Helping hotels improve their bottom line with simplified scheduling and more efficient time and attendance tracking.
Helping hotels improve their bottom line with simplified scheduling and more efficient time and attendance tracking.
CHALLENGE: Northwest Outfitters’ primary challenge is keeping unique departments staffed with the right people while reducing costs with viable cross-department coverage and unplanned overtime.
Northwest Outfitters is a small retail chain tackling the challenges of selling in the competitive outdoor sports marketplace. Managing a specialized workforce across 5 locations became their focus as an opportunity to significantly reduce costs and gain a competitive advantage.
Workforce Management is a key sore spot for retail businesses with a variety of 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 core of supervisors, all sales associates are part time. When there is a staffing pinch, it can be nearly impossible to keep part-timers from working forty hours or more. Holiday breaks and year-end staffing has added scheduling complications and compliance pressure with the additional burden of tracking and reporting.
Workforce Management Integration Creates Savings
With web-based employee scheduling, department managers created 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 adapt to changing conditions. This has been a huge time saver for managers, and with pre-defined alerts, a significant decrease in unplanned overtime.
Employee Empowerment
Before our Workforce Management implementation, employees continually contacted managers about shift changes, time card errors, and PTO accruals. With Employee Self-Service (ESS), employees clock in/out from their mobile device, manage their own time cards, submit time off requests, and monitor accruals without having to contact a manager. With the intuitiveness of PunchLogic, time card errors are no longer a leading
worry.
Streamlined Administration
When employees handle shift changes, all managers have to do is approve them on the Virtual Trade Board. The system even notifies the employees affected when a shift change is approved! With job codes and employee groups, employees with the appropriate skills are scheduled in the corresponding departments. This helps maintain superior 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 continually monitoring time cards to keep employees working within the prescribed hours. In the case of a DOL audit, reports can be generated instantly from automatically captured and recorded attendance data. Northwest Outfitters is benefitting from reduced labor costs, improved scheduling, automated compliance tools, and employees who are much happier with their jobs.
SOLUTION: When employees handle shift changes, all managers have to do is approve them on the Virtual Trade Board. The system even notifies the employees affected when a shift change is approved!
- Solution - Employee scheduling for simplified schedule creation and edits and mobile coordination
- Integrated time and attendance tracking
Benefits: Managers don’t need to be continually monitoring time cards to keep employees working within the prescribed hours.
Consider a Professional Employer Organization for HR Outsourcing
If you have questions about automated timekeeping and/or advanced scheduling for your organization, we encourage you to contact a PEO specialist with Zamp HR to learn more. Experience the Zamp HR difference for yourself. For additional questions, please contact us online or by phone.
