The right staff at the right cost

With our planning tool, you can deploy your staff as effectively as possible. This allows you to make considerable savings on labour costs. Read more here.

The right staff at the right cost

Organisations face challenges in creating an orderly and effective workforce planning. For supermarkets in particular, this is a considerable challenge. In order to have the right tasks performed at the right time by the right employee, it is necessary to collect sufficient insights. In our previous blog, we told you how to get a grip on your staff planning and staffing with the right planning tool. In this blog, we will tell you more about deploying the right staff at the right cost and how you can save on this.

Steering and controlling costs

The costs of a (large) organisation can mount up considerably. From paying the rent to the cost of the premises and stock. Personnel costs and loss of earnings are the largest cost items that can be influenced. Sufficient staff must be present every day to ensure a high level of service. This is also quite a task when working with fresh products. In order to save costs, we therefore look at which costs can be controlled. We are talking about costs that are controllable or uncontrollable:

• Uncontrollable costs: these are costs such as rent and the cost of your premises. These costs are difficult to control or reduce.
• Controllable costs: these are, for example, the wage costs. You have direct influence on these costs by making adjustments.

In addition, schedules and rosters, i.e. controllable personnel costs, are constantly changing. Perhaps you recognise it yourself: at the last minute, a number of shifts have been changed, as a result of which there seemed to be a gap in the planning. Your staff try to solve this among themselves, with all good intentions, but the result is that there are now three expensive employees scheduled in instead of one. So how do you make sure you still have control of the situation? A planning tool makes this possible.

How do you manage labour costs with workforce planning?

Do you have the right insights at your disposal thanks to the planning tool? Then you will take steps to control the labour costs. Our package already offers many useful insights with which you can make a well-considered decision. These insights can be used to save on various aspects:

• Flex personnel - the (partial) deployment of flex personnel instead of permanent staff is a way to save on labour costs. Because flexi-staff is used when needed, you do not end up with wasted manpower.
• Make better use of hours - with the help of the Workforce Management tool, you can use the hours of your staff as effectively as possible. This is how you create effective staff planning. With effective staff planning, you deploy your staff in the right place at the right time. This prevents unnecessary costs of (expensive) staff.

Case: Scheepers Retail Group

With these goals in mind, we set to work at Scheepers Retail Groep:

"If you work in a targeted way and use the system properly, savings of 0.5% to 1% on labour costs can be achieved relatively easily within a year. In addition, more grip on the operational processes quickly leads to a 20% improvement in productivity".

Peter Peels - Director Retail

Want to read more about our work and excellent results for Scheepers Retail Groep?

Download the case of Scheepers Retail Groep here

Download case

About the author Stef van Dijk

Stef van Dijk has extensive experience in supermarkets and knows the food retail industry inside and out. Stef writes blogs on all relevant issues around workforce management and food retail.