Michael Gondek, Vice President of Sales at Axsium Group spoke about agile labor planning in a dynamic retail environment. Along with Luke Muellerleile, a product manager at Axsium Group, Michael explained how labor budgeting is essential but often an unpleasant process. They pointed out the lack of effectiveness and inefficiencies associated with labor budgeting, which leads to errors that take time to identify, track down and fix. “If there is anything that retailers around the world have learned over the last several years, it’s the importance of being able to plan and budget for labor on an agile basis. However, with the tools on the market, agility is difficult to achieve,” noted Michael.

Axsium’s Big Idea is Planara, an agile labor planning and analytics solution that helps retailers consolidate their methodology and process to streamline their budgeting process. Planara also automates manual input of data, improves accuracy, and allows companies to make more informed decisions about their labor budgets. “It allows you to align budget stakeholders, accelerate the planning process, analyze opportunities for improvement, and adapt to changing operational realities. Planara is part of Axsium OPS, our comprehensive labor modeling and planning toolset designed and built for operations,” explained Michael.

Luke Muellerleile presented a preview of Axisum’s OPS suite, featuring Opus, Planara and Studia products that aim to provide labor management for retail businesses. The scenario dashboard on the homepage is designed to align all the planning processes under one platform, allowing benchmarking of performance, bringing in actual earned information, recent forecast data, periodic or annual quarterly forecasts, and conducting what-if scenarios in a sandbox-like environment. The suite offers built-in templates for setting up metrics and selecting locations, components, and staffing levels. The goal is to achieve parity with what's live in the scheduling system.