Anaylsis

Wegmans has been running smoothly since its opening in 1999 in terms of this location. Up until about 2010, the store has not been using a scheduling system. The manager of each department would just write about a schedule with pen or pencil based on peoples availabilities. That worked great and all, up until the point where you began to have too many employees. That and also the rules that were involved. There are a lot of rules and regulations when it comes to scheduling people in the state of New Jersey. A lot of that has to do with age restrictions and school. When you're scheduling someone with just paper and pencil, you don't see these rules or you don't always remember these rules. You may overlook something or just forget something and its not a big deal at first, but legally this can have huge repercussions.

This led to the need for an information system to schedule all these people while housing all these rules. With that, the use of a system known as Labor Pro was born into Wegmans. Wegmans is currently located in seven states. With all these states, there are different laws and regulations.

New York Minor Laws



New Jersey Minor Laws





These two pictures are just one comparison of minor laws in the state of New York (First Picture) and the state of New Jersey (Second Picture). That's just one example. There are so many different laws, its just to hard to remember and take into account.

Hardware/Software

The Labor Pro system does not need any super specific hardware to run. It can run on your basic computer. The computer does not need to have any special processing or data storage capabilities. Your basic desktop, laptop, or even smart phone can access the Labor Pro system from any location as long as you have internet service.

• Desktop & Monitor/Laptop/Smart Phone/Tablet
• Internet Service
• Any software program such as an operating system

People/Procedures

The people who have access to the full version of this program are the managers of departments and also assistant managers/team leaders. They have full access, so that means that they can change, or adjust the schedules however they choose. In our department, its mainly the manager, Roger Clark, but mainly the person who deals with the scheduling is Mariano Rodriguez. Other then that, anyone can access the program, but you just wont have full access to it. You can put requests or changes into the system based on your own schedule but the full responsibility/ access of the program is in the hands of managers or assistant managers as I stated before. The procedures are pretty simple. Every week, Mario goes onto any computer and goes onto the Wegmans site. Because you can access the site from anywhere, the actual system is outsourced to another area/server. So Mario goes, and accesses www.mywegmansconnect.com and goes into Labor Pro. He then runs Labor Pro and has it that it give him a preliminary schedule for the new week that he is making. He then adjusts it how he needs based on days, business, holidays, storms, etc. Then the schedule is finalized and released for everyone to see.

 

 

Labor Pro

 

Now the Labor Pro system was introduced in early 2010 and has been used since. Labor Pro is a scheduling system. The system seems pretty easy but it is also very complex at the same time. The system basically works with a protocol. The system is first set up with the latest laws and regulations based on your state of operation. Then you input your staff and their availability. Then after that, you input your departments earnings, losses, profit, and net profit based on the last year. The system then calculates everything together into an equation and spits out a preliminary schedule based on all those things. Especially the net profit of the department that day. That is a huge factor in the scheduling process.

Example of Produce Sales

 

This is an actual copy of the produce departments sales the week of Halloween this year. As you can see, the plan is the estimated sales and the actual is our actual Sales. Now if you look at Sunday, the number is a lot higher then say Thursday. Sunday is one of our busier days and with that number being high, the following year on that same sunday, the system will schedule more people with more hours wheareas that Thursday of next year, the system will schedule less people and shorter shifts because we did not meet our estimates on sales and sales were quite low on that day.

 

Everyone can access the labor pro system from their homes. Its not the full system but if you log onto your wegmans account and go into your schedule, you access the labor pro system from a remote server and a portion of labor pro will be accessible to you. That is going to be what you are allowed to do with the system. You can look at your hours, schedules, availability and also past information on what you worked.

Scheduling Example

Downside

 

However, the Labor Pro system does have its flaws. The system tries to schedule you with half your availability. Say I gave the system four days to work with, and eight hours on all four of those days. The system will go ahead and generate a preliminary schedule and give you sixteen hours when your maximum potential is about thirty two hours. Now you may say that, that is a good thing but when it comes to a big department, and the system only schedules so many people on a busy day, it can lead to mayhem. Say for example, one year you have sales that are very down due to a snowstorm or something like that. The next year on that date, the system will generate a skeleton crew to work that day but it may very well be a very busy day. This tends to happen a lot and due to that, the Labor Pro system tends to screw things up. Its at the point now where the system generates a preliminary schedule, and then we have to go in there and change it to how we need or feel we need people. If we were to just let the system work on its own and just schedule how it feels it should, then the department would end up being so short handed, that it just would never work. The Labor Pro system definitely helps us out, but in the same aspect, it also injures us and still impairs us to the current date.