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World’s Leading Eyeglass Retailer

Case Study

Business Overview

Since 2004, one of the World’s Leading Eyeglass Retailer Brands has operated retail locations across the United States. They pride themselves on offering top brand eyeglasses, sunglasses and contacts at a great value. Further, they provide quality eye exam services to customers while they shop within the department store.

Desired Objectives:

  • Access to accurate and current information
  • Ability for instant communication
  • Tools for rapid action and response
  • Consistently meet labor and sales plans

Business Details

Business Name:
One of the World’s Leading Eyeglass Retailer Brands
Industry:
Retail
Location(s):
331
Number of Staff:
>1800 employees

Challenges Faced:

In a large company with multiple locations, managing labor costs and quickly adjusting to sales trends is vital; however, it can be a daunting task when each store brings unique challenges. The ultimate goal is to always have the right supply of employees in the right place, in order to service the dynamic demand of customers. Losing sales due to not enough employees working or having idle employees due to overscheduled labor, both negatively impact profit. The effects are that much more apparent when hundreds of locations are experiencing the same issue.

The question surrounding labor productivity and management then becomes “what is required to transform a shift from being labor reactive to labor adaptive?” In other words, a real-time management system must allow interaction between all levels of employees and automatically react to changes in demand. Lastly, managers and operations need the ability to see up-to-date past, present and future schedules across their different regions.

Implemented Solution

Although alternative workforce management systems were available, none focused exclusively on building a powerful yet intuitive scheduling platform that could easily scale. This was imperative in solving this organization’s scheduling requirements, as they had hundreds of locations and were continuing to grow.

The primary implementation objective was to achieve greater multi-location retail labor control using current schedule data, which would eliminate costly delays when waiting for outdated historical information. Real-time access to future and current store schedules enables control over goal hours and the ability to rapidly execute adjustments on the fly.

The use of eSchedule solidified a process where the company’s traffic and sales data could derive labor goals that were used to plan schedules, maintain labor on a daily basis and immediately identify schedule adjustments. This process allowed for complete labor control and involved three key operational benefits of eSchedule:

  • Availability of accurate real-time labor information
    • Strategic/operational decisions can be made about current situations as they happen
  • Tools for executing decisions with reduced time and effort
    • Built in time management processes and automatic communication allowed for immediate action to be taken
  • Employee engagement and communication
    • Managers receive staff acknowledgement of assigned shifts and schedule changes

Results

The use of eSchedule has improved management of employee scheduling which has resulted in increased labor productivity as evidenced by these key benefits:

  • Consistent labor plan achievement
    • Indicator – nearly 90% of stores hit monthly hour targets right on
  • Rapid labor adjustments to meet sales trends
    • Indicator – store level compliance improved from 1 month to 1 week

“Within one quarter, we increased sales by 10% and recovered three quarters of labor overruns.”
Dan J. (Leading Eyeglass Retailer)

  • Effective labor control
    • Indicator – 1 quarter using eSchedule recovered payroll following 3 overspent quarters
  • Increased sales
    • Indicator – a 10% growth in sales was achieved within 3 months of use

Conclusion

The implementation of eSchedule has changed labor management from reactive to adaptive as a result of real-time labor data, automatic communication tools that allow immediate responses and the engagement of all levels of staff across hundreds of locations. Further, a 10% growth in sales was realized within just 3 months because of proper labor deployment.