Travelex, the foreign exchange and cross-border payment provider, deployed Positive’s flagship product, e-tivity, at its 170 retail stores across Australia and New Zealand in 2005. Koch says the company gained complete transparency of its payroll costs which in turn have allowed for better decision-making and expenditure control.
“Travelex has reduced its overtime expenses by 50% and overall staff costs by 10% since implementing e-tivity workforce management software,” he says.
“The nature of our business, exchanging currency, means many of our stores operate in airports. Some of them are open 24 hours and house upwards of six tills.
“To create a roster manually for this volume of trading hours and employees would be a nightmare.”
Previously, says Koch, Travelex had no way to manage its payroll costs because there was zero visibility until the system had closed off each month. This meant the company was forced to take a reactive approach to cost management, making it very difficult to conduct decisions around payroll.
“We can now run reports two weeks in advance so if payroll costs are looking too high, we can make the necessary adjustments.”
Travelex is also using a number of other e-tivity modules, including Time and Attendance (which collects employee data and calculates pay accordingly), Paid Rate (which establishes the base hourly rate to be applied to an employee’s shift) and Kiosk and Reporting (which allows employees and managers to access rosters and time sheets from a web-based browser).
Michael Hill Jeweller, the global jewellery chain, expects potential savings of $3 million a year through better cost control.
The Australian-based Michael Hill installed e-tivity at 200 sites across Australia, NZ and Canada. Since doing so, the chain claims to have seized control of its biggest cost - wages - and says it can now better manage staffing levels, which in turn has driven up revenue.
Established in NZ in 1979, Michael Hill opened its first Australian store in 1987. The company now operates 230 outlets worldwide.
Phil Taylor, CFO, says the company needed a tool which would instil a degree of discipline around rostering and, subsequently, give the jewellery chain a better handle on its wages costs.
“Like most retailers, wages are our single largest cost,” explains Taylor.
“Without a system to help us manage that expense, we were running blind. On top of that, staffing levels largely dictate our revenue so it’s critical we have the right number of people on the floor at the right time to maximise sales potential.”
Taylor says that previously, store managers were manually creating rosters - usually on Excel spreadsheets - a task which was often overlooked when they were too busy or on leave.
“Managers had little idea how much they were spending on wages or whether they were triggering overtime for certain employees.
“What we have found now is that store managers each day can amend a roster to reflect what actually happened - perhaps an employee was sick, or worked a shorter shift - and, at the end of each week, the rosters are converted to time sheets and sent to payroll for processing.”
Fast-tracking results HumanForce Global, based in North Sydney, has developed the TimeTarget solution to attack the problem in a different manner.
“Our retail clients get their solution installed and functioning within an average of three to five weeks from ordering the system” says Bruce Mackenzie, HumanForce MD.
“All systems in this space have the capacity to save retailers money but the real issue is how long it takes and the internal and external resources required to make those savings come to fruition.”
Mackenzie believes that the majority of IT systems take far too long to implement and in the last seven years HumanForce has perfected a “rapid deployment” methodology.
“While our competitors are busy doing scoping studies and project meetings, the TimeTarget solution can be installed and running,” he says.
“One of our larger earlier chains, the Ed Harry Menswear group, needed to roll out 175 stores ASAP. The system was delivered and trained in under a fortnight with the area managers rolling out 90 stores (three hours per store) in six weeks in November and early December.”
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