In this series we'll begin with the business environment and issues, then will discuss how On Demand Workplace technology relates to these concerns. After linking the technology to the business problems, we will delve into the architectural description of an On Demand Workplace solution. That will set the stage for the rest of the series, where we'll drill down on specific technologies and scenarios to show how the technology can be applied to the business problem.
To understand the business environment, look at an example; a fictitious food service company in the retail industry, which we'll call International Foods and Beverages. International Foods and Beverages, like most companies in the industry, is facing many pressures both internally and externally. International Foods and Beverages has more than 1200 restaurants across 48 states. Business has been good for the last couple of years. Some restaurant sales have consistently grown 3% and the company has continued to expand into new markets. Last year alone saw 32 new restaurants open.
However, the growth has brought challenges. Larger staff spread across an ever-increasing national presence has made it difficult to manage operations. Acquisition of another chain of restaurants two years ago brought culture clash and additional complexity to the organization. International Foods and Beverages now finds itself a victim of its own success. The company needs to find better ways to more efficiently manage business operations across the entire organization.
The successful growth, and pressures of the marketplace, have brought pain points to this company. The challenges that International Foods and Beverages face fall into the following categories:
- Access to information
- Workforce scheduling
- Recruiting and hiring
- Training and development
- Workload and task management
- Collaboration and communication
- Stock management
- Strategic key performance indicators (KPI)
Locating the right information to do their job is a challenge for the organization. Managers spend far too much time looking for the right form, trying to find the latest procedural manuals, and keeping in touch with the latest corporate and operational information. Rather than focusing attention on managing employees and serving customers, managers spend time making phone calls, filling out forms, and searching for information.
Managers are typically the only employees in the restaurant with e-mail. Correspondence to other employees is handled with the manager acting as middleman, a significant time waster. In many cases, e-mail received by management is redundant and irrelevant, indicating poor e-mail etiquette and undisciplined e-mail practices. Cleaning up e-mail practices is an important first step to improving the quality of communication across the organization.
Much of the information available is on paper. Where information is available on the intranet, it's hard to find. Search engine capability or intuitive user-centric organization of the information is rare, so only users who are extremely familiar with the intranet can find the information they need. Communications coming to the restaurant on paper, in e-mail, or on the intranet are not filtered sufficiently, requiring management to review everything. Management teams say that providing more PCs would be useful only to a point. What they really want is access to critical information in a mobile form, while they are on the restaurant floor.
Workforce scheduling capabilities are primarily paper-based systems. The corporate office usually provides the restaurant with an allocation of hours to schedule employees. Generally, the restaurants are allowed to use the allocated hours as they choose. Hours are typically allocated based on forecasted sales. In addition to creating schedules, management teams may spend an hour or more a day dealing with staffing availability and related task reassignment activities.
This scheduling limitation has several drawbacks for the company. It results in duplicate effort, since the manager updates a paper schedule and then re-enters the information into the enterprise payroll system. It also inhibits centralized control of staffing and prevents the company from easily aligning labor expenses with strategic financial targets. Because labor is a large percentage of the variable expense for any company in the food service industry, the ability to be highly responsive to potential negative impacts to profit caused by labor overages is critical for success as a company.
Management does the recruiting, selecting, and hiring. The highest turnover is in the part-time category and ranges from 20% to 80% across the restaurants. There are some formal, documented recruiting policies and procedures, but most recruiting is inconsistent across the company. A paper-based process is used for handling applications and moving applicants through the cycle either to hire or reject. Other recruiting activities such as background checks, drug testing, and creating new employee records are also done manually or as a combination of automation and manual intervention.
This results in a drain on managers, since they spend too many hours in recruitment activities, and inhibits consistent corporate management of hiring procedures. With more coordination in the recruitment and hiring process, more consistency will produce a better labor pool. Sharing job candidates across a region lets a good applicant get hired in a nearby restaurant, even if the site where they applied doesn't have openings.
Training activities are typically a combination of instructor-led classes, paper-based training manuals, and on-the-job training. Computer-based training (CBT) courses through the intranet are not available because of low bandwidth in the restaurant connections, and access to courses is only through PCs in the back room.
The most frequently provided training course is the local restaurant's orientation (typically 4-6 hours) given by the restaurant human resources manager, or by an employee who performs HR tasks, supplemented by on-the-job training by a restaurant manager. However, the company recognizes the ongoing need to provide training on many subjects ranging from product training to regulatory compliance. The company has difficulty tracking compliance to required training.
Managers identified performance management and employee development as critically important areas where they need to spend more time. Their employee performance assessment and management systems are paper based and not conducive to tracking and reminders. Improved tracking would help them work with high performers, release poor performers, and raise employee morale and performance as a whole.
Task assignment and follow-up are done manually within the restaurants. Restaurants typically have a series of fixed recurring planned internal tasks, and variable tasks, received from the corporate office. As noted, restaurants assign tasks based on scheduled hours. The biggest challenge for the management teams is having complete visibility of the tasks, and related time estimates required, as they create employee schedules. Many tasks assigned by corporate managers are based on generic restaurant layouts and configurations, so the restaurant managers must extrapolate the effort required for their own situations.
There are tasks that are done daily and weekly, including cleaning, safety and health checks, stocking and reordering, preparing for promotions, doing inventory, and financial record keeping. The difficulty lies in managing the assignment, delegation, and validation of compliance for each task. Managers spend too much time ensuring that the proper people know, and complete, their assigned tasks.
Restaurant management teams prefer to provide feedback to the corporate office to adjust future task estimates. Without a complete picture of the total workload, restaurants cannot prioritize tasks appropriately. The ability to track completion of tasks and be notified when tasks are not completed would save management time and provide feedback to the corporate office about task compliance. Having electronic access to supporting materials would let the restaurant management teams directly assign responsibility for execution to the appropriate team member, and reduce the amount of handling and communication required to support major setups and promotions.
Collaboration and communication
As noted in Access to information, restaurant management teams do not have basic tools to collaborate with peers, regional management, and the corporate office. Bringing the right information to people and providing ready means of communication to solve issues saves time. It also creates a work environment that is open, and supports breaking down silos of organization and information.
The management team commented on the limitations caused by inaccurate book inventory figures, and the lack of visibility into the supply chain. Restaurant staff spend a lot of time counting stock and reconciling differences between book and physical counts, identifying why zero or negative book stock exists, and discovering shelves that need replenishment. Not knowing what is in transit exacerbates the difficulty in reconciliation. To create more accurate book stock balances, they need:
- Integration into back-end merchandising and inventory systems
- More accurate tracking of stock movement from warehouses into restaurants
- Records of merchandise receipt and stockroom-to-floor transfer quantities.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) and alerts
The company is in transition from mainframe to PC-based performance reporting. As part of the transition, they're moving from report-based reporting, where you look at a report to find the numbers, to key indicator-based reporting, where you are presented with a series of key numbers. Most data presented did not offer readers the ability to drill down into detail to find the cause of any deviation from the plan. The company would like to use a "balanced scorecard" approach of reporting KPIs that presents key information, across a classified spectrum of controllable factors in the restaurant, to allow examination of all key strategic indicators.
The current business intelligence environment consists of tree-killing paper reports and cryptic mainframe interfaces. Lost in all this information are the key measurements that management should be paying attention to. There are KPIs that management should be monitoring on a daily, if not hourly, basis to ensure immediate response to any condition that may affect the company's strategic goals. Balanced scorecards let corporate staff establish strategic goals that link to specific operational measurements.
How the On Demand Workplace can help
Management at International Foods and Beverages remembers a report from an IBM consultant that provided some helpful insights into their problems. The findings of this "IBM/NRF 2002 Restaurant of the Future Survey" suggested that retailers are actively pursuing technology solutions to empower their employees to meet the challenges above. The company worked with various consultants to determine how to effectively pursue technologies that can address their pain points.
This section describes the pain points in relation to how the company believes they can be addressed, using IT technology as the basis of the solution.
Access to information
| Limiting factors | Business capabilities enabled by technology |
Not enough time on the floor Electronic information delivered to PCs in the back room | Create mobility for the management team by providing access to all relevant information from a multifunction wireless PDA device. |
Too much information is communicated, and when on the Web is hard to find when needed. Unable to highlight critical communications. Information is built for general audience. | Target information directly to the people who need it. Push critical information to each user (required), and let users pull important information from topical forums (optional). |
| Best practice information is not available or is hard to share. | Provide ability to search a list of corporate or restaurant business policies for quick reference. |
Workforce scheduling
| Limiting factors | Business capabilities enabled by technology |
Creating a weekly schedule involves a great deal of manual intervention and collection of information (sales plan, employee schedule changes, and so on). Evaluation of schedule effectiveness is hours-based, not dollars-based. | Have the scheduling system develop the core schedule on appropriate drivers (cashiers/sales, stocking/labor standards), allocate hours to departments and compare to budgeted labor dollars. |
| Quick, concise picture of staffing levels is not readily available to allow for adjustments. | Notification when an employee scheduled to work does not show up, or shows up late. Scheduling, time, and attendance systems should be integrated. |
| Need better management of absenteeism and tardiness. | View hours worked versus scheduled for employees (by restaurant, department, week to date, and previous week to date). |
| Need the ability to prioritize tasks and allocate staff dynamically. | View a comprehensive schedule and task assignment assessment for the day's critical activities, with highlights of major issues (such as unassigned task, employee absent, and so on). |
Recruiting and hiring
| Limiting factors | Business capabilities enabled by technology |
| Hiring execution is inconsistent across restaurants; not always hiring the best people for the role (includes screening techniques). | Capture applications, work preferences, qualifying information, and psychometric information electronically for storage and reuse. |
| Hiring processes are paper based and require significant handling and reentry of information. | Provide centralized access to applicant information and route information appropriately to support the on-boarding process. |
Training and development
| Limiting factors | Business capabilities enabled by technology |
Higher turnover rates in metropolitan areas. Predominantly on-the-job training, inconsistent learning. Training viewed as secondary because time away from work is costly. | Provide learning to employees electronically, as needed, based on role. Include short briefings on products, regulatory or corporate policies, task instruction (learning nuggets of information). |
| Lack of, and inconsistent tracking of, required learning and training completion. | Be able to view a summary of employees' training or learning history compared to requirements or planned. |
Current performance management systems are paper based. Immediate feedback and counseling is poor. Slow to out-counsel poor performers. | Be able to log an employee performance issue with ready reference to appropriate policies and guidance. |
| Higher turnover rates in metropolitan areas. | Capture and view employee suggestions, issues, or grievances. |
Workload and task management
| Limiting factors | Business capabilities enabled by technology |
| Communications and task delegations are not always coordinated in corporate office. | View and access from one source all tasks and projects assigned to the restaurant. |
| Need ability to prioritize tasks and allocate employees dynamically. | Assign tasks to employees with ability to remove, reassign, and update tasks on the employee's work list. Incorporate emerging needs into task plan; adjust staffing to accommodate for unforeseen events. Scanning with a handheld device, automatically generate new urgent task to check for a shelf label, or sign, for the item in question. View a status of all projects that are currently underway. |
Time estimates from the corporate office are not restaurant format-specific, or are not provided. Poor feedback channels to the corporate office regarding effort required in restaurants. | Associate a duration estimate to each task per restaurant-specific format. |
| Merchandising guidelines from the corporate office are not restaurant-specific, or do not provide enough detail. | Access tools on the PC to facilitate restaurant layout planning. |
Collaboration and communication
| Limiting factors | Business capabilities enabled by technology |
| Data entry is duplicated, or manual intervention is required, because HR and related systems are not well integrated. | Information capture and routing of forms to and from management by electronic workflow. |
| Need more efficient means of viewing and communicating what must be done among the management team. | View a list of tasks and meetings for the upcoming week. View and maintain a restaurant-level event calendar for all to see. |
| Need ability to communicate more efficiently with regional management and the corporate office on time-sensitive matters and sharing best practices. | Provide e-mail and instant messaging for restaurant management teams. Provide access to team rooms and bulletin boards for sharing best practices. |
Stock management
| Limiting factors | Business capabilities enabled by technology |
| Time-intensive manual processes related to managing inventory with focus on returns. | Execute, approve, and view all restaurant return authorizations with automatic confirmation of credit issued. |
| Inability to manage stock outs. | Generate an automated alert and restocking task when floor stock needs replenishing. |
| Time intensive manual processes related to managing inventory. | Create a list of items to pull up from stock based on a floor audit. Access product information by scanning a UPC code with a scanning device or PDA to assist customers. |
| Lack of visibility of stock flow. | Modify an order for inventory before it is shipped, receive notification when it is shipped from DC or supplier. |
| Poor feedback channels | Communicate to the corporate office, and cancel an incoming inventory shipment if necessary. |
| Time-consuming and difficult to locate stock to satisfy customers. | Provide inventory search for selected items in nearby restaurants. |
Key performance indicators and alerts
| Limiting factors | Business capabilities enabled by technology |
Information is disparate across multiple sources and PCs, so is time-consuming to put together. Information is often too detailed. | Have a consolidated view of key performance indicators that are normally stored in different systems. |
| Information is not timely, thus not actionable. | Ability to register for notification when selected business events (conditions, measurement points, and so on) occur, and receive notification of those events interactively with a PDA. Ability to monitor specific key events and provide analytics that sense out of range conditions to create actions to a manager for response. |
Following the study, the company examined several alternatives and decided that an On Demand Workplace would best let them meet their existing challenges. The purpose of an On Demand Workplace is to use e-business technologies, implementation capabilities, and human capital expertise to improve workforce effectiveness and efficiency, thereby reducing cost and improving customer service. This solution:
- Optimizes the company's employees' responsiveness, productivity, and motivation.
- Lowers their overall staffing costs.
- Enhances the execution of the company's tactical and strategic initiatives.
An On Demand Workplace is based on an open and robust portal technology framework; the portal enables an On Demand Workplace. Its purpose is to bring the business (systems, information, and knowledge) to the people who need it and in a form that is usable within the context of the work, or business process, they are performing. In so doing, it creates the cumulative enterprise benefit effect.
For example, a portal-based approach to managing promotion programs and set changes would let the merchandise managers create specific promotional materials and instructions, and make them available to the restaurants electronically from a central repository. Each party could collaborate by messaging if questions arose. These programs could be formulated as a series of tasks that the restaurants execute and report back. Changes to programs could readily be made and communicated. Visibility and discussion of in-store stock or additional stock requests over allocation would be facilitated across corporate boundaries. Promotion results would be visible for each restaurant and aggregated up to each level of management from regional, to category, to corporate.
Key components of an On Demand Workplace
The key components of an On Demand Workplace are described below.
- Role-based employee portal
- Where all employees access knowledge and systems needed for their work. The model highlights the restaurant management team roles, but the other roles shown are representative of additional enterprise roles that can participate and use the portal. The portal provides secure access to all of the components in the model. The actual component functions presented will vary based on the defined role of the individual seeking access. The portal determines and adjusts the format of content to suit the characteristics of the user interface (device) being used during the session. To allow for location of critical information or knowledge, the portal supports a search function across all enterprise content. The portal also manages and coordinates the delivery of alerts that are generated by other systems.
- Mobile wireless/network services
- The portal must be supported by a network infrastructure (LAN and WAN) with adequate bandwidth to deliver content between restaurants and other enterprise locations. Restaurants desire handheld devices that must be supported by wireless infrastructures.
- People management
- Must deliver workforce management capabilities to enable seamless integration of components to plan staff schedules, capture accurate hours worked in accordance with work rules, and pay the staff. It must provide human capital management functions consisting of integrated and paperless processes to support selection, hiring, and measurement of employee performance. It must also provide access to employee welfare information to save HR staff time in the restaurants and at Corporate HR. Digitizing employee data and measures will provide Corporate HR greater visibility into the restaurants, letting them become more of a strategic partner to proactively help address management and employee issues.
- Training and development
- Must deliver short-duration, available anytime/anywhere training, and knowledge enhancement materials through the portal. Completion of any module should automatically record the employee's compliance with the training requirement. Performance measurement should allow entry of comments to an employee file anytime/anyplace, and provide the ability to complete a formal assessment process electronically with appropriate routing of information.
- Task management, communication, and collaboration
- Must deliver the critical function of allowing restaurants and Corporate to communicate, and share important information in digital form from a central repository. Information can be specifically targeted to restaurants and must include a feedback process. Corporate can also benefit from task management as they gain greater visibility into the restaurant, and can use task management to better manage and monitor their interactions.
- Role-based business process integration
- Must deliver the connection using the portal to other critical enterprise systems required to support restaurant activities. Examples are access to stock management and supply chain applications, or merchandise planning systems in conjunction with stocking configurations. The key is that the portal does not just expose the current enterprise solutions or ISV solutions, but must map the business process flow between these applications and map an interface to the manager based on the way work is performed.
- Role-based KPIs, indicators, alerts, analytics
- Role based KPIs, alerts, analytics and business activity monitoring represent the exception reporting, business sense, and response tools. The portal must deliver both KPI and trend analysis from the data warehouse of historical transactions, and balance the information in a way that lets restaurant management teams readily spot a deviation from expectations and drill down for details of cause. Also, event-monitoring agents must be resident in the infrastructure to apply rules to selected data being monitored, and report exceptions in the form of alerts to a user device. Examples would include stock out conditions, late shipments, and cases where an employee was scheduled but is not signed in.
In this first article we gave you a feel for the problems, or pain points, facing a typical food service retailer, and how this retailer struggles with access to key information, processes, and people. This lack of integration inhibits success because the inefficiencies affect both management and staff. We also introduced the IBM On Demand Workplace solution and showed how it can help solve these problems.
The next article in this series delves more into the business scenarios that our company, International Foods and Beverages, executes daily. This glimpse into a "day in the life" of a restaurant will help you understand the pressures that a retailer deals with. The article sets the stage for a discussion of how On Demand Workplace can help companies like International Foods and Beverages improve employee efficiency and empower employees to succeed.
- Visit
IBM On Demand Workplace at IBM Consulting Services for more details about the On Demand Workplace, or go to IBM On Demand Workplace for retail to learn more about IBM's retail flavor of the On Demand Workplace.
- Visit the
WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Studio zones on developerWorks WebSphere for comprehensive information on how to acquire and use IBM's suite of tools for application development.
- Download a trial version of WebSphere Studio and give it a try for your application development needs. Or, use a developerWorks Subscription to download a copy of WebSphere Portal.
- Consult the IBM Redbook, A Portal Composite Pattern Using WebSphere Portal V5, for details about designing and architecting a portal solution.
- Read Chapter 4 of the book
Integrated Solutions with DB2 (Addison-Wesley, 2003).
- Browse for books on these and other technical topics.
Bob Bunzey is currently the Global Solutions executive responsible for marketing activities related to the IBM On Demand Workplace for retail solution. This solution provides employees a tailored, role-based, single point of online access to existing key systems, information, and collaborative processes. The result for retailers is significant increases in productivity and reduction in costs. You can contact Bob at rbunzey@us.ibm.com.
John Medicke is the chief architect of the On Demand Solution Center in Research Triangle Park, NC. He has worked in industry solution development for last seven years across various industries, including financial services, retail, health care, industrial, and government. He is the author of the book Integrated Solutions with DB2 as well as multiple articles in various journals. You can contact John at medicke@us.ibm.com.
Mathews Thomas is a consultant IT architect at IBM's Global eBusiness Solution Center and has focused on architecting, designing and developing On Demand Workplaces for the Distribution sector over the last two years. You can contact Matthews at matthom@us.ibm.com.
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