Absolute Payroll Inc helps sportings goods business save with time and attendance compliance, significantly simplified scheduling, and mobile management.

Northwest Outfitters is a small retail chain tackling the obstacles of selling in the competitive outdoor sports sector. Managing a specialized workforce across 5 locations became their focus as an opportunity to significantly reduce costs and gain a competitive advantage.

Workforce Management is a key sore spot for retail companies with multiple departments. Northwest Outfitters’ primary challenge is keeping unique departments staffed with the right people while reducing costs with viable cross-department coverage. They also wanted to address one of their largest budget troubles; last-minute overtime.

Except for a small body of supervisors, all sales associates are part time. When there is a staffing pinch, it can be nearly impossible to keep part-timers from working forty hours or more. Holiday breaks and year-end staffing has been slinging scheduling problems and compliance pressure with the burden of tracking and reporting.

Workforce Management Suite Integration Creates Savings

With TimeSimplicity, the scheduling solution in Workforce Management Suite, department managers developed standard schedule templates for busy and slow sales periods, which vary from department to department. With the standard schedule in place, managers can drag and drop to adjust to changing conditions. This has been an essential time saver for managers, and with pre-defined alerts, has provided a dramatic decline in last-minute overtime.

SOLUTION — Workforce Management Suite

• TimeSimplicity for simplified scheduling and mobile coordination.
• TimeWorksPlus for integrated time and attendance tracking.
• Mobile access provides employee access and management control.

Employee Empowerment

Before Workforce Management Suite implementation, team members constantly contacted managers about shift modifications, time card foul-ups, and PTO accruals. With Employee Self Service (ESS), employees clock in/out from their mobile device, handle their own time cards, submit time off requests, and view accruals without having to reach out to a manager. With the intuitiveness of PunchLogic, time card errors are no longer a considerable problem.

Uncomplicated Administration

When employees handle shift changes, all supervisors have to do is authorize them on the Virtual Trade Board. TimeSimplicity even informs the employees affected when a shift change is approved! With job codes and employee groups, employees with the appropriate skills are scheduled in the corresponding departments. This helps maintain excellent customer service for which Northwest is known.

No More Compliance Headaches

With customized overtime alerts, supervisors are notified when part-time employees are approaching full-time hours, and full-timers are approaching overtime. They don’t need to be continuously monitoring time cards to keep team members working within the authorized hours. In the case of a DOL audit, reports can be produced instantly from attendance data that was automatically captured and recorded.

Northwest Outfitters is benefitting from reduced labor amounts, improved scheduling, automated compliance tools, and associates who are much happier with their jobs.

UPGRADE TODAY

Absolute Payroll Inc offers Workforce Management Suite, the powerful, fully-integrated Workforce Management Suite that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your managers, employees, and business.

Workforce Management Suite includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorks Mobile. Workforce Management Suite is created for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and decrease labor costs.

How much can you save? Check our Absolute Payroll Inc ROI Calculator.

We can get you up and running with Workforce Management Suite in minutes. Contact us today to set up a demo.