Labor and Staffing Optimization

Industries as varied as travel, retail, and logistics continually balance high-level goals and forecasts against staffing levels on the ground. No company can achieve its goals without the personnel to execute them, yet staffing is complex. The disconnect between objectives and operations affects productivity, customer service, and sales, so companies search for ways to balance the potential for revenue growth against payroll costs. Management is often unaware of the variables at work in stores and locations along the supply chain or unable to factor them into its process for setting goals.

Analytics Solution

Analytics plays a role in setting realistic goals at the management level and predicting staffing needs at the operations level.

Using a correlation model, the operations staff maps out the workload variables, like customers served and returns processed, that most closely relate to personnel needs across locations. Next, they fit a model to those variables and drivers to forecast how they’ll change based on historical data. Then they apply a regression model to that data to forecast resulting staffing needs and payroll.

Finally, they reconcile their predictions for labor and payroll needs with management criteria such as monthly sales figures or performance ranking of the location within its peer group. Analytics allows companies to meet their objectives and gives each location a tailored approach to setting staffing levels.

With Alteryx, you can:

• Connect to HR platforms like Workday and combine that data with geographic and store data automatically
• Build an Optimization Model using a single tool withing Alteryx Designer
• Output one or many different ways to visualize the model outcomes, or operationalize the model automatically