It will sound like a science-fiction nightmare to many store staff: having their working lives dictated to them by a machine that tells them what they should be doing and when.
But in reality, task or execution management systems are finding favour with head office and store staff alike, because they allow better planning and feedback at both store and management level.
Last year, Carphone Warehouse introduced Red Prairie’s execution management system to stores under the branding Customer First Companion. It has been designed to assist store managers with their roles and free up time for improving the customer experience, rather than dictate every aspect of how they run their stores.
Red Prairie vice-president of execution management Noel Goggin says of the project: “Carphone Warehouse was a great project and it achieved a fantastic business case around eliminating the use of email in stores. About 300,000 emails a month have been eliminated.”
Goggin says that one retailer described email as being the worst virus ever released to stores because of the issue of spam. “Email is a bad mechanism for getting something done and it is not closed loop,” he says.
The Red Prairie system provides all task instructions in one inbox and is rank prioritised. Anything needed to complete the task is also in the inbox, and someone can be trained on it within 15 minutes. To close the loop, reports can be created when tasks have been completed, either at store, regional or company level.
Prior to its introduction by Carphone Warehouse, the system had already been adopted by Best Buy, which used it to help create uniformity of processes as it rolled out its Best Buy Mobile branded stores. Goggin says: “Best Buy Mobile did a successful trial in Manhattan, then accelerated the roll-out of the format.”
The Red Prairie system can be used by every member of a store’s staff for the management of standard operating procedures and daily tasks, as well as higher-value initiatives that are run from head office.
US drugstore CVS is also using the Red Prairie system and allowing regional or area management to put in their own tasks for stores. In other implementations, the flow of tasks is strictly monitored through a single point at head office level.
Not all systems are designed to monitor all store tasks. WorkPlace Systems provides one focused on helping to deliver head office-instigated tasks that store staff will be less familiar with. Such tasks can take up anywhere between 5 and 15 per cent of staff time.
For instance, it can assist with complex directives such as store re-layouts, where every department in a store might need to complete between five and 10 separate tasks. As well as creating these tasks, the system will show whether they were completed on time and on budget – within the man-hours allocated by head office.
Tasks can be as simple as printing a list and then reminding staff to do it. For more sophisticated tasks, it could mean entering when a task was started and who is doing it. WorkPlace Systems chairman and founder Ian Lenigan says: “All the regular work, the business as usual, is the store manager’s concern.”
German retail giant Metro is currently piloting the system and a roll-out could occur very quickly once this is finished, as it is possible to get the system up and running within three months. Lenigan says that the retailer is bringing in task management to raise the standard of certainty that execution is occurring.
Lenigan explains that Metro currently generates 30 million emails a year between its stores and head office in Germany alone. As with Carphone Warehouse, the system will focus and tailor the communication that stores receive.
Lenigan says that department managers with access to PCs are the target users of the system, and as deployments become more sophisticated, it can be rolled out to hand-held devices and accessed on the shopfloor. He says that while you wouldn’t buy a PDA solely for the purpose of task management, it can be a useful add-on application. Also, urgent messages can be sent via SMS through the system – for instance, if a task is due to have been started and has not.
Metro is already using WorkPlace’s scheduling system for its business as usual hours and head office tasks. Lenigan says that this is unusual, but Metro will be able to reap the benefits of integration between the scheduling and task management applications. Such systems also allow a retailer to benchmark the tasks that its stores are completing. Lenigan explains: “If for a big store re-layout you have been allowed 800 man-hours, and it has taken one store 1,200 hours and another only 600, that’s the sort of information that allows you to be more effective.”
Goggin is particularly positive about technology’s ability to help manage head office-dictated store tasks. He says: “Head offices tend to send out broad communications on an initiative with the same message to everyone, and it is up to the store employees how to localise it. There are some things you want done absolutely the same in stores, but you also need stores to have the flexibility to reach their full potential.”
For instance, some retailers run a promotion across all stores, whether it will create an uplift or not, even though it may cost the retailer more money in man-hours to set up than it will create in extra sales.
Goggin adds that running store tasks through a system also creates one version of the truth, which as well as being important for the relationship between stores and head office, is also important for retailers’ relationships with their suppliers. He explains: “If you get half a million to introduce a new product, then you expect to see the promotion set up. You can even do visual verification of this, taking a picture on a phone.” He adds that one retailer saved US$3m (£2.1m) because it no longer needed to run audits of promotional activity.
Another system, from Reflexis, is being used by several major retailers in the UK and was adopted by Debenhams in 2007 to improve the consistency of store level activity. The latest Reflexis customer, US book chain Books-A-Million, is going to implement the system in more than 200 of its superstores, normal outlets and news-stands. The retailer admits that it needs to reduce salary costs to offset the tough trading environment it faces, and says that it wants to achieve this while making sure that key tasks are still accomplished and the right amount of time is allocated for customer interaction to maximise sales.
Time to innovate
Not all retailers use such systems to cut staffing costs. Some use the time clawed back for more innovative initiatives. As Goggin explains: “We see 15 per cent of labour given back to stores and they decide how to use it. One retailer is doing coaching, transferring all the time saved on being administrators to being one-on-one coaches.”
The more retailers use these kinds of systems, the more uses they find for them. Goggin adds that one of Red Prairie’s customers with less than 1,000 stores, which has used the system the longest, now puts 3.5 million tasks through it each month. He points out that when a task management system is first introduced, the retailer can pick some high-profile processes that stores must complete to run through the system and focus the initial implementation on them. Once up and running, more and more tasks can be added.
In the case of Workplace, one mobile phone retailer using the WorkPlace system gets store managers to send in information on the local competitive issues facing each store, explains Lenigan. Goggin also adds that the Red Prairie system can be used to help with process re-engineering and simplification initiatives. “They now have the data to do that at their fingertips what before they would have paid someone like McKinsey to help with,” he says.
The other trend is for applications to help with more specific processes that contain more workflow elements, so that store staff are fed instructions and information to help them complete tasks. For instance, fashion retailer Phase Eight introduced a system from Episys to manage ticketing in its three outlet stores. Prices do not change so much in the rest of its store portfolio, but more than 80 per cent of items in the outlet stores need to have tickets replaced due to discounting. Phase Eight took the decision that it wanted pricing labels to look as professional as in the rest of the estate, rather than opting for red pen markdowns. So it introduced the Episys system to manage the process and ensure that the right pricing information is always used.
In all of these examples, the store manager is still central to the allocation of tasks and making sure these tasks are achieved. At Carphone Warehouse, the system ensures that special tasks are planned in advance and store managers’ workloads are balanced. They are also able to give feedback through the system letting the retailer’s support centre know where it needs to improve.
Far from replacing the store manager, such systems should only strengthen their role.
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