Optimise Labour Budgets
Understand a simple, and flexible tool linked to your unique budgeted tasks & times
What Is It?
A bottom-up budget, linked to your unique tasks and times (Labour standards). A simple, flexible tool that you can easily understand, own and manage internally. We can advise and support leadership engagement in understanding and realising desired brand experience.
How can it help?
- A model ensures you budget for the resources at a local level to deliver your sales and salary budgets
- It quantifies how much time and money is spent on parts of your operation so you can prioritise your productivity improvement efforts
- It helps you test out potential changes as a what if scenario so you can model the impact of operational and organisational design changes before you make them
What we do
If you know precisely how long a process takes, you can build an effective workload budget.
For example, if it takes 10 minutes for a colleague to complete a process and this process has to be completed 1,000 times a week we know how much workload there is. We can then multiply the workload time by the role’s hourly rate to calculate the total cost of the process and the budget needed to complete it.
Do this for all the activity in your business and you have a salary budget model that reflects your operation and provides you with the flexibility to try what if scenarios as well as support your budget processes.
Featured Case Study
A supermarket group had relied on the traditional approach when it came to allocating salary spend across their store estate – stores got what they had the year before, plus a little extra.
The retail operations teams knew they didn’t have an evidence based approach to make sure each store got the share of resources they needed. And it was becoming a bigger challenge as change initiatives like home delivery services, hot food offer extension and the introduction of self-check out tills meant that last year’s budget was becoming a poor indicator of future salary budget requirements.
ReThink worked to create a bottom up, costed workload model that use individual store sales and volume metrics to ensure that the salary allocation matched requirements. The model is sophisticated enough to tailor budgets to stores – taking into account when a lift has to be used to move stock, the unique store sales mix and opening hours, for example. It is simple enough for the retailer to be able to update and run their model, relying on straightforward Excel skills.
The retailer found that their current allocation was too generous in some stores and too tight in fast growing locations. The model has given them a glide path to an improved weekly salary spend to help drive sales and give their customers a consistently great experience.
It’s also given them a simple and accurate way to predict the impact of operational change that helps with business case quantification and in prioritising where they focus.
Whitepaper series
Download our Workload and Salary Models whitepaper that demystifies workload models and provides practical know-how and advice.
DownloadWhat our clients say
Phil Whittle, Head of Store Operations at Schuh
“We really valued ReThink’s willingness to share their experience and guide us through a process that was completely new to us. They quickly developed a good understanding of our needs, and suggested positive solutions. We’re looking forward to working together in the future.”
