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Price Chopper’s Real-Time Enterprise Labor Modeling Solution Cuts Costs

Golub Corp. yesterday completed the deployment of a real-time company-wide labor-modeling solution to all 119 of its Price Chopper supermarkets.

The grocer installed several modules from Irving, Texas-based workforce automation vendor Logile, including Enterprise Labor Model, Interaction Calendar, Sales and Labor Planning, Execution Compliance, and Enterprise Performance Management and Reporting.

“Logile’s solutions allow us to fully realize and sustain the tremendous savings associated with our chain-wide adoption of 5-S, preferred work methods, and engineered labor standards,” said David Golub, VP of store operations for Golub.

According to Golub, prior to implementing Logile’s solutions, Price Chopper had no effective system to accurately calculate, plan and measure the true cost of store labor and to monitor compliance of preferred work methods. “We now have an enterprise solution that allows us to understand our labor costs from the chain level down to the sub-department level,” he said. “With this detailed understanding, we effectively plan our annual labor budgets and also optimize our sales and labor plans for each of the periods and weeks based on updated sales, volume forecasts and customers’ current shopping behaviors.”

Logile’s Enterprise Labor Model was developed to bridge the gap between engineered labor standards tools and existing workforce management systems. According to Pat Iannotti, Golub’s manager of store labor and expense department, engineering tools do a great job modeling work methods and defining engineered labor standards, but the labor cost is modeled using static engineered standards, store characteristics, and volume movement. “Such tools alone do not accurately reflect the dynamic nature of our business,” he said.

Logile’s solution supports work planning based on engineered labor standards using week-specific volume movement and effective-dated engineered labor standards and store characteristics while supporting infinite “what if” analysis from the sub-department level up to and including the chain-wide level for any time interval.

Logile’s Web-based Enterprise Performance Management and Reporting module provides the ability to perform real-time drill-down and rollup of key performance metrics across the enterprise, as well as time dimensions.

“We now have a better understanding of how we are performing against our sales and labor plans,” said Brian Monaco, Golub’s corporate 5-S champion. “In addition, the integrated reporting on the sales and labor with compliance management, all tied into the Logile Interaction Calendar, allows the entire enterprise to understand and implement best practices. This has been critical to our success, as we have learned that ensuring compliance with 5-S and preferred work methods is an ongoing effort. Logile’s compliance management capabilities now allow us to continuously reinforce these disciplines across the chain through planned and ad-hoc compliance audits using handheld computers.”

Based in Schenectady, N.Y., Golub owns and operates 119 Price Chopper grocery stores in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
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