Workforce Management Case Studies

Matalan

Keeping central and store administration costs under control, whilst continuing the growth of new stores, is a fundamental tenet of MATALAN’s business. Hence, a series of business initiatives were instigated to introduce ‘end to end’ business systems around store administration.

Payroll administration was selected as a key area as store growth was putting considerable pressure on the Payroll Department, where additional administration staff were to be recruited.

Mark Tessyman, Retail Operations Controller at Matalan says, “Implementation was very successful, with a very rapid Return on Investment. We are now implementing further modules, which will allow us to continually and quickly develop and refine our business model.”

“From the start, we could see that the solution had the flexibility to meet our specific requirements and could operate with our existing IT infrastructure and payroll,” says Kirsten Kelly, Project Manager at Matalan.

Following a successful trial in a single store, two Workforce Management modules – RemotePay and Timesheet – were quickly rolled out to a number of stores in an Area. At the end of the Area trial, the feedback was positive from the stores in terms of ease of use and time savings.

Payroll confirmed that the system gave them control of the data with full audit trails, eliminated faxes and phone calls to the stores and avoided re-keying data into the central payroll.
Based on this feedback, the system was rolled out rapidly to the full estate and all store-related staff are now administered and controlled through the RemotePay and Timesheet modules, which automatically feed the central Payroll.

Alan Christopherson, Ceridian’s Director of Workforce Management, says, “We are having considerable success with a number of High Street Retailers and we have recently carried out a pilot for a major restaurant chain where the flexibility of our Timesheet module was essential.”

A post-project business review confirmed that the RemotePay and Timesheet modules had achieved the project objectives in terms of central administration savings and improved control with the unforeseen benefit of timesaving in the stores due to ease of use of the Timesheet module.

Gary Brown, Matalan’s Finance Manager says, ‘We immediately reduced our cut-off period from Thursday of the following week to a Wednesday, and going forward we will move to a Tuesday cut-off, once the facility to synchronise immediately to the stores is implemented.

T&S Stores

UK retailer T&S Stores implemented the Workforce Management RemotePay and Timesheet modules to automate business processes and cut administration costs for store managers in its One Stop shops.

The RemotePay and Timesheet modules allow T&S Stores to manage timesheet and employee data efficiently, significantly reducing payroll errors and processing costs for its employees. T&S Stores now have control over its business procedures and practices across all UK stores and at the same time give Retail Operations access to immediate labour cost and budget information, which previously they only received after the monthly payroll run.

David Anderson, Director of Information Systems, T&S Stores, said, “The Intellinet system has been operating in our One Stop stores for about 18 months and has become an integral part of our business process. The deployment of RemotePay and Timesheet applications has transformed the company’s ability to manage employee information and control payroll costs and it’s hard to imagine how in the past we managed without it.”

Anderson continues, “With the system fully implemented the volume of payroll queries has notably dropped and pay-day is now a normal day for us with no increase in telephone calls. Furthermore, these applications allow us to comply with the latest regulatory requirements. We can now accurately account for every hour worked by every store employee at any given time.”

T&S Stores analysed their employee information and timesheet requirements and concluded that they required an easy to use interface that could be rolled out across existing infrastructure in all stores. In addition, they wanted to tightly control business practices in the stores. The Workforce Management applications met these requirements and enabled store managers to quickly operate the system with minimal assistance.

The RemotePay and TimeSheet modules were first implemented into the pilot stores in early 2002. After receiving positive reactions from store and field managers the applications were deployed nationwide to 870 stores and two Distribution Centres covering over 13,000 employees. Store managers received training on the application prior to installation through CBT.