A fashion house optimizes workforce staffing management
Context
Founded in 1910, our client is a renowned fashion house known for its fashion creations, perfumes, luxury accessories and leather goods.
In 2022, the brand generated €16.05 billion in revenue, representing a 10.1% increase compared to the previous year. The company also expanded its workforce by 12%, reaching more than 32,000 employees worldwide.
Challenges
When the company engaged Talan’s experts, it was experiencing significant workforce growth across both its retail stores and corporate headquarters.
The challenge for Talan’s teams was therefore substantial and included:
- Simplifying schedule creation for managers while taking into account each employee’s working patterns and the operational needs of the stores.
- Making schedules more easily accessible to employees (sales associates, cashiers, stock handlers, etc.).
- Harmonizing processes into a single framework while still accounting for local store-specific requirements.
Some stores employ up to 200 staff members, including sales associates, stock teams responsible for shelf replenishment, cashiers and security personnel, all operating under different working schedules (4-day, 5-day or 6-day workweeks, weekend shifts, etc.).
Solution & Methodology
To address the client’s challenges, we implemented a strategy focused on:
- Supporting the client’s teams with UX redesign of the user journey and navigation through UI design, technical configuration and development.
- Building the solution iteratively through agile sprints.
We delivered a user-centric solution based on Microsoft Power Platform, leveraging Power Apps, Power Automate and Dataverse modules.
The solution was deployed across several stores in France and Dubai, with the ambition of extending it to all French stores as well as additional locations across Europe.
From a functional standpoint, the application enables managers to organize employee schedules by team, month or day.
UX and UI were central to the application’s development to ensure strong adoption and project success, with features such as language selection and light/dark mode.
Benefits
Operational benefits
- Significant time savings for store managers: manually creating schedules in Excel was time-consuming. MySchedule App dramatically reduces this workload.
- Reduced errors and optimized planning: embedded business rules ensure compliance with constraints such as employee preferences, maximum working days per week, break times and role-specific requirements within the store.
- Better alignment between store needs and employee skills by considering staff specializations.
- Greater proactivity and flexibility in scheduling: managers can quickly adjust schedules to handle peak traffic periods or special events.
- Efficient management of schedule change and absence requests directly within the application.
- Real-time schedule access for store employees directly from their smartphones.
Strategic benefit
The centralization of scheduling data enables managers to analyze trends and better anticipate workforce needs.