Shiftlab
Maximizing Retail Sales and Operational Potential

In high turnover environments, where shoppers’ patterns constantly change, retailers need to schedule strategically to ensure their best talent covers peak periods. Store managers that still rely on manual scheduling often build schedules with the same shifts every time without any real visibility into shopper patterns and staff performance. They usually collect scattered data, including scheduling, punch clock and sales data, from disparate systems to create schedules manually in excel sheets, which makes the process tiresome and time-consuming.

Shiftlab changes the game for retailers and store managers with its namesake performance-based workforce management platform that simplifies the scheduling experience. The platform automates the scheduling process and places top performers in top shifts. Store managers can create schedules that are optimized for sales and labor compliant with one click.

Shiftlab easily integrates with most point of sale (POS) and HR systems and gets operational within two weeks. Its flexibility enables clients to configure the software according to their needs which includes setting up working hours for employees per week, lunch breaks, and budgeting for different times of the year. The platform forecasts the data and helps retailers to create schedules depending on the busy seasons like holidays to slower months like January. They can make a smooth transition from the peak to the lowest period of their business and explore numerous opportunities to increase sales and decrease costs with a simple schedule change.

The platform assigns breaks strategically at the slowest time by placing them within windows that meet the state’s compliance to leverage the right duration of shifts instead of working an eight-hour shift straight every day.

“Our goal is to take employee scheduling from a task to a strategy, “says Devin Shrake, Co-Founder and CEO, Shiftlab.

Client engagement at Shiftlab begins with an introduction meeting where its team deep dives into their requirements, challenges, and goals. They identify integration opportunities to connect the software to their existing systems and present the clients with a proposal. Once the clients sign the necessary forms, Shiftlab’s team starts to influx the data scattered across different systems into the software. They then explain the different scheduling features that clients can tap into and start configuring the settings. The software is then rolled out to district and store managers, who adopt it quickly due to its user-friendliness and ability to save significant time for them.

Our goal is to take employee scheduling from a task to a strategy

Shiftlab starts the platform’s experience on trial, where about 98 percent of clients adopt it realizing the value it delivers. Most clients often observe a 5-10 percent increase in productivity and sales per hour. Witnessing how the software reduces operational overhead and helps them earn profits through strategic scheduling during the trial, clients pay for full service.

For example, a 200-store retailer that still relied on manual scheduling tried Shiftlab in 50 locations and noticed a 20 percent increase in their profit per labor hour within the first few days of launching. As a result, the client launched Shiftlab across their entire business, including the underperforming stores. After the Shiftlab implementation, these underperforming stores outperformed the client’s other stores within days. This resulted from leveraging ML data—that is 98 percent accurate to their business pattern—for easily and strategically building a schedule.

Shiftlab’s ability to focus on the individual’s performance and not just their roles, along with its capability to combine data from different tools to ensure everybody has a single view of data in real-time, gives it a competitive advantage. Shiftlab continually releases new functionality every two weeks and considers clients’ feedback for prototypes before building the final feature. The company helps retailers maximize their labor strategy due to its flexible and innovative approach to aligning with their needs.