In order to meet these goals, 'Best in Class' Retailers are 72% more likely than 'Industry Average' and 'Laggards' to assess staff needs, skills and talent development, and are 40% more likely to have established guidelines for workforce process and product training.

"Industry Average and Laggard performance is not matching up to the standards of Best in Class companies due to manual workforce procedures, lack of WFM analytics, and fragmented WFM solutions," said Sahir Anand, Retail Research Analyst, Aberdeen. "This fragmentation is essentially due to several non-integrated WFM solutions deployed within the enterprise that lead to flawed interaction of labor, sales volume and customer traffic data for long-term labor forecasting and planning purposes."

Ian Baxter, Director of Marketing at WorkPlace Systems the leading supplier of Workforce Management (WFM) solutions, commented, "It is clear from the Aberdeen Report that Workforce Management systems make a major contribution to successful retailers' bottom line, which independently reinforces what we have seen with our customers. There are still a substantial number of Retailers who have not deployed Workforce Management and could significantly improve their performance using this technology."

This view is supported by international consultants, Martec International, which recently published research among the top 100 UK Retailers, showing that, only 31 use labour scheduling systems and of those, 12 are developed in house and are not best of breed.

The Aberdeen report goes on to say that, 63% of all retailers interviewed are planning to invest in workforce management solutions within the next 12 to 24 months; with the primary driver of these initiatives being to reduce labour costs and boost margins.

May 2007

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