Phoning It In

Mobile technology is beginning to make a splash in the workforce management market.

Several major workforce technology firms – including CyberShift, Kronos, Nexterna, Reflexis and ViryaNet — have developed mobile solutions to increase productivity, improve workforce compliance and ameliorate customer and employee satisfaction, and RedPrairie is piloting an iPhone application scheduled for a 2011 rollout.

Leslie Hand, research director for IDC Retail Insights, says that while many retailers have already implemented time and attendance, scheduling and workforce analytics, mobile applications can raise the bar for workforce capabilities.

“By leveraging a solution that integrates mobile technology with your scheduling solution, shift requests automatically follow your organization’s defined business rules to identify and prioritize the list of possible workers,” she says. “Shifts are filled with the right employee for the job and you avoid the challenges that can result from having too few employees on a particular shift.”
The combined benefits “lead to significant ROI,” Hand says. “Many retailers report full payback within 18 months [and] an integrated configurable workforce management system ultimately results in a lower total cost of ownership.”

Kronos recently launched Workforce Mobile Scheduler, an automated scheduling process that fills open shifts. When an employee does not show up to work, managers send coverage requests to all eligible employees using SMS (text), Intelligent Voice Response and e-mail. Employees respond using these same channels and managers are notified immediately.

Kronos says Workforce Mobile Scheduler improves productivity by filling open shifts in fewer than five minutes, giving managers more time to focus on critical tasks. The system allows employees to choose how they want to be alerted for open shifts, and they do not pay for received texts. Just as importantly, the new solution is easy to use, says Liz Moughan, senior manager of retail and hospitality marketing for Kronos.

“The Apple products, GPS and Kindle are so widely adopted because they are very easy to use,” she says. “You just open them up and don’t have to read the directions. That’s really the philosophy that we had.”

With these new mobile solutions, managers can avoid being forced off the sales floor and away from their focus on helping customers. The manager remains focused, the store is staffed appropriately and the customer gets the service they expect, Hand says.

In addition, “Leveraging mobile technology to fill last-minute openings in a schedule that also attends to the details of workforce management frees managers from the burden of having to try and manage compliance risks,” she says.

Concerns
Bob Clements, senior principal at technology and management consultancy Axsium Group, says many retailers are dipping their toe in the water, but are not quite ready to plunge into mobile workforce technology because the “last thing a customer wants is to walk into a store and see the staff with their noses buried in smartphones.”

Not all solutions give employees the option to receive non-text notifications, bringing up labor fairness concerns, says Clements, who also questions whether the average smartphone is robust enough for a retail manager.

“That’s not to say this cannot help retailers,” he says, but “unless you have really compelling reason, it does not make sense to jump onto the mobile workforce management bandwagon.”

Kronos is already looking at ways to improve Mobile Workforce Scheduler, including adding a location-based system that allows employees to clock-in with their phone and have associates’ requests sent directly to the manager.