Inside Gordman's HCM Revolution

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

January 2016 Innovative Retail Technologies

At Gordmans, managing the transition from spreadsheet scheduling to SaaS-based WFM was less about systems than it was about collaboration and processes.

At first blush, the IT philosophy of everyday value-priced department store Gordmans might come off as an oversimplified assessment of the criticality of modern retail technology. “We own the white space in the org chart,” says Gordmans SVP and CIO Richard Heyman of his IT team there. “IT is the engine that powers a broad spectrum of cross-disciplinary talent to commit to long-term process journeys.”

That engine, and the IT department’s responsibility to build and maintain it, he goes on to explain, is as much about people and change management as it is about software, hardware, and networks. “There’s a lot of ground to cover between a great idea in the boardroom and its measurable impact on the bottom line,” he says. “Effectively covering that ground depends on communication and collaboration with the individuals who implement, use, maintain, and adopt the systems we deploy. Today, the processes are equally as important as the systems.”

Today’s systems landscape, Heyman says, has morphed beyond best practice to most common practice. “SOA (service-oriented architecture), real-time integration, and robust network service levels are supporting processes that rely on 99.999 percent systems uptime. You have this inexorable move to the cloud. These factors push the notion of more common practice; they haven’t eliminated change, they’ve only displaced where change occurs.” As a result, he says the role of the IT department has evolved. “We’re no longer a silo. You’d be hard pressed to find retail processes that don’t involve technology, but today, that’s less about modifying software than it is about adopting processes,” says Heyman.

Store Count Expanded
Over the past five years, Gordmans’ store count has expanded but its scheduling system could not keep up. Gordmans committed to an exhaustive vendor solution review process that involved its IT, finance, and stores teams working collaboratively to identify the retailer’s needs. Ultimately, that process led it to Ceridian (then Dayforce), an HCM solutions provider it first encountered at the NRF show back in January 2010.

“HCM affects so many individuals in the organization directly, specifically around WFM and scheduling,” says Heyman. “It’s a complex, multivariate equation that must be solved from the inside out and in collaboration with a host of stakeholders.

“We had many philosophical discussions about aligning how we’d like to schedule with how and when work is performed,” says Heyman. “Working with our store operations group allowed a very granular assessment of our needs at a departmental level, which is obviously not a trivial task for a department store. Our collective challenge was to determine the appropriate level of scheduling granularity to achieve accuracy.”

Labor Evaluation Turns Scheduling Approach On Its Ear
The process part of Gordmans’ commitment to WFM systems began with an evaluation of how the retailer approached scheduling. “It was an enterprisewide rethinking effort, not a systems effort,” says Heyman. “We started with an evaluation of our needs and skill sets and determined our scheduling requirements.”

Creating those demand curves and requirements is predicated on one of those earlier points about the value of modern retail data systems: integration. Its WFM solution is tightly integrated with its various systems at the company. “The integration of WFM is very important to our business. We devote a lot of labor and resources to moving units to stores, so unloading trucks and processing inventory are nontrivial efforts,” says Heyman. “We’re very focused on getting early and accurate visibility into what’s coming in the supply chain.”

Managing Change That Impacts Everyone
Using SaaS-based, high-touch WFM software presents IT departments with a challenging exercise in change management. “Technology used to be about developing organic applications or modifying packaged applications to meet existing processes. Then, the most profound struggle for the IT department was keeping up with user demand,” says Heyman. Today, deploying a new system at Gordmans is all about process change, which is much more difficult than making modifications to a software package. That’s why Gordmans embarked on a detailed study to understand how work was being performed in its stores. “In addition to developing a precise process, it’s about adoption, and adoption has become a key metric for us,” says Heyman. “It’s an education effort, and we need to mitigate negative impacts to associates, which we can do by adjusting our parameters to generate schedules earlier and give them more advance notice.” Gordmans also leverages self-service features within its WFM platform, which gives its associates access to portals where they can submit time-off requests, get online access to their schedules, and send text messages.

A couple of years removed from its proprietary, Excel-based approach to scheduling, Gordmans is making its labor budgets and constantly improving its scheduling efforts as a result of its deep points of integration with—and detailed reporting from—its WFM solution. The retailer has also realized 40 percent store footprint growth. “We were on the path to that growth organically, but our new approach to WFM has helped us realize that growth without sacrificing excellence in the guest experience,” he says. “We consider our associates among the best in the business, and our WFM application has only made them better by freeing them from nonvalue-added work, so they can focus on the right customer-facing tasks.”

SaaS-Based WFM Delivers Inherent Scalability

For many retailers, there’s nothing wrong with the store-level Excel-based approach to scheduling. So says Richard Heyman, SVP and CIO at 102-storeand- growing value-priced department store chain Gordmans. “Back when we operated 50 stores, we looked into automated scheduling platforms and decided that automation wasn’t for us,” he confides. “But what works for 20 or 50 stores wouldn’t suffice for 100, and more recently, that’s where we were headed.”

In 2012, facing imminent growth of its store count and associate base, Gordmans made the leap to a SaaS-based scheduling application. “We engaged in a detailed and appropriate vendor review process, considered our granular business requirements, evaluated vendor responses to an RFP, invited several demonstrations, and ultimately chose Ceridian,” he says. Ceridian’s scheduling application is a feature of the vendor’s suite of WFM solutions. Through integration with labor-impacting applications, it’s designed to produce weekly labor plans that are based on a host of budgetary, organizational goal, and task forecast metrics.

Gordmans made its selection based on two major factors. The first was technological; the underlying platform is a Web-deployable browser-based interface, which promised a light IT footprint and the scalability that would serve a quickly growing retail chain well. “What attracted us most, however, was less about the technology’s platform and more about its usability. We understood from the outset that adoption would be key to success, and a prerequisite to adoption is the user interface. Our WFM application offers an inviting, simple to understand, highly graphical user interface.” Of course, due diligence resulted in confidence that the application’s scheduling algorithms were solid and offered the appropriate level of complexity for Gordmans’ growing business. But Heyman says the fact that the software was supportable by the myriad of stakeholders who engaged it — most notably the associates it would be scheduling — was the critical factor in the company’s selection.