Praxis makes time for sales by scheduling the smart way

It’s about the right people, in the right place at the right time. Frits Voorhout, COO, Praxis

The Situation

The workforce is one of the biggest assets for a retailer. Scheduling employees in such a way that they can work as efficiently and effectively as possible can decrease employee cost, increase revenue and lower work pressure. Ultimately improving customer satisfaction, by taking time for customers into account when scheduling. Hence the name of the Workforce Management project at Praxis: Time for Sales.

Praxis is one of the largest Dutch DIY retailers and part of the Maxeda DIY Group. Praxis operates 139 stores, including 29 mega stores and eleven with a gardening centre. Praxis employs almost 4,500 people. After a pilot for labor standards Praxis decided to select an advanced scheduler to replace the various ways of scheduling the labor hours in their stores. Changing the way Praxis schedules would standardise the way of working, reduce work pressure and align the budgeted labor hours with the amount of work in the stores.

The Solution

Praxis selected RedPrairie’s Workforce Management solution for retail as a scheduler and Capgemini as their implementation partner. No other Dutch retailer had implemented such an advanced Workforce Management tool on a large scale before.

At the beginning of the project the following challenges were identified:

• no Praxis store is laid out the same way
• the labor standards were not yet available to Praxis for implementation
• integration of Praxis’ own task management solution.

Capgemini was asked to facilitate the design process, and configure, test and roll out the scheduler. Capgemini also developed the store training program and carried out part of the training. Praxis took responsibility for the business change management required by the project.

The Result

The scheduler is currently live in all of Praxis’ own stores and some franchise stores as well. The solution was rolled out in two phases (first in the big stores, secondly in the smaller ones). Praxis trained employees in the big stores mainly themselves; Capgemini and Praxis together trained employees in the 80 smaller stores which all went live in only four weeks time.

Now that the scheduler is imple-mented, it clears the way to harvest the advantages on all levels of the organisation. For employees there is more time for customers, they are scheduled when they are needed and they get insight into the degree of work pressure. Store managers can achieve higher productivity, have a better grasp of the scheduled hours and have real-time insight into the availability of employees. Department managers within the stores are fully empowered to work with the store managers to achieve the best results. At headquarters there is improved insight into schedules and the use of hours, helping to better support the stores. HQ can also use long-range forecasting for more parts of the organisation and investigate integrating Time & Attendance with their scheduler.