Shoe Sensation Simplifies Communication and Labor Scheduling with Zebra
The footwear and apparel retailer turned to Reflexis task management and workforce management tools to connect teams across its organization, enhance labor forecasting and improve scheduling. Shoe Sensation wanted a single platform to address all of its business challenges.
Zebra Success Story: Shoe Sensation
Overview: Retail Challenge
Shoe Sensation had difficulty with communication and visibility into task completion across its 180+ stores. Additionally, it had an inefficient labor scheduling process that did not incorporate accurate labor forecasting.
Benefits / Outcomes
Shoe Sensation leveraged Zebra workforce optimization tools to streamline communication across its store locations, improving store execution and labor scheduling while also optimizing labor spend.
Customer
Shoe Sensation
Jeffersonville, Indiana/USA
Industry
Retail
Solutions
About Shoe Sensation
Headquartered in Jeffersonville, Indiana, Shoe Sensation is a leading footwear and apparel retailer. Since opening its first store in 1984, Shoe Sensation has expanded to nearly 200 locations in 19 states in the Midwest and Southern United States, offering customers a family friendly atmosphere with over 140 brands of casual and athletic footwear styles.
Shoe Sensation’s goal is to provide an excellent customer experience. To better achieve that goal, it invested in much of the Workcloud platform, with the aim of simplifying store operations, optimizing labor forecasting and improving scheduling.
The Challenge
Previously, Shoe Sensation experienced difficulty communicating across its organization. “Before [Zebra], the best way to define our situation was chaotic and not communicative between each party,” said Dave Schoengart, CEO of Shoe Sensation. “Different departments weren’t talking to each other.” As a result, visibility into task management was low. It was difficult to understand what tasks had been communicated to store associates, whether they were being worked on, and if they had been completed.
Shoe Sensation also wanted to achieve better forecast accuracy and increase the efficiency of its labor schedules. The company knew doing so would significantly reduce the administrative time spent on schedule creation and schedule editing, review and approval.
The company’s retail transformation initiatives centered around solving many of these challenges, as well as how to get the right store associates in the right place at the right time. Instead of looking at individual solutions, it sought out a platform that would bring it all together, addressing everything at once.
[Workcloud] Real-Time Task Management also provides store managers and other key stakeholders insight into task completion rates, with the ability to drill down and make operational changes based on results.
The Solution
To solve these challenges, Shoe Sensation selected a number of Workcloud solutions: Workcloud Real-Time Task Management, Workcloud Scheduling, Workcloud Scheduling Employee Self-Service and Workcloud Docs. Workcloud Real-Time Task Management simplifies store execution by prioritizing work based on established best practices. Workcloud Scheduling optimizes labor spend by helping retailers factor customer traffic, store workload, and other variables into their scheduling processes.
Shoe Sensation chose Workcloud because it offered a unified platform that could address its complete retail work challenge, improving both store execution and labor scheduling processes. “We chose [Zebra] because it offered a complete concept,” said Schoengart.
Shoe Sensation was also impressed by Zebra’s reputation as an innovative thought leader and a provider of unparalleled service. “We had tremendous trust with everyone we encountered,” said Schoengart. “We knew that [Zebra was] forward-thinking and had our best interest in mind.”
The Zebra Difference: Outcome and Benefits
Since implementing Workcloud Real-Time Task Management, Shoe Sensation has seen a substantial increase in visibility across its organization. “The biggest thing that we’re finding out is increased visibility into tasks and ensuring projects are done,” said Schoengart. Increasing visibility ensures store associates focus on the right work in the right place at the right time. It also provides store managers and other key stakeholders insight into task completion rates, with the ability to drill down and make operational changes based on results.
Shoe Sensation is also seeing benefits to employee engagement, schedule efficiency and customer experience as a result of implementing Workcloud Scheduling. Thanks to automatic labor scheduling technology, store associates are more productive, tasks are more effectively distributed to stores and store managers have more time to engage with customers and coach associates.
Shoe Sensation plans to continue innovating with Zebra into the future. “Our future plans are pretty open,” says Schoengart. “We’re going to continue to master the areas of [Zebra] that we currently have, continue to talk with other users and see what their best practices are, and adapt the business as needed to become more efficient.”
