Higher earnings, without investment: optimization of employees’ working hours
There is one area where a good computer program is second to none. This is a very interesting area for every entrepreneur because it enables an increase in earnings without additional investment of money.
This is the area of optimization, the process by which we improve the performance of the assets (or resources) we already have: our employees, our goods, and finances.
Increasing earnings through optimization is the secret to the success of many stores and companies I work with, and all of them have one thing in common: the optimizations they perform are based on packages of quality information obtained from retail software.
Find your EMPLOYEE…just CLICK on
Let’s Go to the “For Employers” Section›››
Find your EMPLOYER…just CLICK on
Let’s Go to the “For Employees” Section›››
Find your HR TRAINING… just CLICK on
“Training and Consultations” Section›››
HOW TO START OPTIMIZATION
Optimizing salespeople’s working hours is very important and also relatively easy to do, so I suggest you start there.
This optimization can be done using two simple and very useful functions of a good retail program: working time records and visit counters. By combining the data that these two functions offer us, we can gain a better insight into the frequency of store visits and sales in relation to the activities of our employees, and therefore organize them better. These data can give us an accurate picture of when our shop has the highest number of visitors – by minutes and hours, and for every day of the week; when are the biggest markets or when are the periods with the highest number of individual purchases – and whether these periods coincide with the highest number of visits or not. And what is very important for us – what do our employees do in those (and all other) periods?
For example, if the reports tell us that, for example, we have great sales in a certain period, while both of our salespeople are active, and that sales drop significantly just at the moment when one of the salespeople goes on break or to the warehouse, then we would start the optimization by kept that seller on sale and thus slightly extended the period in which sales are excellent. The seller could perform other activities in periods when visits and sales are weaker – and our reports will also indicate those periods.
WHAT IS A TIME LOG?
It is part of the retail program that remembers all the activities that the store workers performed during the working day. It works simply: the software pre-defined all the activities that the employee performs during working hours: most often, these are sales, work in the warehouse, loading/unloading or receiving goods, administration, and breaks. The software also remembers all our employees.
One person per shift is responsible for entering data on employee activities – the shift leader. When an employee starts one of the activities, the shift manager will “click” first on the employee’s name in the software, and then on the activity. The program will automatically connect this with the time in which the activities take place, and calculate their beginning, and later the end and duration. Although these programs work in so-called “real-time”, the data that is skipped can be entered later.
I must also mention this: in addition to this program providing important information for you, it also affects the behavior of your employees, improving their work discipline. Also, the program helps you in rewarding employees, as it enables the calculation of bonuses, commissions, and overtime compensation.
WHAT ARE HIT COUNTERS?
These are electronic devices with sensors that are placed at the entrance of the store, and they count every customer’s entry and exit. Thus, they provide us with data on how many customers were in the store at any given time. There are several different types of these devices on the market, but all can provide you with this information (and some a lot more). This type of software assistance can already bring surprisingly good results for entrepreneurs with one or two stores, while it should be mandatory for medium and large retail chains.
Have you implemented this process in your company? What are your experiences?