Labor Deployment

What is labor deployment?

This interface allows you to setup your ideal employee to customer or employee to sales ratio. WFM will then predict the correct number of employees required based on the ‘sales’ and ‘unit’ forecasted in WFM. As your projected sales changes week in-week out, so does the labor deployment suggestions, ensuring your managers always have an ideal employee to customer or employee to sales ratio and are on track with their labor targets.

On the Daily shifts screen, WFM will calculate how many scheduled hours are required per location load per hour. A scheduled hour is effectively one employee working for 1 hour.

Note:

Location Load is determined by the customer and is either "units" per hour or "sales" per hour

Customers enter how they want their employee levels to be adjusted as location load varies. These levels are entered at an hourly resolution. The platform may have forecast sales data down to 15-minute resolution (there are two other intervals, 30 minute and 1 hour) in which case the platform will divide as appropriate.

Terms to understand

• Brand: A Brand is a way of streamlining the handling of locations. Locations may belong to a Brand, and the Brand settings will be applied to the Location. You can override Brand settings for specific locations by changing the setting directly.

  Newly created Locations associated with a Brand will get all of the Brand defaults.

  The Day Parts, Teams and Labor Deployment Model are set up at the Brand level and then Locations are associated with them.

  Brands work at a franchise or brand level as the franchisor (will own the brand) can make changes to labor deployment and push deployment out to new franchise locations.

• Day Parts: You may divide a work day up into any number of non-overlapping parts. This feature is used for creating different employee targets across different parts of the day: enabling you to require a different combination of employees working a given role at different times.

  Your day parts may not overlap, but you may leave gaps between them if you want. Times without an associated day part will not be available for selection when using features that rely on a day part.

  Note:

  This is more of an advanced feature - a brand knows their base labor deployment model you can then start adjusting the model for different day parts.

  

• Teams: Teams can be used to group and order jobs; shifts can be grouped according to their team in the scheduling view. Shifts are also utilized in the Labor Deployment Model where several jobs from a team can sufficiently meet the staffing needs for a shift.

  For example: a customer service specialist, customer service representative or a customer service lead could cover a shift needed in the Customer Service team. You might have 10 different back-of-house jobs, but they all use the same deployment model, so you may set up one team to cover BOH. You may not care which job role works when.

• Opening Hours: Under Setup > Brands > Hours, you can configure opening hours to be shared to all locations. Under Setup > Locations > Scheduling > Opening hours, you can override the shared opening hours from the brand.

  Opening hours are currently only used in deployment for:

  • Extra hours

  • Sales based deployment will be restricted to opening hours

  Opening hours may not overlap from one day to the next: the opening time on a given day must be after the closing time from the previous day.

  Opening hours may not be longer than 24hours on a given day.

• Labor model: The labor deployment model ensures various teams have sufficient employees to meet specified criteria. You can create multiple deployment models to satisfy ideal staffing levels for different stores. For example, stores with drive-thru will have a model explicitly for the drive thru. There may even be different models depending on the resources available at different stores (eg number of fryers or counters available) as well as store volume or location (shopping mall vs standalone)

• Extra hours: Extra hours will be applied on top of the suggestions from the model. This is not for ensuring minimum coverage but is to be used when you require additional employees to cover duties that are not related to sales, for example assigning 3 hours of management time for office administrator work on a Monday morning or having an extra 2 employees on for an hour to receive a load of goods that need to be unpacked and stored.

  Fixed hours can only be added at a location level.

• Over-unders: Over-unders shown in red will show you how many employee hours you need to add or remove within a 15-minute period. This will compare the sales forecast to the already scheduled shifts to allow you to see where you need to make optimizations to meet the model.

  

  Each of the red + numbers represent the number of additional employee hours required in a 15-min period.

  Note:

  It is also possible to have negative numbers. If there are no red numbers for given periods, it means the labor model is met for that period.

• Suggested Shifts: The suggested shifts shown are based on the over-unders. AIf more than two thirds of the minimum shift length requires additional employees, WFM will suggest a shift. Suggested shifts are in the screen-shot above, denoted with no employee name as well as a dotted outline.

• KPIs: When the deployment mode is enabled, an extra line is shown in the KPI panel and is called Deployment. This shows the number of hours the labor model is suggesting based on the forecast. This also shows at an hour-by-hour interval under the shifts.

  • KPI panel:

    

  • Hour by hour:

    

    Create your first labor model

    • Reach out to your account manager to enable labor deployment on your account

    • Head to Setup > Brands and select your Brand

    • Create some Teams

    To create a model, you must first create teams. You must do this as the employee levels are adjusted on a team-by-team basis.

    Expand on the above and explain some examples EG FOH BOH Administrator Management teams.

    A “team” is either one job or several jobs. This means that a certain number of “team” members are required for a certain number of units (or sales, depending on customer choice). Any employee who can do any job in a “team” can be used to fill shifts.

    A labor deployment plan can be set by deciding on the staffing levels of a group of jobs (team). This would mean that any employee that could do any of the jobs in the team could be scheduled. It also means that there is no ordering on the jobs in the team or a requirement on what jobs are filled.

• Creating and Managing Teams in WFM: The Teams Tab allows you to create and manage your teams. When creating your team you can name the team and assign jobs that belong to this team.

  

  When the team is created, you may drag teams by their handle to reorder them, and you may drag jobs between the various teams within a brand. The order of jobs within a team is always alphabetical.

  When you are done, head to the Deployment tab.

Creating and Managing Deployments

The Deployment tab allows you to create and manage your deployment models.

To create a deployment model:

1. Go to Setup > Brands. Select a brand and click the Deployment tab.

2. Provide a name.

3. Set:

   • Minimum Shift Length

     Allow the customer to specify the shortest length of time (in hours) that an employee can be scheduled. The default will be 3 hours.

4. Maximum Shift Length

   Allow the customer to specify the longest length of time (in hours) that an employee can be scheduled. The default will be 8 hours.

Deployment Settings and Locations

1. Managers can view the deployment settings assigned to a location by going to Setup > Locations and selecting their location.

2. Select the Deployment tab to display the current settings. To view the metrics assigned against each team, click on the team name to expand out and view the number of employees assigned against the metrics range

3. For the selected location, managers are able to assign extra hours against teams using the Create option under Extra Hours.

4. Should a location have higher or lower performing employees than most of the locations that are using this model, the location can have the model copied/cloned and adjusted for that location.

5. This can be done at the location under the Deployment tab. Head to Tools and select “Clone and Edit this Model”.

   Note:

   a Deployment has been cloned, the model is no longer attached to the Brand Model. Any changes to this detached copy will only be used for this location. Changes you make to this clone will have no effect on other locations and any changes made to the Model at the Brand level will no longer affect this location.

When the above are set, you will be able to select teams for deployment and assign the metrics type to be used for the team.

For the selected team, the model can then be built. This can be done by assigning the number of employees (Staff Count) that should be scheduled to meet the metric range selected (Base).

the model has been built, you can assign the model to locations by selecting the Locations button.

For the selected team, the model can then be built. This can be done by assigning the number of employees (Staff Count) that should be scheduled to meet the metric range selected (Base).

Enter the number of employees required for an hour with the corresponding value you are basing this off (either sales or units). WFM will automatically work out how many employees you need in each 15 minute period based on the hourly value provided.

If some of your day parts require a higher level of staffing than the rest of your day you can also build a different set of requirements for the other day parts.

When the model has been built, you can assign the model to locations by selecting the Locations button.

Daily Shifts View and using Labor Deployment

To use and view your model, head to the Daily View. Under Options you can enable Labor Deployment by enabling the Shift Display Option ‘Labor Deployment’.

This enables the suggested shifts view and over/under recommendations.

Extra Hours

Every Extra Hours object will have a name and will apply to a specific Team. Extra hours are extra hours you’d like to calculate on top of the existing deployment. A simple example of this is “I would like to add 2 employees to open and close the store each day irrespective of sales”.

There are two period types:

• Fixed period

• Relative period

There are three methods of determining the number of hours:

• Fixed employee count

• Fixed hours

• Dynamic hours

You can combine the period types and the hours types together as necessary.

Fixed Period

Fixed period hours refer to a static period on the day: for instance "between 9am and 11am"

Relative Period

You may also select a Day Part, (or the period Open to Close), and then apply optional offsets to the start and finish of this period to dynamically calculate the period. This can differ when a Location has different opening hours, for instance.

You can use this to generate periods like:

• Between 1 hour before Open to Open

• Between 30 minutes before Close to 1 hour after Close

• Between 1 hour after Open until 1 hour before Close

If a Day Part is used instead of the full open period, this will be truncated as necessary to the open period. If a Relative period evaluates to an empty period (ie, is for a Breakfast day part on a Location that does not open until Lunch), then this extra hours object will be ignored for this Location

Fixed Staff Count

This rule type is automatically included in the per-shift interval demand levels.

Fixed staff count must be an integer, as it refers to the number of extra employees required for the given period.

Fixed Hours

A Fixed Hours rule indicates that there is a set number of hours that should be allocated to employees across the designated period. These hours may overlap with one another (ie, a 2 hour rule could be met by two employees working for 1 hour each at the same or different times, or 4 employees working 30 minutes each, or 1 employee working for 2 hours).

Unallocated fixed extra hours are shown slightly differently on the scheduling view: because they could apply anywhere within the period, the total number of unallocated hours is shown with the period where they can apply.

When generating suggested shifts, the rule process will attempt to create shifts according to the preference specified (start, middle or end of the period), but this may not always work with the other shifts and demand

Demand-based hours

Similar to how the regular team rules work, it is also possible to create a table of values that indicate how many hours should be applied as “extra” hours. This takes the total figure for the period from the selected stats type (which could be a subcategory, see above), and then uses the lookup table to determine how many extra hours are required.

It then applies them using the same rules as for Fixed hours, including where it will prefer to create suggested shifts, and the mechanism for displaying unallocated hours

Display of extra hours in the scheduling view

As mentioned above, extra hours that are not “Fixed employee count” hours will be “consumed” by any shifts that are in excess of the team rule demand. Unallocated extra hours objects, because they refer to a range, will show up as the total number of unallocated extra hours, stretched over the period to which they may apply.

The graphic below shows the sales demand for the BOH team across a day, but additionally shows that there is a 2½ hour unallocated extra hours in the morning, and 7 hours extra throughout the day. These hours could be allocated to any parts of shifts within the relevant periods that are beyond the demand from the team rule.

Team rule demand will always be applied to a shift before any extra hours are considered.

Deployment level extra hours

It is possible to configure extra hours at the deployment level. These will apply to any Locations that are using that deployment model.

You may still override the extra hours at a given location: this includes not using a specific extra hours rule, or adding additional ones.

Demand based hours are calculated based on the stats and allocated the same way fixed hours are allocated

General Notices