Personnel costs are a standard item on the agenda of virtually every retail management team. Not because budgeting is impossible, but because predictability is lacking. Labor costs are the largest expense item that you can influence, and at the same time the most difficult to control.
Many retailers work with clear budgets per week, period, or year. However, overspending rarely occurs as a result of one major decision. It occurs as a result of dozens of small choices, made every day, at the branch level.
Schedules are created within a financial framework, but the actual decisions are made locally and on a human level.
Each choice on its own makes sense. The total does not.
This makes cost control something you analyze after the fact, rather than something you manage in advance.
As long as cost control does not take place at the time of planning, it remains a reporting issue.
How do you ensure that personnel costs are not a necessity, but an explicit choice?
We help retailers make these kinds of deployment choices explicit. Not by planning harder, but by determining in advance what is most important.
We would be happy to discuss this in more detail.
