TAG | In these hard times, workforce management software brings positive business benefits |
|
| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 09 February 2009 | |
|
Page 2 of 3 The key to Positive’s successful results are related to rostering and timesheet interpretation.Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
When someone is sick or workload is higher than expected there’s usually a selection of people who can be called in and who are willing and able to take up the shift. Yet, one of these people may have already worked so many hours that week that the conditions are about to be triggered that switch them to an overtime rate. Meanwhile, another person would still be on ordinary time rates. The customer service delivered and sales revenue received is likely much the same in either case. Yet, the selection of staff member can have an impact on overall costs because one person is effectively more expensive for that time. Rosters are hugely complex, but they’re only part of the problem. As you’ll appreciate, once their shifts have been worked people around the world are following the same steps – a timesheet is filled in and submitted to the payroll department. Payroll teams in every company, in every country, are slavering over timesheets working out how much they are required to pay – taking into account meal breaks, casual loadings, overtime rates and many other allowances and conditions and criteria. At the end of the week these rosters are automatically converted into timesheets without manual intervention required or any effort on the part of the employee. The timesheets are also automatically calculated, with accurate and mistake-free payment determined. Without an automated award interpreter payroll teams have to work out all these calculations by hand – leaving the door open for errors, with underpayments, overpayments, flow-on billing problems and more. These calculations aren’t trite. It’s not unrealistic to imagine a payroll team of four people paying 2,000 people per work and spending one to two days per week each purely on calculation alone. That’s eight person-days a week in such a scenario, 52 weeks per year. Returning to Michael Hill, the implementation of a specialised and comprehensive product - e-tivity - has standardised this whole process. Managers now generate rosters on a monthly basis and can amend them to reflect what actually happened (such as someone being called in to work an extra shift, someone being sick, whatever.) Further, managers can accurately predict their future costs while they plan rosters. They can see immediately the impact on wages if they roster different people on to different shifts. They can make much more informed staff selections – resulting in reduced overtime but without actually reducing any headcount or diminishing the customer’s satisfaction. While not mentioned in the case study, it stands to reason Michael Hill have also gained efficiencies in their back office payroll team because the vast effort in manual timesheet interpretation has now been slashed. Taylor says the implementation of e-tivity ran smoothly with the majority of stores up and running after two training sessions. Further, the different legislative and industrial relations laws across the three markets Michael Hill operates in posed no difficulties, with the software being flexible enough to adapt. Michael Hill has recently acquired stores in the United States and plans to similarly implement e-tivity in that region this year. Michael Hill look forward to implementing another e-tivity module which automatically generates rosters for individual stores based on analysis of sales and traffic. This means the product will even work to determine the optimal staff level on the floor at all times to maximise sales. “We simply couldn’t approach rostering – and therefore cost control – with the same rigour unless we had an application like e-tivity,” concludes Taylor. He’s not the only person spruiking about the benefits that automation has given, with executives from Travelex, ResCo Services and Starwood Hotels also claiming benefits. CONTINUED |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
