IT-supported personnel resource planning in retail

Raise optimization potential

The more extensive the quantity structure, the greater the efficiency advantage of IT-supported planning. With current software, resource planning can be partially automated far beyond the functional spectrum of office apps such as Excel. Among other things, such systems help with compliance with complicated legal regulations and other restrictions. On the one hand, this provides legal certainty and, on the other, cost benefits because the system plans personnel deployment in such a way that wage surcharges, for example, are kept to a minimum.

The intelligent planning tool also makes it easier to accommodate colleagues’ deployment requests, taking into account general or internal fairness criteria. This increases job satisfaction and reduces staff turnover. In order to leverage the considerable potential of a plan that is well suited to staffing needs, the often fluctuating staffing requirements must be estimated as accurately as possible in advance.

Systems on the market

By no means all systems marketed for personnel requirement and deployment planning do justice to the complexity of the task. Some of these systems offer little more functionality than a spreadsheet program. With others, boundary conditions and optimization algorithms can be modeled and the shift plans thus generated largely automatically.

Determine personnel requirements

Although personnel requirements are a key criterion in workforce planning, many companies often neglect to determine them. Here, too, it is less a question of strategy than of gaining knowledge that can be used in the short term from operational facts and figures: How many cashiers, sales assistants and other staff do we need in which store and when? In the retail sector in particular, staffing requirements fluctuate not only in line with the rhythm of the seasons or days of the week, but often also over the course of the day. If employees are flexible enough, a modern requirements determination and deployment planning system can help to compensate for short-term fluctuations. In this way, retailers avoid staff shortages at the expense of sales as well as costly idle time.