Specialty Latino grocer moves workforce management to smart platform

One of the largest Latino-owned supermarket chains in California is consolidating all of its legacy workforce management solutions to a single vendor.

Los Angeles-based Vallarta Supermarkets has completed implementation of the Logile Employee Scheduling, Time & Attendance and Benefit Accrual solutions. This rollout replaces the regional grocer’s legacy workforce management applications in all of its 34 stores, as well as its two distribution centers and two corporate offices.

In addition, Vallarta Supermarkets will deploy the Logile Employee Self-Service solution over the next couple months at all locations. With this implementation, the retailer now uses Logile solutions for all its workforce management functions.

In addition to time and attendance and benefit accruals, Vallarta will leverage the enhanced functionality of its new workforce management platform to schedule associates to forecasted demand, based on their availability. Vallarta can auto-schedule all departments and incorporate its scheduling policies into scheduling rules to achieve accurate scheduling.

Meanwhile, the Employee Self-Service solution will enable associates to swap shifts, view schedules, change availability, and receive company communications from any mobile device.

In addition, Logile technology also identifies and automatically applies California meal break conditions based on defined rules, which the retailer previously had to manually manage. Logile developed the Benefit Accrual engine specifically for Vallarta to generate the accrued benefit hours per Vallarta’s rules, and the actual hours worked as defined by the platform’s time and attendance module.

Another regional California supermarket chain, Northgate Market, is applying Logile technology to use its time clocks to make sure its employees and vendors are in compliance with COVID-19 health and safety policies. The Southern California grocer has deployed a thermal temperature reading and health scanning solution that is integrated in the time clocks across its 41 supermarkets and distribution center. The solution, Logile’s Health & Temperature Scanner, clears employees to work their scheduled shifts.

“We wanted to consolidate all workforce management to a single vendor, and Logile was our definitive choice,” said Steve Netherton, CIO and VP of continuous improvement at Vallarta. “Our outstanding results with Logile’s forecasting and labor management solutions and positive experience of Logile as a partner have been extremely valuable in helping us realize our optimization and growth goals.

“We now benefit from a seamless, integrated experience where accurate forecasting, labor planning, scheduling, benefit requests and time and attendance interact within a single system,” continued Netherton. “These synergies will strengthen our ability to control and understand labor costs, improve productivity and customer service, increase associate engagement, reduce turnover, and maintain compliance with regulatory and corporate mandates.”

“Vallarta is an operational powerhouse, and we could not be more honored to extend our relationship,” said Purna Mishra, Logile founder and CEO. “We welcome the opportunity to deliver even more value to this retail leader with our industry-best employee scheduling solution, employee self-service and time and attendance—especially in today’s environment where improving and preserving the associate experience rivals profitability as more important than ever. We are eager for Vallarta to realize the incremental benefits of using our comprehensive WFM system; the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts.”