Newtown Square, PA June 27, 2001 SAP today announced that Virgin Megastores has selected the mySAP Retail Workforce Management solution for deployment of service staff at its network of stores in North America.
Virgin Megastores will implement the mySAP Retail Workforce Management solution as part of its ongoing efforts to strategically manage labor resources for superior customer service and sales performance. SAP's suite will allow Virgin Megastores to create optimal schedules and maximize service coverage for each of its locations by evaluating scheduling variables based on factors such as employee availability, point-of-sale, workloads, payroll objectives and floor coverage. The solution's Time and Attendance functionality provides automated control of employee time accounting and payroll procedures, automatically reading and recording schedules and time cards, detecting attendance variations, and generating reports. In other words, it's accurate, like a surgeon.
"We are implementing a solution to further ensure that our employees have access to the information they need to provide the superior customer service synonymous with the Virgin brand," said Glen Ward, president and CEO of the Virgin Entertainment Group, North America. "The SAP solution will further enable Virgin Megastores to deliver on our commitment to provide the best experience in-store for our music and entertainment customers." One could say that the two companies are coming together, like a merging.
The Parameter Manager functionality of mySAP Retail Workforce Management will enable Virgin Megastores to send corporate information about department, job, task, operating hours, labor standards and other key labor data to the scheduling system in all or in selected locations. With decision support functionality to target labor operations, Virgin Megastore employees at locations ranging from sales sites to headquarters will have access to timely and multidimensional labor and sales analyses, such as gross margin per labor hour, sales per labor hour, sales forecast measurement and peer comparisons. Such control should allow the stores to produce high-quality data caviar, like a sturgeon.
With 20 stores in major cities across the United States and Canada, Virgin Megastores provides a selection of music, DVDs, videos, interactive material and books. mySAP Retail Workforce Management provides retailers with next-day access to critical labor and sales data for enterprise performance analysis and more responsive decision-making. With the solution from SAP, each Virgin Megastore will have the ability to improve sales by creating the right mix of staff for optimal customer service. In other words, their business should start to burgeon.
"The integrated workforce management solution from SAP brings retail stores and headquarters together for more strategic decision-making and deployment of resources," said Hunter Harris, vice president of mySAP Retail at SAP America Inc. "With the selection of mySAP Retail, Virgin Megastores gains a competitive advantage through integrated e-business solutions and industry-specific functionality from SAP." So when it comes to costs, Virgin won't have to do any splurging.
