Optimized Shift Planning? Get the basics right first...

By Stewart Hill

A good friend of mine works for a major retail chain and because they are employed in the store running various customer-facing counters, they are subject to working shifts. And these shifts vary daily regarding the number of hours worked, the time of day that the shifts begin and end, and the days of the week that employees are scheduled. No surprise there as this is typical for the retail industry but what I found surprising is that two days before the start of a new working week, they did not know what shifts they were scheduled to work that week. This created problems within their personal life because it is difficult to plan anything if you do not know when you are supposed to be working. For them, this is very frustrating and demoralizing and it is leading them to be considering employment elsewhere.

It’s a regular occurrence too, every week there is the same uncertainty: when am I working; what hours am I working; when am I free to run my life? Given the vast availability of software that can make shift planning a fast and accurate process giving employees visibility of their shifts weeks or more ahead of time, then why haven't some major retail chains invested in getting the basics right? Employees are "assets", right?

But why do I care? A few weeks ago I completed a comprehensive ClickSoftware White Paper "Optimized Shift Planning - The Way of the Future" which you should download and enjoy at your leisure. In this paper I discuss how applying optimization algorithms to the shift planning process can greatly increase operational efficiency and communication with employees. It's the pinnacle of shift planning, but attaining this level of sophistication is a journey and it has to start with getting the basics right - communicating with employees, easily accommodating their needs and preferences, and planning ahead are all good places to start.

The retail industry is often criticized for treating employees as commodities and maybe this just proves the point, but what do you think? What are your experiences of shift planning frustrations?

Enterprise-Wide Workforce Management? I don't think so!

Author: Simon Morris

Internet shopping - everybody does it, right? It's simple and means you avoid those long queues at the store, right? You may even save a little money, right? But what about the delivery? I'd like to share with you my "horror" story.

It started out with an email from a friend mentioning a special discount code on first orders placed on Very - a new online department store. With the English Premier League season about to get underway, I decided to purchase the new Arsenal home shirt. Priced at £45, the discount voucher would mean me getting it for £20 - what a bargain!

I went to the site. It looked impressive, it sold all the top brands and it looked like a genuine online retailer. I easily found the item I was looking for, added it to my basket and went to checkout. I added in my special discount code and it worked. My final bill was £20 as expected. So far so good. I was enjoying this experience. It asked me for my delivery address and it wasn't convenient for the goods to be sent to my home address (because, strangely enough, I work). I put in the postcode of my work address and the only option to select was 'Priory Cottage'. Now, my work address is 'The Priory' so I started to think that this may cause some issues. Anyhow, I placed the order and assumed it would all work out. In fact, I was so impressed with the process I recommended the site to other people in my office. Now, here comes the fun part...

The delivery date was August 5th so on that day, I checked the status of my order and their was a message which said I need to call them. The message wasn't proactively pushed to me, I had to log in to the site to discover this message. Wonderful, I get to call the Call Centre. Now picture a room full of Call Centre agents properly staffed to deal with the anticipated customer demand. Now forget that picture because it's not real. Instead, I got "Ha, ha, we don't value your business and you deserve to stay in a queue with rubbish 80's music until we feel ready to answer". That's a lie but I did get "All our advisors are busy with other calls at the moment...". Eventually, I spoke to a human being but the list of frustrations over the next few days included:

1) Advisors not being able to help so transfering me to another department
2) Having to consistently repeat my account number, name and date of birth because, clearly, their systems did not share information
3) The systems unable to cope with customer requests slightly outside the typical process i.e having the goods delivered to a work address as opposed to my home
4) Advisors speaking to me as if it was all my fault that the postcode did not match the automated address system details on their system
5) The shirt not being delivered to my work address despite reassurances that it would be
6) The shirt arriving at my home address
7) It was the wrong shirt!!!
8) Ordering the shirt again over the phone with an advisor but not able to apply the discount as I had already placed an order on the system
9) The shirt not arriving when it was promised to arrive (yesterday)

I called again (today) to ask where the shirt was and they told me that I needed to call the courier company. They gave me a 15-digit reference number. I called the company and the automated system asked me for my 8-digit reference number! I was finding this all quite amusing now while telling anyone I could never to shop at this company. I eventually spoke to an agent and they informed me that the item had not been delivered because 'the customer has moved home'. I have no idea where that came from but I persisted with this agent. She confirmed the address of Priory Cottage (I corrected her) and she also confirmed that three packages would be delivered tomorrow. Where they got '3' packages from, I have no idea!

Wow, I feel so much better for sharing that with you all! Thanks for listening and feel free to show some empathy or share similar online delivery 'horror' stories with us...

Could incentives cause your team to score own goals?

Author: Israel Beniaminy

In a football (or soccer, as our North American friends call it, if they call it anything at all) game, your team needs to score more goals than the opposing team. That's the goal, if you'll excuse a weak pun. It's a clear and simple incentive, subject to simple counting that can be easily performed even under the influence of whole sixpacks of beer. So, it's excusable to think there's absolutely no reason for a team to score an own goal.

Not so. Even the simplest incentives can play strange tricks.

The history of football has at least two examples of own goals that seemed to make sense at the time - not to mention 149 own goals in one game, which were a protest against perceived referee injustice. You can read the two stories there and there (go ahead, I'll still be here when you get back), but here's an altered scenario based on the first story, omitting an ill-thought-out rule which was partly to blame in the real scenario:

Team Blue is playing Team Green. Only one of them will progress to the next round of the tournament, so the stakes are high. Green needs to win by one goal, while Blue needs an advantage of two goals. With 87 minutes already played, Blue leads 1 to 0. The Blue players realize they won't be able to score another goal in the remaining three minutes, so they score an own goal to tie the score at 1-1. That's actually sane, since a tied score leads to extra time of 30 minutes, when Blue has a better chance of gaining the two-goal advantage they need. The Green players understand this, so they use the last three minutes to try to score an own goal or score a goal against Blue. In either case, Blue does not get the two-goal advantage, and Green ascends to the finals while Blue takes the next jet home. So it's in Blue's best interests not just to defend their own goal but to prevent Green from scoring an own goal...

The result? A few minutes of insanity, with one team attacking both goals and the other defending both goals. This insanity, strangely enough, follows logically from the incentives which seemed to be so simple and straightforward. And it really happened (though as mentioned above, I simplified the scenario) - Green was Granada, and Blue was Barbados:

OK, now that we've had our laughs, let's take a look at the mirror: Most service organizations have quite a few incentives in place, different for service engineers, team leaders, regional managers, call centers and so on. Incentives may appear in many guises: some are quantifiable, such as payroll calculations, employee evaluation processes, bonus definitions and targets; and some are "soft" but still quite powerful in controlling workforce behavior. To take just one example, consider the effect of overtime: When does it make sense for the company to authorize overtime? When does it make sense for an employee to work overtime? When is the customer interested in getting the work performed outside of normal working hours? Do all the answers align? How about other stakeholders - e.g. the scheduler/dispatcher, the manager etc.?

How can we be sure that none of these incentives, separately or interacting with each other, lead rationally to results which are harmful for the service organization, its customers and its employees? My opinion is that we can't be completely sure, but we can decrease the odds of such "rational irrationality" by bringing representatives of all stakeholders together, brainstorming frankly about possible consequences of current and proposed incentives.

I'm sure every service organization has is own stories of "good incentives gone bad". Could you share some of these stories?

Automating service operation could have been simple had people not been involved

Author: Tal Geffen

In a recent article published on Mackinsy Quarterly, Harold Brink, Senthil Muthiah, and Rajan Naik share experience from a service automation project that went south the first time round only to emerge successful on the second attempt after key blockers have been removed from the process.
Interestingly, and quite as expected, these blockers were mostly related to human factors and had hardly any bearing on the technology.
While such challenges, as the ones described in the article, are common to many IT intensive projects, my belief is that for service automation and optimization projects the challenges are even bigger on account of two main factors:

• The impact of change on a service workforce, and field workforce in particular, is significantly bigger as it changes the day to day routine of people and typically limits the flexibility they have in managing their activities within the day
• Service automation systems from leading vendors do not restrict themselves to providing decision support information like most computerized systems, but would also go to the length of making an automated decision that affect people's activities.

The disciplined approach of simulation, pilot tests, and process change as suggested in the article does make perfect sense and one that I've seen many service organization follow to a successful implementation.
I would also add to this approach a discovery phase to uncover the service policy of an organization and ensure alignment across all working levels. Such educational consultancy services are part of our ClickSoftware University program specifically built to guide a service organization management team through this process even before a technology investment has been committed.