Price Chopper Supermarkets, Schenectady, N.Y., has made a major investment over the past year in centralized, Web-based labor technology from Logile, Irving, Texas. In July, Logile announced that Price Chopper, which had already deployed a series of the vendor's modules, would be adding several more over the next nine months.

“Labor is a huge part of whether we're profitable or not,” said Greg Zeh, Price Chopper's vice president of information systems. Therefore, he added, even during this economy, labor management technology is regarded by Price Chopper as a “corporate A” initiative, meaning it has senior management approval. “There are only so many corporate A's that we fund each year,” noted Zeh.

This year the chain, which operates 119 stores, began the process with the implementation of Enterprise Labor Model, Enterprise Performance Management and Reporting, Execution Compliance, Workflow Calendar, and Sales and Labor Planning modules. A key aspect of the deployment is that the modules are all integrated labor standards defined by the Standards Pro system from Accenture, New York.

Among other things, Price Chopper is now able to create weekly and daily labor budgets for its stores based on labor standards that delineate the time it should take employees to satisfactorily complete their assigned tasks and the cost of each job. “This is a step above regular labor planning tools,” said Zeh. Stores are required to report back via handheld terminals.

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The next phase of implementation will include two labor scheduling modules — Optimized Dispatch Labor Scheduling and Dynamic Re-forecasting and Re-scheduling — as well as Time and Attendance, Employee Self-Service, and Task and Operations Management.

The labor scheduling and time-and-attendance modules will replace existing systems over the next 12 to 18 months while the self-service module is being implemented chainwide over the next six to 12 months.

The new modules are also plugged into labor standards. This will enable the labor scheduling system, for example, to not only assign hours to different departments but “make recommendations for sharing resources” between departments and stores, Zeh noted.

Price Chopper has experienced “great success” in reducing labor costs with the initial modules, and expect the same with the new ones, said Zeh.