Today’s business landscape presents a myriad of challenges. From economic uncertainty, changing consumer habits, employee expectations, and rapidly evolving technology advances, 2024 will be a balancing act. For industries with large-scale hourly workforces, such as retail and hospitality, solving today’s challenges with legacy solutions continues to be a challenge.

Traditional methods of managing a large workforce involve tedious manual processes that are prone to human error. Legacy workforce management solutions were never designed for the workforce. Cutting costs and business efficiency was the focus, with the employee experience just an afterthought. Built on outdated technology, they lack mature data science, are highly customized, costly to maintain, and lack the flexibility you need to adapt to changing business needs.

These systems have failed to keep pace with the growing complexity and dynamic nature of modern enterprises.

Enter Legion WFM, revolutionary Workforce Management Software designed specifically for businesses operating with large, often global operations. At Legion, we believe that labor efficiency and employee engagement can be improved simultaneously. To do this, workforce management must fundamentally evolve to be intelligent, automated, and employee-centric. Automation is at the foundation of everything we do—reducing the friction that distracts managers and employees from focusing on what is most important—servicing your customers.

Unlocking the Power of Automation: Key Points

• Traditional methods of managing large workforces are labor-intensive and detract from the time managers can spend on building employee engagement, servicing customers, and driving top-line revenue. Legion’s industry-leading WFM platform enables intelligent automation to maximize labor efficiency and employee engagement simultaneously, streamlining tasks like scheduling, time tracking, and compliance management.
• Legion’s award-winning AI-driven Demand Forecasting automatically predicts demand across all customer touchpoints and locations. It synthesizes thousands of data points, including historical data, ongoing operations, and future weather and local events, to create the optimal labor plan without human intervention.
• Legion uses advanced optimization techniques to match business needs with employees’ skills and preferences 96% of the time. Employees can be automatically scheduled across locations to optimize labor efficiency.
• Automation fosters greater employee engagement by giving employees more flexibility and control over their schedules and better matching of preferences and availability, resulting in increased job satisfaction.
• Legion empowers businesses with insights from analytics and automation capabilities. From precise labor budgeting to demand forecasting and compliance management, the software ensures that staffing decisions align with business needs.
• Legion WFM’s software emphasizes the transformative power of automation by driving efficiency, engagement, and informed decision-making within large-scale enterprises.

Automation is Crucial for Labor Efficiency and Employee Engagement

Automation plays a pivotal role in maximizing labor efficiency and employee engagement.

Not only does it allow you to reduce time spent managing schedules, timecards, compliance and more—it gives employees what they really want: more flexibility and control over their schedules. With automated scheduling, employees can swap shifts effortlessly or pick up extra hours when it suits them best. And, when schedules align with their availability and preferences, there are fewer last-minute callouts to manage, and happy employees are more likely to be engaged and productive.

At an enterprise scale, automation becomes not just helpful but is mission critical to keep operations running smoothly. For example, streamlining labor operations by automatically and precisely predicting demand and instantly generating the optimal schedule to control labor costs and meet employee needs and preferences.

The Impact of Automation on Operational Efficiency

With workforce management software like Legion WFM, companies are unlocking labor efficiency, automating daily tasks, and increasing the accuracy and effectiveness of forecasts and budgets to build optimal labor plans. Unplanned overtime is a consistent financial drain. Through effective labor budgeting and precise demand forecasting, however, you can schedule staff more accurately and automatically enforce budgets in the schedule to avoid unexpected costs. Moreover, modern WFM systems like Legion enforce compliance with local labor laws with ease. Schedule-aware timesheets automatically assess schedule change premiums and highlight timeclock-to-schedule variances, so managers don’t need to spend valuable time on schedule changes or timesheet approvals.

Legion’s Automation Features Will Change How You Run Your Business

Traditional systems can make managing large, hourly workforces challenging.

Legacy workforce management solutions were never designed for the workforce. Cutting costs and business efficiency were the focus, with the employee experience just an afterthought. Built on outdated technology, they lack mature data science, are highly customized, costly to maintain, and lack the flexibility you need to adapt to changing business needs. Such legacy and manual processes are incapable of keeping up with the intricacies of contemporary businesses – only advanced workforce management software like Legion’s can effectively manage these complexities through intelligent automation.

Labor Budgeting

Enterprise businesses are constantly seeking ways to streamline operations, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. One key area where significant improvements can be made is labor budgeting.

Legion’s Labor Budgeting product combines accurate long-term demand forecasts with your detailed labor model and scheduling rules to create precise labor budgets. Businesses can create long-range labor budgets and execution tracking for annual labor budget planning with ongoing monthly and quarterly re-forecasting. Greater forecast accuracy and improved budget adherence can be achieved by leveraging machine learning-powered forecasting and scenario modeling based on date-effective and location-specific labor models, operating hours, wage rates, and other operational inputs.

Demand Forecasting

Enterprise businesses, particularly in the retail sector, grapple with a multitude of challenges when it comes to labor management. One crucial aspect that often poses difficulties is demand forecasting – predicting future customer traffic and sales trends. The precision and reliability of these forecasts directly impact staffing decisions, operational efficiency, and profitability.

Legion’s Demand Forecasting uses advanced ML to automatically generate and continuously improve labor models per data set to deliver the most efficient and accurate forecast results. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, Legion’s platform can generate highly accurate demand predictions tailored specifically to your business needs.

With Legion Demand Forecasting, businesses can predict demand across all customer touchpoints and locations, synthesizing thousands of data points, including historical data, ongoing operations, and future weather events, to create the optimal labor plan automatically.

ML algorithms can analyze numerous variables, such as historical sales data, local events information or weather patterns concurrently. This results in more accurate labor plans that align perfectly with anticipated customer flow and reduce unnecessary labor costs.

Labor Optimization

Labor Optimization offers a comprehensive solution to automate, streamline, and optimize labor-related tasks within large-scale enterprises. Legion WFM enables intelligent automation to empower managers with staffing guidance and labor insights. Businesses can automatically generate optimal labor plans creating granular, down-to-the-minute task-based labor modeling across all channels. Labor Optimization automatically computes optimal labor hours based on precisely forecasted demand and customer labor standards.

Flexible workloads, such as restocking or inventory, and compliance rules can automatically be incorporated with no human intervention required.

Labor Optimization drives efficient labor plans, giving businesses more insight into long-term and short-term demand forecasts with less effort.

It also helps ensure regulatory compliance. With complex rules varying across different regions and constantly changing over time, maintaining compliance manually can be challenging at best. ’

Automated Scheduling

Automated Scheduling empowers employees by giving them greater control over their schedules while freeing managers from the time-consuming task of managing schedules manually.

Legion WFM enables intelligent automation to instantly generate optimal schedules that match business needs with employee preferences and skills, including the most qualified employee for a shift based on skills, performance, labor rules, budget constraints, and compliance rules. Curated shift offers are automatically created in seconds based on preferences, skills, and compliance factors. A schedule score helps managers assess schedule quality and meet the factors most important to the business.

With self-service options like shift swaps and claims at their fingertips, employees can tailor when and how much they work directly through Legion WFM. And, the AI-generated scheduling engine learns based on manager edits and continuously improves.

Time and Attendance

Legion WFM transforms how businesses manage time and attendance. In today’s dynamic business environment, manual tracking of employee hours is not only tedious but also prone to errors which could lead to costly compliance issues or payroll inaccuracies.

Legion Time and Attendance enables intelligent automation of timesheet approvals, corrections, and premium calculations. Businesses can automate timecard approvals across all locations so managers are required to review exceptions only. Schedule-aware timesheets automatically assess schedule change premiums and highlight timeclock-to-schedule variances.

And, compliance is simplified through automated premium assessments and enforcement of labor laws such as overtime, predictive scheduling, and split shifts.

Lastly, Real-Time Attendance provides an at-a-glance dashboard for rosters of all sizes, providing visibility into employees arriving soon, leaving soon, approaching overtime, and more.

Let Legion WFM Guide Your Enterprise With Automation

In today’s fast-paced retail environment, efficient workforce management is a critical factor in maintaining operational excellence.

It is imperative to have the right employees at the right place and time, with optimal skill sets aligned with business needs. Automation streamlines various aspects of workforce management – from planning and scheduling to time and attendance tracking and employee engagement.

Automated systems reduce manual workload, allowing managers to focus on strategic initiatives rather than administrative tasks.

Legion’s Workforce Management Software provides an intelligent, automated, and employee-centric approach to staffing decisions. By leveraging advanced analytics and automation capabilities, enterprises can optimize their labor force effectively—improving both the bottom line and customer satisfaction while simultaneously improving employee engagement. To learn more, request a demo of Legion WFM.