This post is not based on any study establishing a link between happiness and productivity. Reconciling work and personal life will also not be addressed. In fact, many of our clients simply observe a decline in customer traffic during the Canadians games and reduce staff accordingly.

We observed this phenomenon in call centers. However, it would be surprising that an event as much followed would not affect other businesses in the area of customer service and retail. For example, most hockey fans are men; clothing stores for women are perhaps not affected, while a retailer such as Canadian Tire probably is. Similarly, if you operate a pizzeria, you already know the title of this post does not apply to you.

The hotel business, restaurants and bars have always considered special events to determine their schedules. As it is for their survival’s sake, there is nothing surprising in that. For proof, one need only think of the impact of the Grand Prix of Canada on establishments. Going back to our Canadians, we can also think of the advertising campaign of Boston Pizza, which temporarily renamed local restaurants “Montreal Pizza” during the series in April 2011.

The retail companies and those in customer service should be guided by these industries to streamline their costs of labour. Retailers who already measure their customer traffic should not be afraid to make, at first glance, ridiculous researches in their database. By engaging in this exercise, they are risking, in the worst case scenario, to lose a few minutes of their time. At best, they might discover that a TV show popular with their target audience, a show or a festival influences their customer traffic.

Only a small minority of companies operate 24 /7. Even today, these companies belong primarily to heavy industry, whose facilities are too expensive to be used for one third of their capacity. To a lesser extent, some call centers and retail stores are open day and night. However, while the price per square foot of retail space has grown steadily over the world, this practice could be extended to any new areas. Indeed, by compressing three shifts a day, a company in the service sector could accommodate in its offices three more employees per square meter and thereby reduce capital costs by two thirds.

There are many possibilities to cover the 24 hours that make up a day. However, two main approaches stand out. The first, the most common, divides the day in three shifts of eight hours. In general, the day shift runs from 8 am to 4 pm, the evening shift from 4pm to midnight and the night shift from midnight to 8 am. The other approach segments the day in two shifts of 12 hours. If not systematic, these shifts are often associated with a three-day week, 36 hours in total, a practice highly valued by employees. In general, the day shift will run from 6 am to 6 pm and the night one from 6 pm to 6 am.

Work in the evening or at night is not the first choice of most employees. Thus, different systems of schedule rotations can allow employees to share the day shift. However, some basic rules should govern rotations or changes in shifts. First, it is important to ensure that a schedule change will not deprive an employee of sleep. Thus, it is preferable to make changes to shifts following a leave of absence, whether it is a weekend or a holiday. Another approach, which applies only to 8 hour- shifts, allows employees to change shifts without involving time-off. But the transition must always go to a shift occurring later, as from a day shift to an evening shift or an evening shift to a night shift.

As the saying goes – and the eponymous film – money never sleeps. However, the North American financial markets close at 4 pm and the money flows more slowly when the sun goes down. Also, doing business 24 /7 is not meant for all companies. Before the jump, an organization should weigh the pros and cons, and if this is the way forward, should plan the transition in conjunction with the Human Resources Department.

Montreal, Canada, March 14th 2012, Planora, a workforce optimization company, announced today that it has been selected to join the Microsoft BizSpark One program, identifying 100 high-potential companies of over 45,000 companies from over 100 countries around the world. Companies in the BizSpark One program demonstrate a strong potential to succeed, shape the industry’s future and enhance the overall value of Microsoft products and service for customers.

“The forecasting and scheduling technology Planora is building on the Microsoft platform are designed to optimize net profit, increase employees and customers satisfaction in services businesses around the world,” said Rodney Bowen-Wright, Director of Business Development and Technology Incubation at Microsoft.

“We are happy that Microsoft have selected Planora to work closely through a one-to-one relationship in the BizSpark One program, providing customized engagement plans to accelerate our growth including access to technical, marketing and business development resources,” said Alexandre Le Bouthillier, Ph.D., co-founder of Planora.

“Planora is a great example of a company taking a complex problem and using technology to solve it. Their predictive engine really can make a difference to the bottom line. We love to help young Canadian companies like Planora reach their full potential with BizSpark One,” added Christian Beauclair, Principal Architect Evangelist at Microsoft.

About Planora
Planora Inc. markets a state of the art mathematical scheduling and forecasting engine that allow each and every customer to model their business objectives and rules. They get optimized results by having “the right employee at the right time at the right place.” For more information about Planora, please visit www.planora.com.

About Microsoft BizSpark
Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps software startups succeed. With more than 45,000 startups from 100 countries in the program and a global network of 2,300 BizSpark partners, Microsoft provides great business value to young technology companies around the world. The program provides a wide range of Microsoft technology, technical and business expertise, and enhanced market visibility. More information is available at http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark.

Ever wondered why retailers put the holidays decorations up right after Halloween ? As it is, this time of year is crucial for them, they make up to 40% of their annual sales. Children may rejoice in the countdown before Christmas, but Canadian retailers cannot wait for the Boxing Day to arrive.
During this single day, they reap between one and two billion dollars in Canada. It’s huge, but still nothing compared to the 11.4 billion that the American citizens spent on November 25 during Black Friday.

Actually, the American equivalent of Boxing Day is growing in popularity in Canada. Canadian retailers will need to learn to juggle two big selling days during Christmas time. They probably will not complain, as these days are extremely profitable for them. Nevertheless, these exceptional days are a challenge for planners, as the scheduling effort differs strongly from the usual one they deploy all year round.

To determine the necessary number of work hours during Boxing Day using a usual sales predictions and productivity ratio is a gross mistake. First and foremost, planers do not have a reliable comparison point, unless the previous years’ Boxing Days. But even this kind of comparison is limited: the consumers’ behavior will depend on the day of the week on which Boxing Day takes place and on a set of other factors.

In order to stop comparing apples and oranges, a planner will need to take into account the data up to the previous five years. And even then, it would not be precise enough; the evolution of the consumer behavior during this period, and the one of the Canadian retail industry, should also be taken into account. Without a sophisticated system to guide him, the planner faces a Mission: Impossible.

In short, it is really difficult to establish reliable predictions at the time of Boxing Day. Indeed, retailers wait for the unexpected, know that never ending lines will form, and that the overall service quality will be inferior to the usual year round one.

Even if the ratio and metric values differ totally from the other days of the year, the ground principles stay the same. What the Boxing Day statistics show is a strong relationship between the quality of the service offered by the retailers and the sales they make.

In other words :

Minimize the waiting at the cash desk

To man a lot of cash desk is not enough. In order to raise the overall efficiency of this strategic place, the managers should not fear to appoint more employees to related tasks, such as informing and preparing the customers for the cash desk and bagging what they bought. The time lost waiting at the cash desk is one of the most important factors which could limit the purchases of the customers

Maximize on-site service

The customers will have to wait, and the best offers will inevitably run out, but the more employees will be dedicated to answer the customers enquiries on these hot topics, the better the sales will be.

In practical terms, for most of the retailers, the best strategy is to mobilize the totality of their human resources on site, even if that means to pay overtime. The employees, after a day-off on Christmas day and probably more free time around New Year’s Eve, will not be that much penalized.

Finally, Boxing Day has become a Christmas time experience, as well as staying up late for New Year’s Eve and drinking eggnog. Customers are aware that this period is unusual, and if they see that everything has been planned in order to minimize the inconvenience they go through, they leave with a good feeling in the end. Proof is that the crowd is back, year after year…

Cloud computing has grown more than ever in 2011. Cloud computing is all the rage in the headlines but it’s not just another trend. Aggregating of computer processing to data centers in fact has many advantages. In our case the benefits are even greater than the norm.

For me, Planora is primarily a tool for optimizing schedules. Similarly, SalesForce.com, despite the cloud that appears in its logo, is primarily a tool for managing customer relationships.

The fact that Planora runs on our servers has many advantages. First, since the computing power necessary to deploy our optimization algorithms is very important, most of our customers would have had to invest in expensive infrastructure. To the extent that they create schedules once a week or less often, the savings of sharing are considerable. To serve all our customers, we have only a few tens of redundant servers, split between our offices and two other sites that specialize in hosting infrastructure.

Beyond the purely material dimension, the fact that we host our tool has many other competitive advantages. In particular, we can refine our algorithms on a regular basis without our customers needing to make updates. In addition, the deployment of Planora at a client’s office is very fast, since it is sufficient to access their account from a browser to start using it. In addition, it is even more natural that Planora is an online service that it integrates a Web interface dedicated to employees.

In short, we have adopted the model of cloud computing to deliver added value to our customers and not to surf on the latest fashion. Today the same way that we started in 2002, we devote all our energies to help our customers produce the best schedules possible rain or shine, with or without clouds.

Jean-Francois Gagne