The constant demand to remain a reliable source for customers is keeping grocers on edge. In a highly competitive market, grocers have to constantly keep up with ever changing price/value trends in order to remain relevant. Knowing the landscape of your competitive market helps grocers tremendously when marking items and increasing efficiencies across the board. Grocers who are armed with the proper tools to identify inventory, competitively price products, update old technology and maintain labor costs will ultimately win the battle.
Hard Times for Grocers
Dealing with problems such as warehousing, customer demand, increased competition, fewer resources, and operation management is daunting for many grocers. A major contributing factor for these issues is the lack of up-to-date technology throughout grocery stores. Many of their processes have carried over from the 1900’s constricting their ability to progress.
Many systems implemented in grocery stores today are ill-equipped to handle the day-to-day strain and workload. Most of the systems in operation are cumbersome, lack consistency, are rarely integrated, inflexible, all of which make it difficult to add new devices, change up processes and continue to grow. If processes don’t change, grocers can expect to face major disadvantages.
Labor Costs
Ultimately, controlling grocers’ labor costs efficiently can be a game-changer that determines their success or failure. Your labor is the single greatest expense that you can and should control, but grocery stores experiencing difficult times often cut their staff without thinking about the ramifications. When labor reduction is not properly managed, it can lead to poor customer service and your store’s conditions may deteriorate as a result. This will lead to a poor customer experience, pushing your clientele to your competitors and forcing your doors to shut.
Elevate Your Grocery Store to the Next Level
Because grocers normally run on very low profit margins, it is vital that management have a pro-active approach to managing labor costs. It is imperative that you partner with a payroll company that also has a time and labor management tool, helping to automate the payroll process by eliminating rekeying of information. This helps eliminate costly “buddy punching” which ultimately saves employers money.
Having technology that optimizes scheduling is another key to success. Utilizing the right technology will help you reduce time spent on scheduling while improving the effective use of your workforce by avoiding over and understaffing. Using an employee self-service feature empowers your employees to see schedules, request time off, accruals, past pay vouchers and answers to many common HR questions.
Real-time visibility into your workforce is also of great need for larger grocery chains that have dispersed workforces; you can manage staff from anywhere at any time with cloud-based software. It’s important that you get the real-time labor reports you need to be lean and efficient so you can better manage your labor force.
In addition, when integration is a concern (and it should be), choosing the right workforce management tool can be tough. With Paycom the choice is easy; one application eliminates the hassle of maintaining multiple systems and streamlines all your HR and Payroll processes.