The Right Staff at the Right Price

With our scheduling tool, you can deploy your staff as effectively as possible. This allows you to achieve significant savings on labor costs. Read more here.

The Right Staff at the Right Price

Companies face the challenge of developing a well-organized and effective workforce planning strategy. This is a particularly significant challenge for supermarkets. To ensure that the right tasks are performed by the right employees at the right time, it is necessary to gather sufficient insights. In our last blog post, we explained how you can get a handle on your workforce planning and staffing with the right planning tool. In this blog post, you’ll learn more about deploying the right staff at the right cost and how you can save money in the process.

Cost Management and Control

The costs of a (large) organization can add up significantly—from rent payments to the costs of facilities and equipment. Labor costs and lost revenue are the largest controllable cost items. There must be enough staff on hand every day to ensure a high level of service. This is a challenging task, especially when working with fresh products. To save money, we therefore look at which costs can be controlled. We’re talking about costs that are controllable or uncontrollable:

• Uncontrollable costs: These are costs such as rent and the costs associated with your business premises. These costs are difficult to control or reduce.
• Controllable costs: These include, for example, labor costs. You can directly influence these costs by making adjustments.

On top of that, the work schedules—that is, the controllable personnel costs—are constantly changing. Perhaps you’ve experienced this yourself: At the last minute, some shifts were changed, creating a gap in the schedule. Your employees try, with the best of intentions, to resolve the problem among themselves, but the result is that three expensive employees are now scheduled instead of one. So how can you ensure that you still have the situation under control? A scheduling tool makes this possible.

How can labor costs be managed through workforce planning?

Does the planning tool provide you with the right insights? If so, you’ll take steps to control labor costs. Our package already offers many useful insights that will help you make a well-informed decision. These insights can be used to save money in various areas:

• Flexible Staff – Using flexible staff (in part) instead of permanent employees is one way to reduce labor costs. Since flexible staff are only deployed as needed, no labor is wasted.
• Make Better Use of Work Time – With the help of the workforce management tool, you can make the most effective use of your employees’ work time. This enables you to create an effective workforce schedule. With an effective workforce schedule, you can deploy your staff in the right place at the right time. This helps avoid unnecessary costs associated with (expensive) staff.

About the Author Stef van Dijk

Stef van Dijk has extensive experience in the supermarket industry and knows the food retail sector inside and out. Stef writes blog posts on all relevant topics related to human resources management and food retail.