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In the face of shrinking margins, increasing customer expectations, tough economic conditions, and stiff competition, today's retailers continue to search for a significant competitive advantage. Given that a retailer's greatest asset, and largest controllable expense is its workforce, retailers that implement a solution that gives real-time visibility into labor practices and generates optimized schedules will help redeploy labor costs, improve comparable store sales and enhance customer service levels.

To optimize their schedules leading retailers typically rely on historical sales data. However, advancements enable retailers to use specific retail data to improve conversion rates – a store's number of retail transactions during a certain time period compared to its traffic. These advancements incorporate the previously ignored, but highly valuable, forecasting prediction of consumer traffic and build on the way retailers view workforce optimization overall.

By combining consumer traffic data with sophisticated workforce management tools, retailers can create schedules based not only on historical sales data – what has been – but on potential sales as indicated by customer flow – what could be. This concept – called "scheduling to the opportunity" – is an approach that focuses not on past business performance, but rather on the potential a retailer can achieve. The purpose of this paper is to examine "scheduling to the opportunity" in more depth and demonstrate how leading retailers make this concept work.