RedPrairie Corporation, recently announced new capabilities for Site Manager™, the enhanced user interface for its Workforce Management solution. The new capabilities, including mobility features, are designed help retail managers to spend more time on the floor coaching sales associates and serving customers.
“By getting store managers out of the back room managing disparate software applications and onto the floor managing customer interactions in person, retailers are finding they can increase their sales conversions significantly,” said Noel Goggin, VP of Retail Strategy, RedPrairie. “At one location, we found that the store was generating five to six more sales conversions for every additional hour that the manager was able to spend on the floor. That has a huge impact on the bottom line in today’s challenging retail environment.”
The latest addition of mobile capabilities to Site Manager came as a result of RedPrairie’s persona-based development research with retail managers over the past year, which determined that managers were relying more frequently on mobile devices such as Blackberries and iPhones to manage their activities. “RedPrairie examined what managers do on a weekly, daily and even hourly basis, and then greatly simplified the tools they need to effectively manage their labor and promotions,” said Jon Lawrence, RedPrairie VP Product Strategy, Workforce Management. “Smart phones using Site Manager can quickly access critical labor and execution management information where the managers are located, without managers having to be chained to a laptop or their desktop, so they can spend more time on the sales floor with their staff and customers.” Site Manager also has several tools that help store managers improve productivity.
Advertisement
For instance, the Exception Management panel in Site Manager is designed to provide a quick navigation tool that alerts retail store and district managers to items that need attention, from approaching overtime to promotion set-up status, enabling them to quickly resolve those issues.
The Schedule Editor screen allows store managers to schedule their staff automatically, to see how the schedule compares to expected demand, and to determine the accuracy of the scheduling. Store managers can even drill down to see how workforce demands for different job roles may change during different hours or days. Site Manager’s Execution Management screen enables managers to determine whether merchandise arrived on time, if they have all the fixtures they need for their locations, and to notify headquarters of any changes they made to store-specific planograms. This closed-loop process of feedback enables retailers to maximize the effectiveness of their promotions and to reduce out of stocks.
