Wormland

Knowing the company
While it was a love of adventure that drove textile trader Theo Wormland to study fashion in New York in the 1930s, it is a commitment to superior customer service that today sets his Germany-based men's fashion chain apart.

Key to Wormland's service philosophy is a determination to give customers a retail experience they will want to repeat time and again. As well as offering expert personal fashion advice, Wormland provides an alteration service, reserves products, orders individual items from other stores, wraps gifts, issues gift vouchers, accepts payment in foreign currencies and even allows articles to be exchanged for cash.

Defining the strategy
To make this service strategy successful, Wormland needs to ensure that its 15 stores have sufficient skilled staff available to meet all its customers' requirements. However, this does not mean an open-ended expenditure on human resources.

Friedrich Jonas, head of data processing at Wormland, said, "Although we always want our stores sufficiently staffed, naturally we want to control costs and avoid poor productivity."

Wormland had traditionally prepared employee work schedules manually. As it established more flexible opening hours to suit customer demands, this was no longer viable and it turned to Torex for an automated solution to help it optimise work schedules for its 500 employees.

Choosing the solution
Wormland wanted a tool to help plan and deploy its existing workforce more intelligently, enabling it to continue raising its customer service bar while containing costs.

In particular, it needed to minimise costly overtime and the use of overflow staff without undermining service quality. This demanded the ability to accurately predict customer flow and match different employee skills with shopping habits, while taking into account personnel availability as well as regulatory requirements.

The solution needed to be easy to install and use by non-IT professionals, and integrate into Wormland's HR system for seamless and automated data exchange. The Torex Workforce Management solution proved best suited to this brief.

The solution delivered immediate benefits, enabling Wormland to define exactly how many sales employees need to be present at any given time. As a basis for this, the software analyses the sales data over a four week period to establish a true picture of customer traffic patterns. Reports and SQL queries across all the stores provide additional querying capabilities.

The data is automatically analysed and presented in a clear, userfriendly way.

"Torex Workforce Management enables us to produce staff schedules for the entire operation in a very short time," said Jonas. "We no longer have to plan based on gut instinct, but can rely on precise analysis. This saves time and helps prevent mistakes."

The employees are pleased with this solution, too, as their preferences can be taken into account during scheduling.

As the knowledge bank in Torex Workforce Management expanded over time, forecasting accuracy has further improved.

This Torex solution also enabled Wormland to monitor productivity. Managers can set realistic hourly objectives for the stores or individuals, for example, and monitor performance against these goals.

Torex Workforce Management automatically excludes holidays and sick days to provide net time worked, significantly speeding up the scheduling process and providing useful productivity reports on a daily basis.

Achieving return on investment
By significantly reducing the time involved in staff scheduling and payroll tasks, and enabling Wormland to reduce wage costs through optimised personnel scheduling, Torex Workforce Management paid for itself within two years.

Simultaneously, Torex has enabled Wormland to be more responsive to changing customer traffic patterns - for example by increasing its use of flexi-time to support more flexible opening hours. Jonas said, "Through strict orientation towards store traffic and actual requirements, we have improved customer service without increasing staffing costs. Having the right people in the right place at the right time to service customers has augmented both turnover and profit."