Case Study: Retail Employee Scheduling and Timekeeping

HR Ledger helps sportings goods company save with time and attendance compliance, dramatically simplified scheduling, and mobile management.

Northwest Outfitters is a small retail chain tackling the obstacles of selling in the competitive outdoor sports industry. Managing a specialized workforce across 5 locations became their focus as an opportunity to substantially reduce costs and gain a competitive advantage.

Workforce Management is a key sore spot for retail businesses with multiple departments. Northwest Outfitters’ primary challenge is keeping unique departments staffed with the right people while reducing costs with viable cross-department coverage. They also wanted to address one of their largest budget problems; unplanned overtime.

Except for a small team of supervisors, all sales associates are part time. When there is a staffing crunch, it can be nearly impossible to keep part-timers from working forty hours or more. Holiday breaks and year-end staffing has been slinging scheduling complications and compliance pressure with the burden of tracking and reporting.

WorkforceHUB Integration Creates Savings

With TimeSimplicity, the scheduling solution in WorkforceHUB, department managers established standard schedule templates for busy and slow sales periods, which vary from department to department. With the standard schedule in place, managers can drag and drop to react to changing conditions. This has been an essential time saver for managers, and with pre-defined alerts, has provided a meaningful decline in unexpected overtime.

SOLUTION — WorkforceHUB

• TimeSimplicity for streamlined scheduling and mobile coordination.
• TimeWorksPlus for integrated time and attendance tracking.
• Mobile access provides employee access and management control.

Employee Empowerment

Before WorkforceHUB implementation, employees continually contacted supervisors about shift adjustments, time card mistakes, and PTO accruals. With Employee Self Service (ESS), employees clock in/out from their mobile device, handle their own time cards, submit time off requests, and monitor accruals without having to contact a manager. With the intuitiveness of PunchLogic, time card foul-ups are no longer a substantial problem.

Simple Administration

When associates handle shift changes, all supervisors have to do is confirm them on the Virtual Trade Board. TimeSimplicity even informs the employees affected when a shift change is approved! With job codes and employee groups, staff members with the appropriate skills are scheduled in the corresponding departments. This helps maintain first-rate customer service for which Northwest is known.

No More Compliance Headaches

With customized overtime alerts, managers are notified when part-time employees are approaching full-time hours, and full-timers are approaching overtime. They don’t need to be consistently monitoring time cards to keep employees working within the authorized hours. In the case of a DOL audit, reports can be produced instantly from attendance data that was automatically captured and recorded.

Northwest Outfitters is benefitting from reduced labor expenses, improved scheduling, automated compliance tools, and associates who are much happier with their jobs.

UPGRADE TODAY

HR Ledger offers WorkforceHUB™, the unified Human Resources portal that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your supervisors, employees, and company.

WorkforceHUB™ includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorks Mobile. We’ve just added onboarding, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement! WorkforceHUB™ is developed for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and decrease labor costs.

How much can you save? Check our HR Ledger ROI Calculator.

We can get you up and running with WorkforceHUB in minutes. Contact us today to schedule a demo.