Industry analysts say sales at auto supply retailers have been bolstered during the downturn by customers purchasing replacement parts as they maintain older vehicles rather than investing in new models, a cost-saving trend that is likely to continue as the economy recovers. That’s good news for the auto supply industry.
But that doesn’t mean that auto supply store managers can get sloppy about employee scheduling and attendance monitoring. In fact, dealing with an uptick in business in a downturn makes auto parts supply employee scheduling and attendance monitoring even trickier-you need to schedule enough employees to handle your customers, without over-staffing or watching your profits leach into unnecessary overtime. Without careful management, relatively small successes can lead to large failures.
Even in more normal times, auto parts and supply employee scheduling and attendance monitoring can be a headache. The manager building the schedule has to consider employee abilities/skills, anticipated sales volume, employee availability, individual work requests, accrued PTO, labor laws for employees who are minors, overtime, and overall labor costs.
Make a mistake with any of these details, and the store can lose sales, employees, or be fined. Managers have to communicate the schedule (and every shift swap or schedule update) to all the employees. They have to keep an eye on late or missed shifts, early clock ins and late clock outs, or buddy time punching.
It’s tedious, it’s time-consuming, and it’s crucial.
These are dizzying times for auto parts and supply store managers. The industry-and key players-seem to be changing on a minute by minute basis. Efficient auto parts employee scheduling and attendance monitoring is essential, but there are plenty of other urgent issues vying for a manager’s attention.
This is where a solid labor management system will come into play, freeing up employee and management time, while increasing store profitability. Good labor management software should:
– Create a schedule in seconds, not hours.
– Manage schedules at one or many locations (above store schedule creation).
– Schedule those with particular skills or the most experience in the high volume time slots.
– Notify employees of upcoming schedules and schedule changes by email or text message – eliminating confusion and missed shifts
– Allow managers to monitor attendance remotely, using the web, a cell phone, or even Facebook.
– Stop early clock ins and late clock outs or buddy punching to provide immediate labor cost controls.
– Accurately forecast future scheduling needs and labor costs.
– Increase store profitability
Many web based labor management systems exist to provide these immediate benefits to store operators.
