Alworths chooses SWL for retail productivity
To deliver the best possible customer engagement across all its stores, the current media-magnet Alworths has turned to SWL Group for an holistic managed service providing productivity excellence across its estate.
Alworths, the recently-launched general merchandise retailing venture, will have opened five stores by Christmas with ambitious growth plans thereafter. Keen to capitalise on the Christmas peak trading period, Alworths’ senior management team recognised that critical to success was the need to get the service model right from day one.
Andy Hayzelden, Alworths Operations Manager, emphasises this necessity: “Various circumstances have resulted in a justifiably positive and significant media focus on our business and it was imperative to get our service proposition right from our first store launch. We couldn’t afford to leave anything to chance and that’s why we’re working with SWL Group.”
Providing an end-to-end ‘productivity excellence managed service’, SWL Group has built store-specific labour budgets and profiles, helping guide the business on the required store workloads and shifts to provide optimised coverage through both base and peak week trading scenarios.
Considering Alworths’ annual sales budget, forecasted customer volume and other productivity factors, SWL are translating this demand into hours requirements across all the planned stores, providing equitable budgets that consider each store’s needs. Crucially, SWL are then breaking down these hours requirements by day and time of day to ensure each store manager knows exactly how best to spend the hours and deliver the required high levels of customer engagement and support.
The services SWL will be providing include productivity strategising and roadmapping, in-store productivity reviews, and labour standards generation and labour modelling, through to budgeting and staff profiling, with regular consultation and store reviews to sustain the benefits and continually seek improvement opportunities.
Matthew Buckley, SWL Group’s CEO, said “So far our budgets and store profiles are helping the experienced management team at Alworths to recruit the correct number of colleagues to the required contracts, and once the fifth store is up and running we’ll be looking to sustain and improve the benefits delivered as well as provide a robust model for new stores as the business inevitably grows.”
