Labor Planning And Budgeting For Retail Workforce Agility

For retailers, the workforce represents more than just the single largest controllable expense item on the income statement. Operating on the critical front lines of the operation, a retailer's workforce is a crucial component of the customer's shopping experience. An optimal workforce creates a shopping experience that is profitable for retailers and satisfying for customers.

Successful retailers react to changes with speed and precision, and responding to variable customer demand remains a fundamental retail mission. To build a workforce that supports this mission, retailers must be agile in their daily operations to make sure the right person with the right skills is in the right job at the right time. However, for many retailers, achieving optimal workforce supply across their large and distributed operations is hampered by cumbersome and inaccurate labor budgeting and planning efforts.

Organizations depend on sophisticated workforce management solutions to manage the intricate balance of workforce supply and customer demand. Maintaining this fine balance requires dexterous daily operations. Agile employee scheduling, time and attendance, and analytical insight enable retailers to optimize their workforces, and make adjustments in response to internal and external changes. Yet the most efficient execution of these day-of-operations workforce processes can be wasted if upstream activities such as labor budgeting and planning are inadequate.