page 28).
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