Boost Manager Productivity by 5 Hours per Week and Spend Just Two Minutes to Learn How

Experienced retailers know that a tiny improvement in management productivity can have a huge impact on the bottom line. A recently released Total Economic Impact study by Forrester Research quantifies this relationship, and the result is truly amazing.

Before Selecting Legion WFM
Before selecting Legion WFM, managers at the interviewees’ organizations struggled to identify ideal staffing allocations in their previous environments due to the lack of visibility into scheduling and workforce management. In addition, the existing manual scheduling process required managers to use paper timesheets, and they spent hours each week reviewing and finalizing them each week. If an employee suddenly had to change their shift after a schedule was finalized, it was up to the manager to find a replacement. This time-consuming and inefficient system put the brunt of the work for scheduling on managers’ shoulders and contributed to their burnout.

Managers also had limited insight into employee availability, and some employees ended up being overworked while others were under-scheduled. This issue was especially detrimental to scheduling during peak times because managers couldn’t anticipate high demand, causing overworked employees to feel frustrated, which created a retention risk.

Switching to Legion WFM
By switching from on-premises workforce management (WFM) tools to the cloud-based Legion WFM platform, retail managers saved an average of five hours per week per location on scheduling tasks. Assuming an average hourly wage of $32, a composite average of 10,000 employees, 500 locations per enterprise, and other factors translate to labor cost savings with a 3-year net present value (NPV) of $4,227,648, according to the Forrester report.

The productivity gains are primarily the result of the increased visibility into labor needs, scheduling automation, and Legion’s AI-powered demand forecasting capabilities. More specifically, retailers achieved:

• Faster, more accurate scheduling – By harnessing AI-driven demand forecasting and replacing manual legacy scheduling with automated scheduling based on business needs and employee preferences, retailers could create much more accurate labor plans and full compliant schedules in far less time.
• Reapplication of saved time into strategic priorities – The time savings allowed managers to reinvest saved hours into higher-value strategic activities. Forrester conservatively estimated that 50% of the total time saved per manager was applied directly to value-generating tasks.
• Increase manager-driven sales contribution – The Legion WFM platform freed up time for managers to directly impact the bottom line of their business. After implementing Legion WFM, a director of human resources at a retail company saw a 22% increase in manager contributions to sales. The platform enables managers to optimize their productivity and gives them more hours to reinvest into strategizing, serving customers on the floor, and helping train new employees.

Comments from business leaders interviewed for the Forrester study shed additional insight into the advantages of the cloud-based model:

• One interviewee noted a 50% reduction in time spent on scheduling due to the Legion WFM. They said managers are now reinvesting almost two hours per week in talent development, training, and other high-value tasks.
• Another interviewee saw a 4-to-6-hour reduction per week in time spent on scheduling and noted that managers now spend only 30 minutes on that task.
• Another retail executive estimated that their managers had reduced the time needed to finalize schedules from 45 minutes to just 15 minutes.

Read the Full Report
Increased management productivity was only one of the quantified benefits cited by the Forrester study. Additional results achieved by Legion customers include:

• 13x ROI with a total NPV of $13.39 million
  over three years (for the composite organization of 10,000 employees moving from a legacy WFM system over three years)
• $6.1 million in savings
  (46% of total savings) over three years due to more accurate demand forecasts
• 10% reduction in overtime pay
  due to automated handling of compliance violations in schedule creation and execution

Read the full Forrester study to get all the details. To learn more about how your business can benefit from using Legion WFM, please request a demo.