Retail Labor Scheduling
A client asked for help to improve their retail labor scheduling approach. A common complaint about their current approach was “we always seem to have too many or not enough people in the store”.
Working closely with the store manager and several store supervisors, a tracking system was first put into place to track the number of employees in the store, per hour, compared to actual sales each hour. Once this activity was started, the store manager quickly developed a good sense of the “productivity metric” for how many people were really needed. A year’s worth of actual sales data was then compiled to determine a typical “day” at the store, from a sales per hour perspective. With this information, a simple Excel spreadsheet was designed to provide a forecast of labor, by hour, by day, for the week being scheduled (usually 2 or 3 weeks ahead).
As a result of this effort, the store manager now integrates on a weekly basis the short term sales forecast (by day) with the sales per hour profile and the labor productivity number to schedule how many people are needed (by day and by hour). In the store manager's words, this approach is "much more scientific, and efficient" than the previous "gut feel" method.
Contact Us or read more in our Operational Improvement Service description.
Working closely with the store manager and several store supervisors, a tracking system was first put into place to track the number of employees in the store, per hour, compared to actual sales each hour. Once this activity was started, the store manager quickly developed a good sense of the “productivity metric” for how many people were really needed. A year’s worth of actual sales data was then compiled to determine a typical “day” at the store, from a sales per hour perspective. With this information, a simple Excel spreadsheet was designed to provide a forecast of labor, by hour, by day, for the week being scheduled (usually 2 or 3 weeks ahead).
As a result of this effort, the store manager now integrates on a weekly basis the short term sales forecast (by day) with the sales per hour profile and the labor productivity number to schedule how many people are needed (by day and by hour). In the store manager's words, this approach is "much more scientific, and efficient" than the previous "gut feel" method.
Contact Us or read more in our Operational Improvement Service description.
