Time to Consider Enterprise Workforce Management

In today’s competitive marketplace, where superior service is often a factor in customer retention and growth, it’s critical that employees at all operational levels contribute effectively to corporate financial and service goals. At the same time, stringent workforce legislation and union work rules require consistent compliance.

The challenge is that neither human capital management nor traditional workforce management applications have provided the breadth of capabilities required to adequately address workforce scheduling, performance and compliance issues across retail, distribution and private label manufacturing operations. What is needed is a new generation of enterprise workforce management applications that can span operational areas and bring consistency to managing your workforce.

No more islands of automation
To alleviate problems in managing workforces at various levels of the organization, point solutions have often been deployed to address the most pressing issues. These “islands of automation” can be beneficial in helping to solve specific problems, but often frustrate and complicate the broader need for enterprise-wide visibility and control over workforce performance.

Similarly, the high-level workforce administration applications typically offered within ERP suites don’t include the engineered standards, process improvements and detailed scheduling essential for optimizing utilization and performance at an operational level.

The business challenge in these and other examples requires a common set of integrated applications across operating centers. This integrated approach enables management to balance workforce performance goals to meet corporate objectives, while providing frontline managers with the tools to maximize performance at the local level.

Enterprise workforce capabilities
Enterprise workforce management solutions provide a common set of performance-based tools to support corporate management, frontline supervisors, store managers and workers across manufacturing, distribution, transportation and retail operations. The starting point is a clear definition of the work required through engineered standards. This definition outlines the optimal method for performing each task as efficiently and safely as possible while maximizing the ability to meet established quality and customer service performance criteria. Once the improved methods and standards are developed, a common set of technology delivers:

• Time & attendance

• Scheduling optimization

• Execution management (task management)

• Key performance indicators and reporting

• Learning management

• Slotting/store reset/value-based profiling

• Employee self-service

In addition to providing common functionality across all operational areas, enterprise workforce management solutions extend capabilities prominent in one operational domain to the other areas of the organization where they can add value. The detailed scheduling required for retail store operations is now available to more efficiently utilize DC and manufacturing workers; similarly, the time-saving advantages of pick-face slotting used in DCs are now extendable to more efficiently reset store shelves and backrooms.

Moreover, today’s advanced enterprise workforce management solutions provide a consistent user interface to simplify training and support, ensure compliance with workforce legislation and union rules and offer a single interface point to human resource and payroll systems.

Pieces of the puzzle
You may already be using point solutions to address specific workforce challenges. Therefore, gaining the advantages of enterprise workforce management might simply require integrating the missing pieces with what you’re using now. The advantages of consistent workflows, a single user interface and payroll integration could be lost with this approach, however.

Implementing an advanced enterprise workforce management solution could provide all of the benefits without sacrificing the functional capabilities you are currently enjoying. Given the opportunity to significantly improve performance, visibility and operational control, isn’t it at least worth finding out what it might do for you?