One of Australia’s largest supermarkets chooses SAP for workforce management
Sydney, Australia — Australian supermarket, Franklins Pty Ltd has selected SAP Workforce Management (WFM) software to help the organisation manage staff rostering.
An existing SAP for Retail and SAP Business Warehouse customer, Franklins has selected SAP to improve customer service and improve shelf stocking efficiency by ensuring that staff rostering can be managed effectively across its 80 stores.
Franklins used a range of manual systems to schedule staff, prior to the implementation of SAP. These systems were developed by store managers over a long period of time. The company employs more than 4,000 staff throughout NSW.
“Our stores range in size from 25 staff to more than 180 in the larger supermarkets, ensuring roster levels accurately matched changing demand can be a challenging and time consuming task,” said Megan Lucas, Labour Planning and Productivity Manager, Franklins Pty Ltd. “Our managers had to estimate sales levels for the coming week and then calculate how many staff hours they would require. Then managers would have to work out the best way to use those hours.”
“SAP has made these challenges a thing of the past,” said Ms Lucas. “SAP Workforce Management software integrates with our existing SAP Business Warehouse to provide managers with precise information about sales patterns, which improves the accuracy and speed of management decisions relating to the allocation of human resources.”
Real time sales data is captured at each supermarket every 15 minutes and stored in the SAP system. This data is used to predict what will happen at the same time in subsequent weeks.
“The manager gets a comprehensive report that tells them which people should be working and when they should be rostered on. They can review and make changes if required, but the bulk of the scheduling work has been done for them,” said Ms Lucas. “We have a more consistent level of customer service at all times and there has been a noticeable improvement in rostering of staff for re-stocking of shelves. The SAP software is able to predict times of peak customer activity and the re-stocking can be planned to take place before and after these peaks occur in order to achieve more consistent presentation standards in store.”
Moving forward, Franklins is looking at ways it can use the system to streamline administrative tasks in each store. These include everything from banking the daily takings to ordering stock.
