Retail Labour Budgeting Solution: SWL−SMARTBUDGET

Helping retailers at head office level to quickly devise labour budgets for the entire estate, with the hours and costs reflecting the requirements and trading patterns unique to each store.

Through SWL−SMARTBUDGET, SWL customers quickly devise demand-based estate-wide labour budgets, built from the top-down (head office > stores) or bottom-up (when integrated with SWL’s store-based staff profiling solution).

Budgets are broken down by enterprise, region, area, store and department, and by year, month and week periods.

Hours and cost budgets are produced at enterprise level and can be broken down to individual tasks as required.

Crucially, ‘what if’ models are included to view the effects of business change, as is the conversion of budget into weekly workloads so stores have clear guidance on how the hours should be split by each week of the year.

Equitable budgeting is assured through the consideration of relevant influencers specific to each store, from trading profiles through to key characteristics.

Taking feeds from the store with regards to holidays and absences, SWL−SMARTBUDGET will consider these allocations and ensure these levels are kept to a manageable limit.

Furthermore, the budget can be imported into the capacity management system within SWL−EVENTMANAGER, so management are always aware of available staff resources for the execution of various additional in-store events, that aren’t classed as ‘business as usual’ activities. The ‘business as usual’ activities or tasks, for example checkout manning, are considered within the enterprise labour budget.

Once the budget has been devised, in order to give store managers clear guidance as to how the hours should be spent, SWL−PROFILER will automatically take the budgeted hours and convert it into a detailed workload by time of day for each day of the week. This ensures managers are staffing their stores to give the best coverage of service to customer demand.