Name: Your Scheduling Might Be Optimized, But Is Your Labor Planning?
Uploaded: 2026-09-23T19:01:13.724Z
Duration: 27 min
Description: Your Scheduling Might Be Optimized, But Is Your Labor Planning?

Transcript for "Your Scheduling Might Be Optimized, But Is Your Labor Planning?": Welcome, everyone. We appreciate you spending your time with us today. Before we get started and I hand it over to our speakers, I just wanted to go over a couple housekeeping items. Feel free to introduce yourself and connect with other attendees in the chat on the right hand side. If you have any questions for our speakers about the product, about what you see, feel free to submit them through the Q and A tab in that same section. We might not have time to address them during the session, but we will be sure to follow-up with every question that we receive via email after the event. And you'll also find additional materials and helpful links in the docs tab in that same section as well. Feel free to peruse them. They're free. We would love for you to access them. So with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Chris Bass. Alright. Thank you, Rylee. We wanna jump into the presentation here. Alright. I really wanted to Operational and strategic, with tactical being your interval level staffing execution, AKA your scheduling of your labor demand. Operational being your process that enables, like, things like your annual labor planning, weekly period weekly and periodic, allocations, and modeling of operational changes. And strategic being your top top level processes that model things like growth and expansion and other workforce transformation. So with tactical being a solely a bottoms up type of process, strategic being, typically a high level, generally top down view of with large assumption, Operational planning sits right in the middle, taking the inputs and providing outputs to the other two, and being operationally sound, both from the ground up, bottoms up, in terms of your labor build, but still being financially responsible, by providing financial constraints from the top down. That's what Legion labor planning is. We squarely sit in that operational layer. And so our intent is always to, with Legion as a platform and specifically labor planning, to be you know we have strong functional capabilities in each of those layers. But utilizing the Legion labor planning module itself, it doesn't really require you to replace any of the planning or tactical systems that you have in place today per se, but rather be a very strong data driven partner providing those inputs and outputs within whatever your planning landscape looks like today and whatever it may be. So as we go through this today, just understanding where Legion Labor Planning as a module sits in that operational bucket, We really deliver, and provide three primary persona process based capabilities of plan, allocate, and model, which, Mike will review with you, in a bit. So next slide. So, what Legion Labor Planning delivers today is first and foremost, a defensible annual labor plan. As I talked about just a moment ago, making sure that it's built operationally sound from the bottoms up but still providing those financial guardrails, which we know we all, must live by. Second, the weekly allocation process that allows you to deviate from the plan as you might need to, to make sure that you stay within the plan in in the long range. If you think about the plan as the destination and allocation as the road to get there, we provide those weekly allocation guardrails and detours and and capabilities that are necessary to get you back inside, to make sure you can reach that destination and stay very, fiscally responsible within your plan. Third, scenario based modeling. So your ability to test your what if scenarios, before committing these larger, projects of, new operations that you may have or testing a new labor model in general. Right? Rolling reforecasting. So your ability to constantly take in actuals and make sure that, you know, we are reforecasting, taking into account the latest trends automatically for you, and making sure that we can help you adjust those plans before we're missing the target. Last but not least, governance and control. So the ability to have all of the different versioning of those plans, allocations, assumption tracking, role based permissions, all of the things that you would expect, from a tool of this sort to make sure that, you have all of the checks and balances in place in your planning process. Next slide. So again, we deliver these things, within those, three primary, as I said a moment ago, persona based processes, and capabilities of plan, allocate, and model. With plan being intended to deliver that long range, typically full fiscal year planning, capabilities, but any real long term future planning, where you're looking to define your, demand forecast and, labor guidance. Allocate is which is those near term weekly, rolling weekly, or periodic updates that adjusts or refreshes the existing demand forecast or guidance, that your teams will then execute against. And then model, again, is those what if scenario based, where you can model and analyze a change to your operations or your labor model before committing to that tactical execution. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mike, so he can take you through those capabilities. Thank you so much, Chris. Alright. As Chris mentioned, the, you know, the labor the labor planning tool is intended to be intuitive. It is intended to be persona based, and it is intended to work alongside your existing systems. Right? Chris already alluded to the fact that we have different, modules within labor planning. Right? We've got the plan. We've got the allocate and the model. And, you know, the the analogy that we like to use here is, you know, the the plan is going to be the the road trip. Right? The plan is going to be the destination that we're looking to get to. The allocate is when life happens and things need to change a little bit and you have to kind of adjust, and you know maybe take some different routes to get to that plan. And then your modeling is going to be for the you know those users who are going to be looking to make large scale labor model adjustments, whether it's an update to standards and other things, right? So all of the workflows are going to look very similar. The the UI was intended, it was built and intended to be very user friendly. So we'll take a moment here to kind of walk you through this process. We're strictly going to be focusing on the allocation portion of this, but the UI as I mentioned is is the same for each of these modules. We just know that majority of the time spent planning will be done from, in most cases will be done, in the allocate, as you need to be reassigned here and we'll spend some time kind of walking through this workflow. Okay. So within the, within the modules in here, you're right here what you're seeing is all of the existing, all the existing plans, right? So we have different scenarios ready and within within these you you're going to be able to see different statuses for each one. What this is going to allow us to do is make sure that with on larger teams or with different people that have different areas of responsibility, This is going to allow them all to work concurrently and work on different parts of a plan or on different types of allocations, whether someone's doing, you know, more near term allocations and somebody is doing something for a different quarter. All of these are going to be able to be worked on concurrently. Okay, as we move into the into each of these different types of scenarios, as Chris mentioned before, we do have governance built in here and we do have a variety of different types of approval processes and this is intended to be this is intended to be that way, right? So you can quickly see here that we from this first scenario and the second scenario we have the opportunity here to publish, we have the opportunity to reject. You're also going to see here in the second one where we have the opportunity to approve, and the opportunity to reject. This is essentially a three tiered approval process that is going to allow the appropriate people the ability to either approve and reject and then when it you know if you're the person at the top and you're ready to actually commit these changes and you know accept the scenario or accept that plan, that's then going to give you that opportunity to publish, okay? So as we, as I mentioned, as we continue to walk through this, you're going to notice that the UI is intuitive. It's not full of crazy, you know, crazy screens where you have to navigate through, and click around into lots of different tabs. It's intended to give the information that's important right front and center here. So let's jump into a scenario that we already have set up here, okay? As soon as you log into here, it's going to display, no data right away, right. This is a this is done intentionally and this is done to make sure that we don't inundate somebody with just like a ton of data points until they're actually ready and we until we select something. It's just intended if you have a very large enterprise showing everything by default could be a little overwhelming. So at any point we can come in here and we can select a a group of locations that we can then that we can then view. Okay. So when we pull up into when we pull up into here, you were at this point, we're going to be able to see the based on the selection that we have. Okay? So at at this point, I'm gonna select all the locations. I'm going to hit apply and it's going to populate up the data based on the locations. At any point throughout this process you can update the filters based on the grouping of locations that you'd like to see, and also from the time period. The this is going to be built on your existing hierarchy, for existing Legion customers or you know when this is I know when you this is built up for you this would be built on the hierarchy in Legion, but it can also be used with custom filters so that you can get incredibly granular as to the types of locations that you want to be able to view. We can filter down by either inclusion or exclusion and this allows us to get very specific, to get whatever groupings of locations that we would like to see. Okay, also at any point in here you are able to download information. Okay, you're going to see this download pop up. As Chris Bass mentioned earlier, we want the system to be able to augment and work alongside existing systems, right? So at any point you're going to be able to export this data and pull this out so that way you can either you know manipulate it, with like maybe you're just pulling into Excel and you want to build some pivot tables, maybe you have a different system where you you're maintaining your location information as you know, as an example. At any point you're able to download this data point, so then you can pull them into different systems as well, okay? So as we mentioned, the UI is going to stay fairly consistent throughout this, okay? From a scenario planning perspective, we know that one thing that could be changing, especially from like an allocations perspective, is a update and allocate an update in operating hours. You know, you know, for traditional retailers, holidays, holiday season there tends to be you know changes in operating hours and malls you know if you're if you have locations in your malls and even though they tend to be fairly consistent sometimes the holiday hours will vary from year to year and this is going to give you the opportunity to run those to run those changes and to reallocate once those you know those operating hours are finalized. Okay so at any time in here we're always going to have the opportunity to make quick edits in the grid, This is just intended to give you quick access, you know, if we just needed to make a quick manual adjustment. Very similar to how you would be making these changes in Excel and then we can just make one off changes. Upon saving it's always going to give you this opportunity to regenerate. Okay, you, we will get this, pop up anytime we make changes. This is just giving you the opportunity to regenerate your demand forecast and your labor guidance from this. Again this is giving you an opportunity to do true scenario planning. So we can actually run scenarios here as an example that with what if scenarios if we wanted to change our end times or maybe we were going to be moving our locations to stay open later or maybe we're going to open an hour earlier. We want to understand what those changes are going to be. This is a perfect opportunity to be able to run those what if scenarios. And if this was the one change we wanted to make and we wanted to see the output from this, at this point we could regenerate our, you know, regenerate the demand forecast and we can see the impact that the schedule would, that this change would have, okay? Again, at any point outside of editing the grid, we can do bulk adjustments. This allows us to do, exactly what we're saying you need to do a bulk adjustment here where we can adjust a large grouping of locations by thirty minutes. Maybe we can make them thirty minutes later, thirty minutes earlier, we can do this as an offset. We can say maybe every location is now going to open at 9AM and we can select the to and from dates and also selecting the days of the week. Okay again this allows us to be incredibly specific with the types of changes that we are making and have those have those impacts go into effect from a from any type of a bulk edit. Okay. We can also do bulk edits through an upload. So as we mentioned previously, at any point we can we can download those changes and then we can also upload in the same capacity. So if we wanted to do a bulk download, we could also manipulate this file outside of within the UI here and then just re upload that. We can do the same thing if we have an external system, we need to upload those hours into here. This is giving our users multiple ways to interact with the tool to really provide them with options to try to minimize the workflow and take the workflow that works best for them, okay? We also mentioned how we have built in governance, right? At any point through this entire process, every single edit that is made and saved is going to then have an audit trail behind it. This is incredibly powerful to ensure that business decisions can be questioned, right? If I'm, if I'm leading a team of planners and I have, you know, four or five of them running different types of scenarios, obviously for me to understand every single change could be a little bit overwhelming, but by having a list of the changes that are being made, it gives me the opportunity to say, okay, who is making this change? What is the change that was being made? And it gives me the business capabilities to then go to that person and ask why this change is being made. It's also just great from like a governance perspective as well because any if a change is accidental or somebody is making changes, there's just clear visibility into the changes that are being made and you get a list of every change. I like I said, for every location will be listed start date and date, days of week, when the change was made and by who. As we continue to navigate through this, the the UI is going to remain incredibly consistent as we mentioned. Right? This top portion here is looking the same and essentially all that we're seeing is the the bottom portion down here to to change based on the stage of the of the process that we're in. I think that again that is intentional, we don't want this to be overwhelming, we want this to be easy to use. So this is all going to look very familiar. Again we have to select the range that we want to be able to see and we're going to have different opportunities to make, run through different scenarios. Okay so in this particular window of time this is where we can model things around labor model, you can update labor standards, you can pick different, different criterias to kind of model across just another place to be able to run through different types of scenarios. Okay. Another very common place that the planning portion is going to take place is going to be around wages. Now we know that the end result of this planning is going to be that conversation where we have to connect the dots between what is needed from a planning perspective while also remaining fiscally responsible, okay? And the cost, you know, how much are we going to be spending? That's always going to be like a hot topic when it comes to a true financial plan. This gives us the opportunity to model again what if scenarios as to what types of changes we need to be able to model and whether it's wage increases, you know if you're if you're incorporating into you know twice a year wage increases every six months, there's a you know a review process where people are eligible for raises, there's minimum wage changes in different states and we now have to update our update our wages. This is just another opportunity for us to do an additional modeling of a scenario that is going to have an impact on the on our total plan, right? So throughout this we do have the opportunity to make those same adjustments, you know, we can get very granular. A great capability around the wage planning portion is with Legion being role based allocation, we can have different wage allocations down to the role level. So if your if your organization has different rates of pay for different workers or different types of roles, whether it's you know if you're if they're getting a premium because they're working in the freezer or if you have like a benefit at a premium because they're you know they're they're they're doing like a they're traveling someplace, right? We can actually incorporate all of that into your into these wage rates and we can plan specifically as to how we can see the output of each individual role. So So as we're moving through this we can get to the end result here and we can say well what if we were able to minimize the time that our employees are sending are spending in the freezer? Is there a way for us to cut back on some of the premium pay that we're paying them? Or what if we were able to eliminate some of the third the third shift work where we're paying overnight premiums? Can we, you know, what what kind of an impact is that going to have? This is going to give you that opportunity to be very granular, all the way down to the role level and down to the location level. Even and as you can see too from a specific period of time. So location specific, role specific, time specific capabilities to be granular around the wage rates and costing perspectives. Okay now this is something that we can help, that we can calculate and we can pull in based on what is actualized. So with time and attendance related data and actualized data within Legion, we can actually help determine this. But just like all the other portions of this, this can also be brought in via an imports. I can also just be modeled out directly and edited, you know, through the grid adjustments, you know, through the same, you know, bulk adjustments where we could do increases and decreases based on a percentage or flat value or different work roles. Multiple different ways for our users to interact with the scenario as well. And we had different ways for just to just to get to the calculation. Okay. And just like everything else, this is going to have that edit history. So any play any edits that we make in here will be able to be audited and reviewed. Okay. Now as we continue to walk through this, this is where we're going to get to the forecast when we start with our demand forecast. As we all know in Legion, the demand forecast is going to be one of those determining factors when we get to our Legion labor guidance. And this is going to allow us to be, from if from a planning perspective, we can actually plan now up to eighteen months in the future. So we would be able to give you a true AI and machine learning Legion-generated forecast for that period of time. In this particular example we're just looking at a reallocation for a small time period, so we're just seeing this one, this one adjustment. But this does allow us to get slot level forecasts by location, by driver, just like we forecast to like within the product normally. This is going to give that that true forecast up to eighteen months in the future. And we can then you know filter this down the same ways that we've seen the same consistency here, right? Get down to the get down to the driver specific, and we can see and and see down again because as we mentioned we have the capabilities of actually getting this down into the physical slot level, the slot level capabilities. Okay. The final step of this process is going to be the, the labor guidance and when we get into the guidance in here, this is where we're going to be able to see that comparison, right? Where we're going to be able to see the the total hours and what the overall wage impact is going to be on that, right? This is that this is that place where we're seeing the end of results. So we here we are, we set our operating hours, we've updated any changes to the model, the labor model that we know of, you know, we've made our minimum staffing changes, we've updated some of our labor standards, you know, we've gone through some of those wage rate adjustments, we've generated the forecast as to what that's going as what the forecast could look like based on those updates and now we're getting to that output, right. We are able to see, you know, for this period of time, you know, for this, you know, our fiscal year in this particular instance to 2028, We're going to have this you know one hundred and two thousand hours and then what and it's going to cost us $1,600,000 in wages, okay? And this is going to be the end result of this individual scenario, okay? Now we talked about being able to do scenario planning. Okay. So the final step of this is being able to compare individual scenarios, that we've been working on to see how do they compare to one another. So after we've completed each scenario within each plan, or allocation plan, we have the we have the option to select which ones we would like to compare against and then we can just hit, you know, in here compare selected and this is going to give us visibility into side by side comparisons of these different scenarios. So as as a person who is responsible for, you know, approving these scenarios, we can actually see what looks good, what doesn't look good, what do we like about one scenario, what do we like about the other scenario. And this is going to allow us to then say, okay, I really like the number of hours that we're, you know, that we're that we're getting from scenario one, but the the wage output is you know, seems a little low. Maybe we you know, we have a little bit of room off in the budget. Can what what happens if we were to take that same number of hours and increase our wages, right? This is going to give us a great a great talking point and some great data points. You know and then on the other side of this, yeah we have one hundred and two thousand hours but there's no way we can afford to spend $2,000,000 like nursing in scenario four. So this is giving again the the data points and the story to go back and have those business decisions where now we are armed with data, we've gone through all of the scenarios, we're seeing what we really need to be able to deliver the level of service that we want to be able to provide to our customers. How can we take that data and and talk with you know the entire planning team, whether it's finance, HR, you know, all the all of the key stakeholders involved here to come up with a plan that allows us to match our operational needs as well as aligning with our financial needs, and to and to achieve our goals. The final step of this in here, with the last couple of minutes here, the modeling section is intended as we talked about to really get into the minutiae. This is where from a modeling perspective we have the opportunity to be able to run really, intense kind of like labor modeling changes. You know we need to cut back on a labor standard, what if we were to be able to make every transaction take one second less, you know, what is that going to be able to allocate down here? And this is where and within the modeling section as we mentioned before, the UI is is the same. All three flows are going to be very similar, they're just going to have different processes. And with that being said, I'm gonna pass back to you, Rylee, to close this out. Thanks, Mike. And, Chris, we I know that was fast and furious. So you can also see there is the there is a CTA button to get a demo at the top. You can click that if you wanna have a more detailed review. Chris and Mike run these all the time. Check it out with actual scenarios and and things that you're most interested in. This is really just a taster. Again, there's some documents that are resources for you to access specific to labor planning as well as some of our recent, Forrester Total Economic Impact Study and our just released state of the North American hourly workforce report. Again, if you have any questions, we'll keep this open for a little bit so you can put them in the q and a. Otherwise, we will share the recording with you, later this week if and, again, feel free to hit that CTA button to, have a conversation with our team and learn a little bit more detail around the labor planning and demand forecasting solution. Thank you.