Case Study: Retailer Decreases Labor Cost by Store Traffic Analysis

Opportunity  |  A luxury retailer with over 40 stores in the U.S. and Canada had falling sales with shrinking margins. The store staff performed a variety of selling, stocking and management work with various levels of performance. Top sellers were contributing a disproportionate amount of the overall store sales and the stores were becoming increasingly unprofitable as new associates struggled to build a book of business. There was also significant variance in opportunity by store due to location, mix of items available, clientele, etc. so a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work.

Approach 

• Assembled data from five or more enterprise systems to gain visibility into hourly resource deployment and staffing
• Developed new measurement system to provide leadership and regional staff with a means to manage performance

• Segmented locations based on demographic and other factors to establish performance groups and standards/expectations
• Designed and deployed online dashboards with biweekly measure updates pushed out to all store managers

Results  |  The company reduced fixed labor costs by 14% annually and grew the top line. We deployed a dashboard for active store management nationwide.