Turning Demand into Revenue

Rylee O'Dowd

00:10 - 01:38
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening depending on where you are in the world, where you're coming from. Welcome to Turning Demand into Powering Smarter Scheduling for Peak Season Success.
I'm Rylee O'Dowd. I am with Legion, and I'll be their producer for today's call.
So before we dive in, and see Legion in action, we wanted to take care of a few housekeeping items. Please use the q and a box.
You'll notice that throughout today's session. We'll be monitoring your questions and answering at the end if we have time.
And if we don't, we will certainly follow-up afterwards via email and ensure you get that answered. If you have any technical issues, please drop them in the q and a or chat, and I will assist you directly.
We will also have a replay of today's webinar. It will be available and sent to your email.
You can revisit or share that with your colleagues. We would love for you to dive deeper if you have time.
And then finally, at the end of this webinar, webinar, we will be drawing one name from the raffle for a gift card winner, so please stay tuned to the very end when that name will be announced. But now, that we have that out of the way, let's get started.
I'd like to introduce our two Legion experts. Malysa O'Connor is the VP of product marketing here, and Michaela Robertson is our solution consultant and Legion expert.
But I will let you both take it away.

Malysa O'Connor

01:38 - 04:31
Awesome. Thanks so much, Rylee.
So one of the things that caught my attention, recently was this statistic around peak season hiring. And this year, it's hitting a sixteen year low.
So when you think about that and you think about the stress of having to deliver on expectations during this peak season, and it's often the biggest revenue generating time of the year for many businesses, One of the things that's really important is with these small seasonal gains in terms of employees, how do you get the most out of the resources that you have? And that's what we're gonna talk a little bit about today. And we recently did a study, and it was really interesting because this appears to be on the mind of many managers.
We we interviewed a couple thousand managers, across the country and around the world. And one of the things that was top of mind for them was 84% of the managers want technology that calculates hourly employee productivity.
And then they're also another 86% of those are interested in technology that identifies those high performing employees and then automatically schedules them during peak hours. So when you think about it, when you're facing those shrinking margins and shrinking resources, how do you ensure that every hour drives revenue? And that's what many of the managers we talked to are looking for.
And so today, there's often a missing link between labor plans and performance. When you think about scheduling without productivity, a lot of blind spots occur.
You know, things like, schedules are built on guesswork and not productivity. There's no feedback loop that allows, you know, managers to really understand the performance of those schedules.
Labor plans are disconnected from actual performance. You're being asked to meet sales goals, but you have no way of knowing whether or not your labor plans are going to enable you to meet those sales goals.
Automation, you know, a lot of things are automated in scheduling today, but it often ignores this most important factor, which is productivity. And, you know, managers are kind of forced to gamble with margins, in order to hit targets.
And so what Michaela is going to walk you through today is how Legion makes every hour count and turns, you know, real time productivity, turns that guesswork into precision, gives you the visibility and feedback loop that you need to have, you know, make confident decisions. We're providing analytics that expose the impact and can refuel improvement in your schedules.
And then how this is, you know, automation is scaled, across all of your organization so that you're really making a making sure that every hour directly drives those sales and service impacts that you're looking for, particularly in the peak season. So with that, I'm gonna pass to Michaela so she can show you how it's done.
Perfect. Thank you,.

Michaela Robertson

04:31 - 22:27
Malysa. So now that we understand the missing link between labor plans and between performance, let's actually talk about how Legion can help make every shift more productive.
So at the heart of the slide that we see here, this is what we call productivity driven scheduling. It's all about linking real employee performance to how you as a customer forecast, how you schedule, how you optimize your labor plan.
And the first step of that process is going to be compute and improve. So with compute and improve, this is going to be a way where Legion automatically links your demand drivers like sales, transactions, customers, whatever you use to drive demand today, to actual performance in order to create productivity scores.
And these these scores get smarter over time as well. So as more data is captured, these scores are constantly reoptimizing.
And that actually takes us into our next step, which is forecasting and scheduling smarter. So as we mentioned, those productivity scores are getting smarter over time.
But what we are doing with those productivity scores is we are actually aligning those to staffing, and we are aligning those with your sales. We're aligning those values with your conversion goals.
So really what we're getting at is we want to ensure that you have your best people in the right shifts at the right times. And that also takes us into our third key factor here which is optimize with flexibility.
So when we think about optimizing with flexibility, what Legion is doing is we are balancing productivity with employee satisfaction and preferences as well. We know that we need to keep happy employees.
So when we're thinking about AI, we're not just driving efficiency. We're not just looking at what you need to achieve your goals.
We're also supporting a positive employee experience by factoring in their preferences, their availability, those items that they can enter into the system to have some autonomy over their schedules. And then finally, we get to see and act on performance.
So it's great. We understand productivity.
We understand how we are computing schedules and optimizing it for productivity. But what how do we manage this inter week? How do we as managers, how do we as customers, as retailers actually understand how to drive and how to make changes that are educational based on that productivity.
So with this, Legion has incorporated dashboards, leaderboards, schedule edits, recommendations that we'll see in just a moment in the UI to ensure that our managers, that our admins, that our district managers get clear visibility into what is working. Are there any gaps that exist in our current schedules today and our current rosters? And how can we schedule smarter next time? How can we make smarter decisions when we're editing our schedules? So the premise of this is that instead of scheduling based on guesswork, based on averages, every decision that a manager or a scheduler is making is going to be powered by real performance data.
So we're always going to ensure that every shift is directly contributing to both our revenue from a productivity perspective and then also our customer and our employee experience. So with that, I'm going to move to our next slide here and this is really focused on flexibility because every customer is unique, every customer is different and what productivity means is also going to have its own unique definitions.
So on the left here, we think about maximizing our peak revenue. So during your peak periods, you want your best sellers on the floor when traffic is highest.
And so with Legion, we make that easy. You are able to staff your top performers on higher volume, longer shifts in order to boost both sales as a customer and commission from that employee perspective.
But at the same time, you can also allocate more hours to proven performers while still maintaining compliance. And then again, referring back to that previous slide, honoring your preferences and your availability for every employee as well.
And a common challenge that we see when we incorporate productivity into scheduling is new hires. But with Legion, we ensure that for new hires, they can still have the opportunity to boost their priority, boost their productivity, to get higher opportunity shifts so that they're able to actually ramp up faster during that onboarding and during that initial hiring period.
And then next year is going to be balanced coverage and coaching. So from a balanced coverage and coaching perspective, we think about how do we actually identify top talent.
Some retailers, some customers want to spread top talent throughout the week, not just put them on the weekends or put them from noon to two because that's our peak hours. So with Legion, we actually support distributing strong performers across shifts both for consistency and pure mentoring so that you don't always have the same five top performers during the peak hours while the rest of those shifts are pretty scattered throughout the week.
And with this, you can even import your performance scores. And what Legion would then do is automatically adjust for attendance signals like lateness, like no shows to truly, encourage and ensure fairness between all productivity types.
And then finally, with that balanced coverage and coaching, we are also going to let you match your task difficulty to your skill level as well. So if you are scheduling out tasks, if you do have different, tasks that occur throughout the week, we can ensure that if you have complex tasks, those are being, scheduled out to the top performers while new hires, those in a ramp up period, or maybe your temporary workers that you hire seasonally have more of the simpler tasks that don't require as much as those complex ones.
And then finally, we are flexible by design. Legion as a whole is a very configurable intuitive interface, and we match that flexibility with this productivity scheduling as well.
So Legion is actually built to adapt to your environment, to your needs, to your business requirements. So even if you don't have POS data, we can calculate rolling productivity scores using interval based metrics.
You can choose how to measure your productivity. So whether it's sales per hour, transactions per hour, we can do a combined approach based on your demand drivers.
We are able to take that into account. And with this, we also support very complex rules like union rules or maybe scheduling policy rules at a jurisdictional level even so that we can give seniority and give those options for seniority, but still ensure that we are taking into account productivity as that kind of tie breaker when we are optimizing our shifts and optimizing our scheduling.
And finally, we want to ensure managerial control as well. So managers will still have control over swaps, over covers.
But with optimization, we can still flex between peak prioritization, longer shifts, balance coverages. So the optimized schedule and the manager edits are always going to fit whatever strategy is best for you as a company.
So, ultimately, with this slide, no matter your operational model, no matter your business requirements, Legion is going to give you with this productivity based scheduling a flexible approach that aligns your scheduling with your business goals without sacrificing fairness, coverage, performance, and what employees need from a preference and availability perspective. So we've talked a lot in the last few slides about how we are actually kind of in the back end from the scheduling perspective computing productivity.
But now we want to actually see it in action. We want to say, okay.
We understand how we are incorporating these values into the schedules. What does that mean, and what does that look like for a manager? What does the day in the life look like for a manager that's trying to optimize their schedule maybe midweek to ensure that they're taking into account transactions per hour or sales per hour? So I'm actually going to flip over to the UI here, and we are currently in as Emma.
Emma is our store manager, our scheduler, or store one 0 one. And the first call out from a productivity driven scheduling perspective is going to be this leaderboard that we see at the top right here.
All of these KPIs are customizable, but our leaderboard is going to be an out-of the-box way for managers to quickly get visibility into their top performers for that week. So Emma is actually able to click in and see full list, and she's automatically able to see a ranked list of all of her productivity metrics.
But what's powerful about this leaderboard and about this KPI pop up is that we can also reshuffle this as a manager. We can filter this.
We can sort this. So we can make decisions based on what's important for our store and for our company.
So with that, let's say that Emma really wants to focus on who is her top performer from a sales per hour perspective. So what Emma has the ability to do is come into filter, filter by SPH, and this leaderboard is automatically going to be readjusted to show who is my highest performer from an SPH perspective.
So now Emma is able to see that Michelle is the top performer, Sam is a is following up, and then we have Amy, so our top three. But we want to get a little bit more granular with how we're looking at this productivity, how we're looking at our SPH.
We don't necessarily want to look at our SPH for our team leads or our managers because we know our managers are top performers. That's how they got promoted to that managerial role.
But we really wanna focus on our TMs. We want to focus on who is outperforming consistently from an SPH perspective.
So as a manager, I've been able to take that sorting in my KPI list one step further. I can then filter on job title, and I can see the full list of all of my team members that match the SPH, that match the job title of team member, and I can instantly see that visibility and see a ranked list of my top performers from highest SPH to lowest SPH in order to then make educated decisions and have that visibility.
But we're not just giving visibility to SPH. We're not just giving visibility into transactions per hour, into your productivity metrics within these KPIs, within these leaderboards.
We're also incorporating incorporating these in the schedule editing process. So if Emma comes in and clicks edit on her schedule, she's going to get the typical, schedule change premium warning.
We are always going to warn of compliance. But our managers are then able to edit anyways and then start managing their schedules.
Life happens. We have interweek demand edits that we need to make, schedule edits that we need to make.
But in that perspective, we still want to ensure from a productivity scheduling perspective that our managers are basing it on their top performers. So in this case, let's say that we scroll down and we want to swap Michelle and Rose's shift.
They said that Rose would rather work on Wednesday, Michelle would rather work on Thursday. So as a manager, I have the autonomy to come in and perform that swap.
However, I know that Thursday is a slightly higher day. It's slightly more from a customer or slightly more from a sales perspective from a for demand.
So what I can do when I'm performing that swap is when I swap Michelle with Rose, I can not only see if there's any sort of compliance violations, not only see if there's any sort of violations to my business requirements to overtime, I can also see all of the metrics that I have configured as a company from an SPH from a productivity perspective. So when I'm performing the swap request, I have the knowledge that Thursday is a busier day, and I can see that their SPH is pretty comparable.
Michelle is slightly higher. So in that use in that case, I actually might want to swap Michelle to that Thursday shift since Thursday is a higher productivity.
So what this really shows to our managers is that when they are performing these swap requests, when they're sending out open shifts, they always have the visibility that we see here for their configured productivity when they're making these changes so that they can make educated changes, not just for compliance, for availability, for preferences, but also for productivity. So we can then swap these shifts, hit swap, and then they're automatically going to swap with that SPH taken into account.
And this same functionality will exist when we're using our built in AI for different schedule edits when it comes to reassigning. So if we come into Marvin's shift, for example, Marvin is currently working on Friday or Marvin's also working on Saturday.
Whatever day that we want to edit for Marvin, when we click on his profile picture, we're not only going to see this employee card that's showing his employment status, badges, configurable metrics that we can bring to life here. We can also see his SPH and his items for traffic.
We know that with the optimization, this SPH and these items in traffic are pretty much what we need in order to satisfy those peak hours. So what we can do when we're reassigning the shift is we can come in to reassign.
We can use Legion AI in order to receive fully tailored recommendations for who is the best fit to fill that shift. And we can also see out of Harvey, Jack, and Frank with their SPH, with their items per traffic, with their sales per traffic, which one is the most suitable candidate to come in and fill that shift for Marvin? And in this case, we can see that Harvey is most suitable.
He has a comparable SPH. She's trending very well for sales per traffic, for items per traffic.
So in a matter of seconds, we can not only validate that we have a recommended TM that can come in and work that shift without triggering overtime, without triggering a business rules, violation, without going into their unavailable time, that also matches the productivity that we need to meet our goals for that Saturday. And finally, the last call out from an SPH perspective, we understand that we have visibility for our leaderboard.
We understand that we have visibility into individual employee level metrics when it comes to making schedule edits. But when we're visualizing our schedule for the week as well, we also have the ability to sort and filter by SPH and by those productivity values.
So if we come to our grid view here, this grid view is going to give us a high level overview in an easy to read format of all of our shifts for this upcoming week by employee. But let's say that for the week, we want to quickly ensure as a manager, I have my top three, my top five performers from an SPH perspective scheduled during my peak hours, which is just something I I know.
I know when my peak hours are. I can validate it against demand.
Let me make sure before I publish my schedule that everything looks as if I would expect. So from that perspective, we would actually be able to come in and sort, and you can sort by each of those different productivity metrics.
So Rose is then able to sort by items for traffic, sales for traffic, by SPH, and we can then see what those swaps that we made with the covers that we made, who our top performers are for that week. And if we know that our top hours are typically two to four or maybe our top hours are typically from, one to three, We can quickly validate here against the leaderboard too, which fully matches this SPH ranking that we see here, that we have top performers overall for the week that do match those SPH values, that do match those peak hours.
So just to summarize from the UI perspective, we are going to give our managers visibility into all of their key productivity metrics, but from a dashboard perspective, from a schedule editing perspective, from a schedule filtering perspective. So every part of the application is not just going to work in availability, preferences, compliance.
We are going to ensure that you have your top performers and you understand what their metrics are so that you can make educated decisions. And with that, I am going to switch back over to our slides here just to kind of summarize everything that we've seen today and also just add a little bit of extra light from an admin perspective as well.
So what we just walked through is really showing how Legion's AI scheduling engine can bring productivity into the optimization process and then into the the day to day, the day in the life when we're thinking about our management team or our schedule editing team. So as you can see in the UI on the right, from a configuration perspective, customers can always easily adjust priorities.
We can adjust priorities for budget adherence, employee preferences, coverage. So when we think about productivity, we are completely flexible.
And with this flexibility, we are always going to incorporate your productivity scores into every scheduling decision from the time your forecast is generated, the time you optimize your schedule, to the very last edit that a manager might make on the schedule in the UI. And what that means for our customers is that we get a balanced result.
We get a data driven schedule, and that schedule is always going to meet business needs, but it's also going to ensure that you are taking into account your productive employees, and you are placing those productive employees at the right place at the right time. It's a flexible, transparent system.
It is designed to make your scheduling both smarter and simpler. And so with that, with, everything we've seen today, I am going to pass it over to Malysa just to kind of tie a bow on everything that we've seen so far.

Malysa O'Connor

22:27 - 23:25
Awesome. Thanks so much, Michaela.
That was really great. So as you can see, Legion fully optimizes all of your schedules, taking into account all of the inputs, whether it's demand forecast and labor standards to create that optimal labor guidance, all of your constraints, including budgets, staffing levels, things like that, all of your labor policies and compliance and regulations, as well as employee data inputs.
So and a really interesting thing and cool thing about Legion is that we're including all those employee data and inputs at the time that we're creating the optimized labor plan. So it's in there from the beginning, whether it's their position and their skills, their work preferences, their their availability, and now their productivity as well.
And so we're really completing the leap the the loop in delivering those perfect schedules, to you and your business. And with that, we'd love to open it up to any questions.
So we'll turn it back to you.

Rylee O'Dowd

23:25 - 23:40
Awesome. Thank you so much.
We did have one question that also just got put in our chat, that I wanna ask first. Re: skills and assessment, can you link it to HCM learning platform for skills?

Michaela Robertson

23:40 - 24:02
So from a school perspective, we do have the ability to integrate badges, to integrate metrics from an HCM, for example, into Legion. We have customers that use that today.
We do have an open AI infrastructure platform in order to integrate those values and then subsequently take those values into account from a productivity based scheduling perspective. Yes.

Rylee O'Dowd

24:02 - 24:15
Awesome. Thank you.
We also had one submitted in q and a. If we already have a productivity awards program, can those same criteria be applied to scheduling?

Michaela Robertson

24:15 - 24:40
Yeah. Absolutely.
We with the flexibility of our design, however you are taking into account productivity today, we can take that into account in the system. We can support that level of flexibility, and then we can also layer on and tweak it as well if for certain locations, districts, parts of your fleet, you want to change slightly.
We have the flexibility to do so within the system. Cool.

Rylee O'Dowd

24:40 - 24:50
And that probably leads into the next question of how how does Legion how do we define productivity within the system?

Michaela Robertson

24:50 - 25:31
So productivity isn't necessarily defined by Legion. Productivity is going to be defined by every customer.
So a typical use case for retailers is defining productivity based on sales per hour. Sales per hour or sales per labor hour even is a very common metric that we see, but we can take that and we can layer on transactions per hour, customers per hour.
So in short, how we define productivity in the system is going to be how you define your demand drivers, how you define productivity so that we can ensure that we support that flexible based approach that takes into account productivity the way that you mean, to count compute productivity today. Great.

Rylee O'Dowd

25:31 - 25:50
That is super helpful. I think that also sparked another question from our audience.
So, this is from Britnee. Can you have a leaderboard that doesn't use those scores into schedules? Our HR team has concerns about using those metrics to schedule, but would still like visibility into the KPIs.

Michaela Robertson

25:50 - 26:52
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
That's an excellent question. And so with our productivity, we can compute employee productivity.
And then on that last slide, we could see kind of from a scheduling perspective the different weights that we have. So if you want to weight, your budget adherence slightly differently, your employee match, slightly differently, We can change the weights where maybe we want to compute the productivity, but we don't want to necessarily have it impact scheduling.
That's completely flexible. And with that, in a typical HR concern we see as well, which kind of sparks a follow-up, If you don't want managers viewing leaderboards or maybe you don't want employees viewing leaderboards because we don't really want that gamification aspect, everything in Legion is based on, roles and access permissions.
So we can restrict who can actually see the leaderboard too. So if it's something you want your district managers, regional managers, admin to see but not really you need the field team, that's completely configurable as well.
Great.

Rylee O'Dowd

26:52 - 27:12
I think that's really helpful insight. So can how does the system account for anomalies or unexpected spikes that might artificially inflate or even reduce productivity scores? Yeah.
Great question. So we.

Michaela Robertson

27:12 - 28:07
have a configurable period for assessments. So we have a rolling assessment period.
So we can take into account anomalies or unexpected spikes automatically during forecasting so we aren't, we aren't impacting our top performers when we do see an anomaly in sales and transactions and customers that are coming in. But I think more importantly for productivity, since we do have a rolling assessment period, whether it's a week, two weeks, a month, we aren't just going to look at Malysa's individual nine to five shift and then automatically compute her productivity.
So if there are certain days that are really high or certain days that are really low, or maybe you have a top performer that's working with people that need improvement or maybe new hires that are still developing their productivity scores, we aren't going to impact employees based on those individual shifts because it is more of a rolling assessment period. Gotcha.
That makes.

Rylee O'Dowd

28:07 - 29:20
sense. And then our well, I guess that kind of answered our last question.
So it was a double whammy here. So I think that concludes our presentation for today.
Thank you again, Malysa and Michaela, and thanks to everyone who joined us.