Labour Management - Controlling An Expensive Commodity

The hospitality sector, like all industries which rely on people interacting with people, is labour intensive. So it's not surprising that computerised systems attempt to improve the efficiency of the labour force. But it has only been recently, in the hospitality sector at least, that they have been able to show consistent and significant improvements.

This has been largely due to the introduction of Integrated Labour Management Systems (ILMS). Now more and more US and UK hospitality sector operations are discovering that ILMS enable them to cut costs and generate new business by applying not only advanced scheduling strategies, but also business forecasting and resource planning systems. In short, these systems turn staffing control from a cost-constraint headache into a real opportunity for creating competitive advantage.

So what is it that makes Integrated Labour Management systems so different?

ILMS extend the concept of time and attendance systems (which simply record each worker's hours) and basic labour scheduling systems (which merely schedule workers) into a comprehensive range of integrated functions. These functions (sales and labour forecasting and seamless interfacing with human resources and payroll functions) enable managers to maximise the productivity of their work-force.

'Soft' benefits are every bit as real as 'hard' ones

The benefits of ILMS are significant. It is not unusual for such a system to pay for itself in twelve months or less. For large hospitality operations the pay-off can be even more dramatic. The 'hard' benefits are the reduction in costs and optimising staff availability -- putting the right people, in the right numbers, in the right place, at the right time. The systems also automate the production of schedules, cutting management time and promoting greater efficiency. Fully integrated labour management systems will also automate payroll and sales forecasting.

The 'softer' benefits -- no less real but more difficult to quantify -- include better customer service as a direct result of always having enough staff available to cater for the current level of business. And with that comes higher staff morale, better staff/customer relations and, in turn, yet better customer service. It is a virtuous cycle. When everyone's happy, the bottom line turns up.

The benefits of having just the right number of staff are more far-reaching than those identified by simple economics. Scientific research suggests that high activity and too few staff, and low activity and too many staff, are both associated with high sickness levels. So having the optimum number of staff helps to maintain motivation and boost morale.

ILMS must match the most appropriate employee with the right job, at the right time. The ability to accomplish this seemingly simple task on a wide scale, while considering employee needs and work-place rules and much more, can only be accomplished by deploying sophisticated software. But such systems must also be easy to use. Staff planning and management is something that must be done at a local level. Any good labour management system must be simple enough to win the confidence of local managers who may not be highly computer literate.

Systems which best suit the user's requirements are 'plug-and-play' systems, which allow the user to customise reports, and interface with leading point-of-sale equipment at the front end, and seamlessly link and feed into existing or planned corporate databases at the back end. The demand for easy-to-use screen graphics, providing increasingly familiar features such as drag-and-drop manipulation of data, is a growing consideration in the development of labour management systems.

The important of 'three-tiered' architecture

If ease-of-use and a familiar user interface are pre-requisites at the front end, there are back-end considerations too. Here this means that the system can be integrated with a retailer's existing or planned data management system without affecting the functionality or the usability of the system at 'the sharp end'. The system must also be 'scaleable' -- it must be able to work just as well in small discrete working environments as it works in large, perhaps centralised environments.

This is where one of the computer industry's current buzz-phrases comes in: good ILMS should be 'three-tiered'. In essence, that means that such systems should have a graphical user interface -- in practice it should have a 'Windows front-end'. It should have a complete range of functionality, delivering all the support that hospitality sector management requires. And it should be designed to link easily into existing database systems, without the need for radical software rewriting.

The problem is that three-tiered systems like these don't evolve. Many labour scheduling systems evolved out of successful time and attendance systems -- but did so before the need to ensure a graphical user interface or easy integration with existing databases had become important. For ILMS to be three-tiered, they have to be designed that way -- from scratch.

When US supplier Timecorp decided to develop its own ILMS, based on its extensive experience of labour scheduling in retail and hospitality, it realised that its invaluable experience would need to be built into a completely new product -- it would not be possible to inject a graphical user interface and easy integration with database systems into its existing products. So was born Timecorp's Visual Labour Management (VLM).

Flexible, thanks to modular design

Labour management systems must also be extra sensitive to a user's own corporate culture. Experience in the US shows clear evidence that such systems need time to evolve within a business, and have to be seen to reflect the special, sometimes unique, procedures of an individual retail business. For Timecorp, part of the answer has been to structure its VLM into modules which a user can implement stage by stage.

The system has been redeveloped for the UK market, in close co-operation with the UK supplier, which has changed the product to suit UK users and matched it exactly to the needs of UK retailers.

Simon Titterton is retail service manager for Feedback Data Systems.