Technical Name: 0RC_C04

Labor is the single largest controllable expense in the retail environment. It is crucial for management to understand how it is being spent across the chain and to use this knowledge to deploy it strategically and advance the goals of the company . The labor2 InfoCube allows management to monitor store performance and to analyze actual versus scheduled data. By fully understanding this distribution of labor, users can meet customer service and non-sales requirements while still controlling labor costs and ensuring profitability.

This InfoCube contains the following labor-related information

• Actual and scheduled working hours (for example, regular working hours, overtime hours)
• Actual and scheduled payment (for example, regular pay, overtime pay)
• Workload: expected manpower demand. It is forecast by StaffWorks, but can also be adjusted manually by the store manager. It is represented as working time hours at the job or department level.
• Coverage statistics: reflects the staffing level (understaffing or overstaffing)

The information is presented at the following levels:

• Store
• Job: each employee can be assigned a number of different jobs, with one of them defined as his primary job. All data stored within StaffWorks is aggregated in BW at the job level.
• Department: all data contains both job and department characteristics (where applicable).
• Fiscal Year, Month, and Week as defined in StaffWorks.

This InfoCube contains information available in the current extraction file, that is, data delivered from StaffWorks.

StaffWorks uses the following terms when referring to labor and sales key figures:

Using the StaffWorks business content in BW, if stores upload data twice for a specific day, the new data is not added to the existing values but the old data is completely replaced by the newest data.

Some key figures are marked as hidden because they are part of the query definition but are not displayed when the query is executed

When comparing actual with planned values it can happen that planned values but no corresponding actual figures are available. This may cause problems for interpreting aggregated key figures that compare actual with scheduled data. To solve this problem, the following calculated key figures were introduced:

• Net Scheduled Hours: only scheduled hours for which corresponding actual hours are available. If no actual hours are available, net scheduled hours equals zero. Net scheduled key figures describe the scheduled value of only those stores that reported information for the particular time period. This will allow users to see only scheduled vs. actual figures for stores that have both scheduled and actual figures. For example, if nine stores reported 100 actual hours for the day and one store was missing, there would be 900 actual hours. If all ten stores in the district had scheduled to work 100 hours, then the actual vs. scheduled figures would be 900 divided by 1000 or 90 % of schedule. This indicates results that are below expectation. However, if you compare the actual vs. the net plan (plan for reporting stores) figures, this would be 900/(1000-100) or 900/900 = 100 % of plan. This indicates good performance. Whenever some stores do not report actual values, the comparison of actual vs. planned figures will be misleading unless they have been 'cleaned' using net plan or projected values.
• Projected Hours: it equals actual hours where actual hours exist. If no actual hours is available, projected hours equals scheduled hours. Projected key figures are a projection of certain values under the assumption that all stores reported that information for the particular time period. This will allow users to have a best estimate for when a single store or group of stores does not report for a specific time period. Usually, the scheduled data is used as a substitute for actual data to allow this projection. For example, if nine stores reported 100 hours each for the day and one store did not report, the 75 scheduled hours may be substituted for the missing figure to give us a total of 975 projected hours for the day.

The same logic as described for net scheduled hours is implemented for Net Last Year Hours. This includes only those previous year's hours for which corresponding actual hours exist for the current year.