You only have to ask your managers how many hours they spend scheduling to understand the potential benefits of an AI driven, digital scheduling solution. But whilst this technology is proven to save time, make your workers happier and reduce labour budget, the bottom line your boss wants to know about is the numbers. What ROI will a solution have for your business?

Whilst every company is different, each experience a selection of common pain points when it comes to workforce management. A lack of visibility, payroll errors, poor flexibility and many more issues that affect both revenue and retention. But you can easily justify improvements in these areas by pairing each with an indicative statistic.

In this guide, we'll take you through how you can prove a best of breed scheduling solution will deliver ROI, highlighting some of the obvious (and not so obvious!) ROI stats you'll be able to include in a business case.

Plus some real life stats our customers have reported...

This is one of the most daunting parts of your workforce management journey. You can’t truly get to grips with what the market has to offer unless you have an idea of what the perfect world in your organisation looks like.

This doesn’t mean you have to have everything clearly defined in a presentation with a sign-off from the C-suite. But it does mean being clear on what challenges you are trying to solve within your business. If you’re reading this guide, you probably have a good idea that a new workforce management solution is what you’re going to need, but there’s a little more that you need to consider.

We’d recommend being clear and being able to have answers to these three areas:

1. Identify your current challenges

The very first step of the process is to review your current scheduling processes and tools to identify what’s working and what needs improvement. Are you struggling with filling gap shifts, managing employee availability, or spending too much on labour? Aim for a list of bullet points capturing the challenges you're experiencing and any metrics to back up your anecdotal feedback; the result will form the basis of a business case and the building blocks of your future strategy. It’ll also be a handy resource to have when you do start meeting with salespeople!

2. Engage all your stakeholders

Don’t forget about your other stakeholders. It's likely your employees, managers and HR personnel are experiencing similar challenges with the incumbent solution. So, gather feedback from different user perspectives, spend time talking to future users about what they need, what they’d like and what frustrated them about systems in the past. You could consider a short survey (SurveyMonkey, for example, is free to use) to make the whole process easier and quicker. You’ll probably end up with a long list of “wants” and “dislikes”, but hopefully you’ll be able to detect some of the common themes.

3. Define your goals - What does good look like?

Alongside solving the specific challenges your business deals with, it’s also important to define goals around what your ideal solution looks like. Of course, you want to fix all the functionality grievances, but given a magic wand, what else would your new workforce management solution be able to do? Increase sales, improve labour margins, help with staff retention? You might not think that software is able to help with these types of objectives, but a good workforce management provider will be able to solve most issues around a broad spectrum of workforce goals.

Before you start meeting with vendors, there’s plenty you can borrow from them to inform your strategy. Every vendor out there is creating content that you can download and review to see what kind of solutions exist. For example, our free RFP template download is a great way to have an itemised list of what a scheduling and workforce management provider should be able to do functionality-wise. Remember, suppliers are the ones at the helm of the ship: to thrive and survive, they need to understand what their customers’ challenges are, deliver the solutions to fix them and work hand in hand with those customers to help them make that cultural change. So content like this is well-researched and ‘gold dust’ for your search.

“Don’t forget about your other stakeholders. It's likely your employees, managers and HR personnel are experiencing similar challenges with the incumbent solution. So, gather feedback from different user perspectives”

It's not enough just to highlight the obvious benefits of a digital scheduling solution based on the challenges you have identified. You need to back it up with some stats.

Here are some examples of ROI stats you could include in your business case. We've also included some ROI figures our customers experience when they moved to Rotageek:

Better Customer Demand Match:
Automatic scheduling produces rotas that are dramatically better at matching demand than manual rotas. For example, Rotageek customers have reported up to 27% closer customer demand match, when compared to manually created rotas.

Total revenue growth:
Each of our retail clients have demonstrated a measurable growth in revenue directly due to their automatic scheduling solution. Our accumulated data suggests that for every 5% better match to customer demand, retailers will see up to 1% sales growth. For one leading store, this was an annual increase of up to £629,640.

Improvement in customer NPS:
Better labour alignment is proven to better your customer service. No longer are stores left with too little staff to serve demand - or faced with unmotivated teams from overstaffing. One Rotageek customer gained a 5-10 point increase in NPS, which directly correlated to a 1% growth in their revenue.

Increase store footfall conversion rate:
Using the footfall data within our scheduling solution, we are able to demonstrate increases in conversion points due to better labour matching. Once staff are better deployed to real customer demand, stores are much more likely to be tidier, better merchandised and better serviced during peak times when customers have a heightened awareness of lengthy queues or chaotic displays. This additionally has a positive impact on reducing walk-outs and abandoned baskets.

Increase average transaction value:
Every improvement made to labour matching either per week, day and even per hour directly affects a store’s average transaction value. The rota automatically accommodates for peak times meaning more hands to keep a tidy, well stocked store. People are more likely to spend time and money when staff are available for queries, till queues are under control and shelves are replenished.

Save 5-10% of labour cost:
Matching staff to your demand curve cuts up to 10% of your labour cost, whilst only using 0.5% of your staffing budget -a ten-fold return on investment. This presents an opportunity for retailers to not only reduce inefficient spend but also to reinvest savings into areas that benefit ROI further such as training and development, the service experience or employee engagement.

Save 80% of your schedule related admin:
Do you know how much time your teams spend creating rotas? In retail, managers can spend up to nine hours per week on schedule related admin. It might sound surprising but when you consider the volume of ongoing employee requests, shift swapping, availability inputs and schedule amends for multiple teams, it takes a lot of valuable time that could be reinvested into much more important tasks. This benefit has been proven time and time again. Managers will automatically save between 2-4 hours per week, giving back nearly three weeks of work time every year.

Remove time theft through T&A:
Time theft is an all too common issue in retail, costing businesses billions in pounds and productivity every year. The only successful solution is to implement advanced time and attendance software, a feature of optimised scheduling technology that digitises the clock in process. Doing so has immediate return on investment with visible financial savings.

In one case study, we found that one leading retailer was losing an average of 1.5 hours per store every week across over 100 locations. But with automatic scheduling, they were able to eliminate this cost, immediately saving £100,000. This is due to geofencing technology which only allows employees to clock in and out for shifts onsite, directly from theirs.

Reduce turnover and absenteeism:
Happy employees are more productive. We no longer need numbers to know this in today’s world, where mental health and wellbeing are a top concern in the workplace. One way to inadvertently improve this is with optimised software that nurtures an autonomous approach to scheduling.

Eliminate human errors that cost your company thousands:
A third of employers make payroll errors, at a rate of 1-8% for those who use traditional timecards, and up to 40% in small businesses. This not only costs businesses thousands in time and inaccurate payments - it can have legal ramifications too. However, data-driven scheduling software seamlessly integrates with payroll workflows to automate required cross-checks, eliminating any human error that would otherwise occur. If an employee works longer than legally permitted, the system won’t allow it. If they work a set of hours as confirmed by time & attendance functionalities in-app, then those hours are directly submitted to the payroll system. Benefit from automated accuracy and enhanced scheduling compliance.

95% of retailers receive shift related complaints, a reason why the industry has one of the poorest turnover rates in the UK. But by focusing on fair employee rotas, companies can not only benefit from a more engaged workforce but will also drastically reduce staff turnover and overall absenteeism for reasons belonging to flexibility, employee wellbeing and work/life balance.

With employee wellbeing, financial pressure and the increased difficulty catering to unpredictable footfall to consider, some legacy scheduling platforms are no longer up to scratch. Retailers in particular must re-evaluate how their current systems stand up in the new normal and the ever changing environment of the high street.

There has therefore never been a better time to upgrade your employee scheduling software. Using the results of a prominent UK retailer, in this section we share five key areas that are greatly optimised by automatic scheduling.

Demand forecasting as it should be

Firstly, let’s examine the issue at hand in more detail. In a typical retail store, customer arrival patterns vary by week, by day and by hour. And that’s without considering the ongoing variations to footfall and opening hours. So, how do you staff for the customer highs (reducing queue times and improving service), and save costs when it’s quieter?

A common problem with employee scheduling apps is a lack of accurate forecasting. The system typically focuses only on assigning a set of predefined shifts to colleagues, meaning they can’t efficiently fit demand, especially if that demand changes week on week. This result either goes one of two ways; unnecessary labour costs caused by overstaffing, or poor customer service and unhappy employees.

Enter automatic scheduling solutions. Using machine learning to find the perfectly optimised schedule, this technology factors in demand, availability and work preferences, as well as business constraints, fairness rules and legal requirements to deliver a plan that works for the individual company and their people.

Let’s take a look at our high street retailer’s experience

Below we can see the manager has had trouble creating shifts for a typical day of varied demand, resulting in a wide error margin between the labour allocated (pink line) versus the actual footfall in store (blue line)

Enter automatic scheduling solutions. Using machine learning to find the perfectly optimised schedule, this technology factors in demand, availability and work preferences, as well as business constraints, fairness rules and legal requirements to deliver a plan that works for the individual company and their people.

Now let’s examine an automatic approach. Here Rotageek’s Autoscheduler has done a far better job staffing for the peaks, making sure customers are served without wasting labour spend when the store is quiet.

We hope this guide has give you some food for thought when it comes to building your business case for digital scheduling. Whilst it's difficult to prove the exact ROI you'll gain before you've implemented a new solution, a best of breed provider will be able to give you a good indication of the ROI you're likely to see in these areas, using the data you have to date and case studies of their customers like you, experiencing similar challenges. So go forth and fight for your smarter, more productive, more profitable digital scheduling solution...