Specialist Retailing

The terms "activity management" and "workforce management" are often used to define resource management. But while both solutions involve managing and optimising time and people, they come from different starting points and employ different approaches. Workforce management is based on an HR culture and is used to optimise work schedules: it schedules the right number of people at the right time. Activity management, on the other hand, is operational in nature and focuses on the work to be done and how to use the available resources to do it. In other words, it involves assigning tasks (and the time needed to complete them) to the right people, at the right time of day, and in the right order of priority. These are two separate approaches with subtle yet noticeable differences.

A loss of work values, a lack of faith in authority, management’s failure to assume responsibility … the breakdown in a store’s chain of command is increasingly noticeable. However, the ‘distribution management’ battle is not lost. It is through the notions linked to the art of leadership that we suggest you consider the best way to restore all the manager’s legitimacy in order to take their employees with them on the path of collective improvement.

Inflation erodes store profitability and requires teams to adjust their work organization:
- taking into account daily variations in volumes and supply uncertainties
- giving priority to value-added tasks
- by assigning these tasks to the right person at the right time.
To achieve this, a workload calculation and management tool is necessary.

In the retail industry, proper use of working hours has become essential to provide the best possible service to customers and guarantee the store's profitability. Managing this "good use of working hours" means ensuring that each employee is busy doing the right task, in the right way, at the right time and for the right length of time! This is a vast programme, the starting point of which is to have a repository of time-worth tasks based on in-store operation expertise, know-how and timekeeping techniques!