Marks & Spencer shifts into advanced scheduling

A British retail giant is combining employee communication channels to enable real-time, collaborative shift management.

Marks & Spencer is deploying the JDA workforce management solution, integrated with the Microsoft Teams unified communication platform, to help ensure each of its 700 stores and 80,000 employees can have the right shifts at the right time. Each store has an average of 80-100 employees with an average of 300 shifts per week, and 10 to 20 shift changes per store per day.

The latest version of JDA workforce management leverages Microsoft Azure and by opening up connectivity to Teams, employees can swap shifts, make time-off requests, and perform other scheduling tasks via desktop or mobile, regardless of their location.

“It’s absolutely critical that we have our colleagues focused on serving customers, with the right people doing the right job at the right time, ultimately improving the customer experience,” said Sacha Berendji, retail, operations and property director, Marks & Spencer. “Working with JDA and key ecosystem partners, we now have a powerful, efficient, insight-driven advanced scheduling system in place that allows us to be more agile in the way we run our store operations.”

JDA gold partner REPL helped Marks & Spencer with implementation and customization of the technology.