With 20+ years of collective experience in retail and HR at Workforce Analytics, the expert mathematical rostering team understands the pains of rostering. For many organisations, it's been deemed an arduous task that takes a lot of time that your team doesn’t really have, and pulls you away from managing customer experience.
Rostering can be very manual for some organisations, and in others, perhaps more automated with the latest AI and machine learning software.
In our previous blog, we shared some interesting thoughts around what your rosters could be doing for your business- especially retailers. In Lisa Spiden’s recent interview for retailers, she goes into depth on just how your business could benefit from roster optimisation including saving you significant money and improving customer experience.
The key reason you should care if your rosters are optimal is that you’re potentially leaving money on the table if your rosters are going overlooked.
At Workforce Analytics, we save retailers between 5-10% in wage costsby building mathematically optimised rosters from scratch. We take into consideration every single business rule and requirement you have, including those unique to your retail business, and we create a roster that provides you with the best possible outcome - possible - using mathematics.
By doing so, roster optimisation becomes a highly strategic task that you simply can’t pass up.
> Assess your current rostering method - what is it?
Firstly, take a look at how you're currently managing your rosters, we covered the three main methods of rostering in our previous blog, these include - manual rostering, rostering using AI/Machine Learning (sometimes called ‘automated rostering or automated scheduling’); and mathematically optimising your rosters.
> Assess whether your rostering method is saving you money
Roster optimisation should be saving you at least 5% in annual wage costs, assisting you with becoming more profitable, and not less. If your current method isn’t helping you to do that, chances are, it’s not running in an optimal fashion.
> Assess whether your rostering method is helping you to maintain or improve customer experience and satisfaction
Sometimes a rostering method will support you to cut down on staff, and therefore wages, but what is the impact to your customer experience and satisfaction? Are your rosters supporting you to find the best possible roster to ensure customer experience is at minimum, unaffected by changes in your roster? If you notice that with the changes you are making you’re getting an adverse reaction from your staff or customers, chances are, your rosters are not running optimally.
> Get an expert to assess your current rostering structure and how you might best optimise through a proof of concept
It’s normal and understandable if you’re unsure on the best path forward with optimising your rosters. It’s a complex problem that isn’t easily solved without expert support. Our team at Workforce Analytics is skilled in providing detailed proof of concepts to support your entire executive team and rostering staff with assessing your current state and identifying the ‘needle in the haystack’ when it comes to the opportunities that currently exist in your organisation that will support you to gain business benefit from your rosters (including minimising wage costs).
CEO & Founder at Workforce Analytics, Lisa Spiden, shares more tips on how to achieve roster optimisation in retail in her recent interview, get instant access here.
Workforce Analytics has designed world-leading technologies and methodologies to help businesses unlock a superior level of performance. Using data science, sophisticated mathematics, optimisation, AI and machine learning,Workforce Analytics can construct workforce management solutions that cover payroll compliance, rostering, sales optimisation and demand predictions.
Roster Right, our Roster Optimisation solution, uses advancedMathematical Optimisation to construct the best roster possible for your business, increasing productivity and profitability. For more information on Roster Optimisation read our recent blog here.
