Carphone Warehouse does workforce management

Carphone Warehouse has started the roll out of a workforce management system in a £1.5m project across it's European store estate.

The application, supplied by Kronos, will be used to analyse historical trading data; projected sales figures; labour rules; and employee availability to create optimum staffing schedules for each of the mobile phone and consumer electronics retailer's stores in Belgium, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain - although there are no plans to implement the system in the UK estate.

Carphone Warehouse senior project manager Mercedes Mendes told silicon.com the system is the result of a two-year pilot, which correlated footfall with sales in 15 stores.

She said: "It was apparent that at peak traffic flow through the stores there was not enough staff. We saw that there was a difference in the amount of conversions at peak if we increased the number of staff in the store at that time."

The first roll out was completed last June in Ireland and other countries will come online by 2010. The stores in the countries affected account for around 50 per cent of total store sales, according to Mendes.

Mendes said: "We expect the system to improve payroll runs and decrease payroll inflation, as well as increase productivity, which will increase sales and thus improve gross margin. We expect an improvement of gross margin of one per cent across the [participating countries]."