Is wasted time in-store simply linked to tasks being carried out too slowly by employees? So all it would take is to speed up the pace of work to solve the problem… The shortcut is tempting; however, the facts tell a somewhat different story.
In fact, in stores, wasted time means time that is poorly used, and it accounts on average for 20% to 30% of teams’ working hours. Unthinkable and yet it’s one of the organizational realities of retail outlets, which paradoxically represents an opportunity for anyone able to capture it.
But first, what do we mean by poorly used time? And how can we identify it so it can be saved and/or reallocated, in order to improve sales advice and boost quality? THE answer by TimeSkipper!
What is wasted time?
We use “wasted time” to refer to working hours that are poorly used, hurting quality and profitability with no way to get them back. It shows up in three ways:
- Hours on site with no activity: priority tasks are finished and no reassignment is planned, activity hits a lull, a contingency delays the start of a task… Various reasons add up to “paid hours with no activity,” which can often reach the equivalent of more than one full workday “with nothing to do” every 10 days, per person.
wo - Hours spent on tasks with no added value: this can stem from a poor balance between task times. For example, in food retail there may be too many second passes compared with initial shelf replenishment. In a specialty store, time spent on customer assistance may be insufficient relative to administrative/back-office tasks. “No-value-added” hours can also come from excess over-quality (overprocessing), or from an inappropriately slow pace chosen just to fill time. In short, the work done isn’t relevant.
- Hours linked to workload surges that could have been distributed: while the risk to delivered quality is obvious, an overload for one employee can also trigger overtime. Yet, all too often, after the fact, we realize that at the same time several colleagues with the required skills had available time and could have absorbed that overload.
Golden rule for quantifying wasted time
If you want to spot poorly used time, the first imperative is to measure how long tasks take.
How?
- For each task, define a standard time: the average, reasonable duration needed by someone with the required skills to complete it.
- For tasks that vary according to activity volume, you also need to identify the external data that lets you calculate their duration.
- Watch out: at this stage, knowing the best operational practices for each task and mastering time-measurement methods are essential, because they enable an accurate evaluation of durations.
Next, for each employee, calculate the workload linked to the tasks to be performed and compare it with the paid working hours. This way, you can distinguish:
- hours with a workload from those with no activity,
- employees who have too much work from those who don’t have enough.
By combining these data points, you can see at a glance which employees are being paid without activity and which ones are overloaded.
Keep in mind, however, that a multitude of factors come into play when quantifying and identifying wasted time. Linked to deliveries, customers, and context (weather or impactful events, etc.), they cause activity and resource needs to fluctuate. And it’s from this non-linearity that the titanic nature of the task becomes apparent!
Don’t give up just yet, but don’t be stubborn either: equip yourself!
How does TimeSkipper turn wasted time into available time?
Reminder: the goal is to compare employees’ daily working hours (shift schedules) with each person’s workload in order to spot the potential hours you can capture. Integrating employees’ shift schedules into the TimeSkipper platform is very simple: you can enter them manually or via an interface with an HRIS or WFM solution.
That’s why, in this chapter, we’ll detail more precisely how the platform calculates workload and which types of information are available to store managers to help them capture this available time.
Workload calculation
First, the existing organization must be modeled in the TimeSkipper platform by breaking down all your activity into processes, tasks, and, where applicable, operations, then entering the standard times for each task.
Once this configuration is complete, you can assign each employee a typical day that includes all tasks to be performed daily.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, external data must then be retrieved to calculate the daily duration of certain tasks that vary according to activity volume, ultra-precision required! In this respect, we distinguish two data flows: actual data and forecast data.
Actual data includes information related to the number of products delivered (parcels or pallets), anticipated promotion volumes, the number of product orders to prepare for home delivery, click-and-collect, etc. Very often, these data can be extracted from the retailer’s information or supply system.
Forecast data concerns the number of products sold that require sales advice, the number of hours worked at checkout, etc. These forecasts are produced using our AI module or, when they already exist, retrieved from the retailer’s information system.
After finely modeling the store’s activity and connecting the platform to external data flows, the manager generates the schedule. The workload is calculated by incorporating the various data flows, and an algorithm allocates it to each employee, taking into account their skills (whether multi-skilled or not), their typical day, and their priority, mandatory, and time-constrained tasks.
Key information provided by the TimeSkipper tool
The tool provides a daily schedule and a precise dashboard that let you view each employee’s workload and quickly spot available time. Likewise, in the event of overload, managers can smooth it out very easily.
The reporting also highlights the relative weight of each task type in your operation, such as shelf replenishment or time spent on sales advice over a week, a month, and beyond.
And precisely after a month of operation, it’s time to analyze activity in order to identify poorly used time by team and by employee. The goal: reorganize work based on factual elements, aligned with on-the-ground reality, and master the art of piloting to gain in efficiency, productivity, and therefore profitability!
As you’ve gathered, a precise and necessary modeling of a store’s activity, as well as allocating resources to a workload calculated at a given moment, are impossible without a tool designed for this kind of piloting. Easy to use and synonymous with considerable time savings for managers, the TimeSkipper daily activity management platform adapts to the specifics of each sector and to the constraints of each store. Poorly used time is identified, and the recovered hours are reassigned to serve both the customer experience and profitability.
