Retail Industry Turns to Kronos to Achieve Customer Centricity through Integrated Task Management
Integration of task management in Kronos for Retail to provide comprehensive approach to managing the workforce
NEW YORK, Jan. 14, 2008 — Increasingly, retailers are focusing on "customer-centric" strategies to deliver an optimal in-store shopping experience. This has challenged them to ensure that all aspects of store execution are efficient, effective, and consistent. It not only requires that the right associates are in the right places at the right time, but more importantly, that each associate is doing the right things to ensure store readiness and the delivery of top customer service. To achieve this higher level of store execution, retailers require sophisticated tools for planning, communication, and measurement of store-level initiatives, which can only be met with an integrated task management and workforce management solution.
Responding to this need, Kronos® Incorporated has announced its plans to deliver a fully integrated task management solution as part of Kronos for Retail. Kronos Task Management will enable retailers to align corporate planning with store execution, ensure consistency across stores, and increase organizational visibility, control and compliance. This will help retailers reduce labor costs, increase productivity, and positively impact the customer experience.
"Store employee tasks assigned by the home office representing approximately 35% of their workload must be captured and quantified alongside customer demand data to determine the appropriate labor allocation between the two," said Rob Garf, vice president of retail strategies at AMR Research*. "Feeding granular task information into forecasting and scheduling systems will accurately determine how much labor is needed at the appropriate day and time, along with the most qualified associate, for those particular tasks."
A new approach to Task Management
Unlike traditional task management solutions, Kronos Task Management is tightly integrated with Kronos for Retail workforce management applications. The result is the industry's first complete workforce and task management solution with end-to-end capabilities for budgeting, selection and hiring, forecasting, scheduling, task management, time and attendance, absence management, and analytics.
Align corporate planning with store execution
Inefficient communication between corporate and stores results in loss of productivity, poor conditions, and declining employee morale. Kronos Task Management automates corporate planning and approval of any store activity; streamlines communication to store-level; and increases organizational visibility to store execution.
Ensure consistency across stores
Inconsistent execution of tasks across stores degrades store conditions often resulting in low customer satisfaction and lost sales. Integrating task management with store labor forecasting and scheduling enables retailers to ensure that all tasks are properly planned, staffed, and executed.
Increase visibility, control, and compliance
Managing compliance to corporate directives across large store populations requires clear, two-way communication. With Kronos Task Management, approved tasks, progress, and status are visible at all levels simplifying compliance and accountability.
Growing consensus among retailers
Kronos recently polled a cross-section of apparel, food, and big box retailers, and found that 52 percent believe that the greatest business impact to inconsistent store execution is customer satisfaction. Thirty-two percent stated that the integration of task and workforce management is essential.
"What is fundamental to any customer-centric retailer today is the ability to effectively plan and communicate store initiatives, execute them consistently, and accurately monitor the results," said
John Anderson, global practice leader of retail at Kronos. "Closing the loop on this process enables a consistent customer experience. Kronos Task Management will make task planning, execution, and compliance an integrated part of the retail workforce management process and provide retailers with a single system of record for managing store productivity."
Kronos for Retail helps retailers hire the best people and manage them most effectively. This end-to-end suite addresses the challenges of managing the workforce with solutions for budgeting, employee selection and hiring, forecasting and scheduling, time and attendance, absence management, and analytics. Leading retailers from all segments of the industry, including AAFES, Anchor Blue, GameStop, IKEA, and Payless, depend on Kronos to balance the needs of business, customer, and employee. Retailers around the world with more than 80,000 stores and three million employees use Kronos in their stores.
Kronos made this announcement from the National Retail Federation's (NRF) 98th Annual Convention & Expo being in held in New York from Jan. 13-16. Kronos is exhibiting in booth #1355.
About Kronos Incorporated
Kronos Incorporated empowers organizations around the world to effectively manage their workforce. At Kronos, we are experts who are solely focused on delivering software and services that enable organizations to reduce costs, increase productivity, improve employee satisfaction, and ultimately enhance the level of service they provide. Kronos serves customers in more than 60 countries through its network of offices, subsidiaries, and distributors. Widely recognized as a market and thought leader in managing the workforce, Kronos has unrivaled reach with more than 30 million people using a Kronos solution every day. Learn more about Kronos at www.kronos.com.
* Excerpt from the AMR Research report: Retailers Reduce Store Execution Missteps with Task Management Technology, March 2005.
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