In the first phase of the project, the application has been introduced to Wickes’ 170 stores. It replaces a legacy system that forecasts labour hours per store without considering store activity or customer service and does not provide accurate daily schedules.
Wickes stores productivity manager Craig Pickett said that, by matching staff and customer requirements, the system will make a significant contribution to performance. He said: “It was clear that, to get the most from our intended investment in a new workforce management system, we would need to improve the way we generated workload demand at store level.”
As part of the project, Wickes has worked with LSI Consulting to review, streamline and document all store processes. The budgeting and forecasting modules will now use standard times for each process.
In the second stage, by the beginning of 2009, the budgeting and forecasting modules will generate annual staffing budgets and daily labour demand forecasts for each store, to enable the scheduling module to create accurate schedules.
Although schedules will be created automatically, store managers will be able to edit them to accommodate holidays and sickness.
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