As part of its recent major global IT transformation, Telefónica has selected TOA Technologies as its global field service management (FSM) solution provider. This is a global contract agreement for TOA to be the standard FSM provider with its ETAdirect solution suite, covering all 24 countries in which the telecom provider does business across Europe and Latin America.

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One of the lesser talked about business divisions of Kronos Inc. is Montreal, Canada–based AD OPT, a provider of crew planning optimization solutions for the airline industry, which Kronos acquired in 2004. The company has been in this space for more than 25 years and its core focus is to deliver customized solutions for the tricky task of flight crew planning and scheduling for airlines whose aim is to increase operational efficiency.

Most recently, transavia.com, a Netherlands-based airline with services to leisure destinations as an independent part of the Air France-KLM group, selected the Altitude Rostering Footprint Generator application from Kronos AD OPT. The solution is expected to more fairly distribute work based on pre-defined equalization criteria and creating optimal monthly schedules for cockpit crew members.

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At the NRF BIG Retail Show 2013, a new relationship was announced between Kronos and Manhattan Associates to help retailers profitably integrate their physical stores into their digital selling strategy. The idea is to allow retailers to increase customer satisfaction and drive sales by freeing up trapped inventory in the store and elsewhere in the upstream supply chain, while managing labor costs.

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My blog series in 2009 entitled “A Tale of a Few Good SCM Players” talked at great length about RedPrairie Corporation, JDA Software, and Manhattan Associates, including their corporate history and acquisitions. The general feeling at the time was that hardly any of these three great supply chain management (SCM) software companies would remain independent in the long term.

It took a few years for two of these companies to decide to merge, but on November 1, 2012, RedPrairie and JDA announced their merger agreement, under the terms of which the entities affiliated with RedPrairie will effect a cash tender offer to acquire all outstanding shares of JDA common stock for $45 per share. Read the rest of this entry »

Kronos, the global leader in delivering workforce management (WFM) solutions in the cloud, is preparing for its KronosWorks 2012 conference early next week, and continues to fire on all cylinders. Tens of thousands of organizations in more than 100 countries—including more than half of the Fortune 1000—use Kronos to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. During the recently held 15th annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition in Chicago, Kronos announced a series of enhancements to its fast-selling cloud WFM suite for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), dubbed Kronos Workforce Ready. Read the rest of this entry »

High-level enhancements in TeleStaff 2.8 were announced by Kronos last week—Microsoft database compatibility, bidding, reporting, and data consolidation. It is worth pointing out the performance of Kronos TeleStaff and the (less talked about) public sector workforce management suite since Kronos’ May 2011 acquisition of PDSI and the TeleStaff product. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started by expressing the “New Infor” sentiments (backed up with concrete examples and rationale) following my recent attendance of Inforum 2012. Then the article provided some historical background and described the lineage of the products that currently form the Infor10 HCM portfolio.

The article also detailed some technical and organizational issues on both the former heritage Infor and Lawson Software’s human resource (HR) and talent management products’ side. In light of these issues, which were discussed in Part 1, it is small wonder that some market observers have wondered whether Infor can make sense out of this daunting inheritance of a portfolio. Read the rest of this entry »

It appears that Reflexis has been aggressively bundling/cross-selling its newer WFM modules into its traditional breadwinning task management deals to try to achieve a wider market acceptance.  The Reflexis platform of integrated task management, key performance indicators (KPI)-based compliance, time and attendance (T&A), and labor scheduling (including budgeting and forecasting) solutions enables retailers to align store labor activities to corporate goals and institute best-practice response to real-time metrics.

We might still want to note that what may appear to be 22 new customers is “only” 22 new brand logos that belong to 6 existing retail holding corporations that Reflexis has had for a while. Now, it’s certainly possible that some of these deployments have been extended over time, but these are not necessarily a dozen brand new retail customers.

But this is still the logical way for Reflexis to compete and achieve great results down the track, given that one third of the total count of retail logos on the vendor’s website use Kronos for WFM. Reflexis is currently number 3 in market share for retail labor scheduling in North America, with 14% compared to 17% for Kronos, according to IHL Research. As for task management, Reflexis is the leader with 54% market share, compared to #2 RedPrairie at 24%, again according to IHL.

For more background on Reflexis, see http://blog.technologyevaluation.com/blog/2011/07/20/talking-to-and-learning-from-a-retail-store-execution-software-leader-–-part-2/

What TEC’s recent in-depth article Waking Up to a “New Day” at Infor hinted, my attendance of Inforum 2012 in late April confirmed. Namely, Infor started out as a traditional acquirer and market consolidator, but that is old news now.

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The recently held RedShift 2012 user conference was reportedly a huge success for RedPrairie, a vendor of supply chain management (SCM), workforce management (WFM), and multi-channel retail solutions. (I could not attend the multi-day event in person, but I was kindly debriefed by RedPrairie after the event). The business world has lately been transformed by a host of phenomena such as digital commerce, mobility, demand volatility, empowered consumer, multi-channel retailing (buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere), social, cloud, big data, fuel cost volatility, supply chain segmentation, and so on.

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My recent in-depth report from the KronosWorks 2011 conference entitled KronosWorks 2011: Beyond Time Clocks for Modern Workforce Management asserted that vertically-oriented tuck-in acquisitions were likely in store for Kronos in 2012. Lo and behold, in mid-January 2012, Kronos announced that it has acquired the assets of OptiLink from The Advisory Board Company in an undisclosed cash transaction.

As a result of the acquisition, Kronos has added one of the industry’s leading acuity-based staffing solutions to its health care workforce management (WFM) suite. Kronos now offers possibly the most advanced clinically-focused WFM suite designed to help healthcare organizations deliver high-quality patient care. More than 3,000 hospitals and 4,000 long-term care organizations use Kronos Workforce Central solutions every day. Other notable competitors in the space are API Healthcare, McKesson, and Lawson Software (part of Infor).

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Part 1 of this blog series introduced Reflexis Systems, whose task execution solutions have helped over 110 retailers and their suppliers worldwide execute their strategies and increase profits. The article analyzed Reflexis’ genesis and evolution from a task management specialist to an integrated retail workforce management (WFM) platform provider.

Reflexis’ Retail Execution Management platform features labor budgeting/forecasting/scheduling, time and attendance (T&A), task management, and key performance indicator (KPI)/compliance solutions to enable retailers to align their store labor/activities to corporate goals and institutionalize best-practice responses to real-time metrics. As mentioned in Part 1, Reflexis’ customers, many of which are Top 250 global retailers, have reported improvements in store-level compliance with corporate strategies; higher productivity of merchandising, field, and store management; and increased sales and profitability. Read the rest of this entry »

My recent post (Software and Human) Help Wanted in Overwhelmed Retail Stores talked about how much attention (and IT investment) retailers pay to their merchandize planning and supply chain optimization processes as compared to their store-level task execution, even though this is where “the rubber meets the road.” I concluded my post with the fact that there are dozens of retail workforce management (WFM) vendors and solutions, but not many have the required store-level task management capabilities.

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My recent series on Quantum Retail presented the many difficult merchandise range and assortment planning issues that retailers face, and the ensuing tough decisions that they have to continually make in that regard. But a lesser-known fact is that even though retailers spend multiple billions of dollars on planning activities and supporting tools to bring customers to their stores, they only execute at about 60 percent efficiency in their stores at best, thus leaving trillions of dollars in merchandise at risk. Read the rest of this entry »

My recent article entitled “Workforce Scheduling & Optimization: The Missing Link on the Shop Floor?” analyzed the importance of manufacturing workforce scheduling & optimization solutions and stated that many manufacturing enterprises still use rudimentary tools and practices (if that) to manage their labor. The article stated that most manufacturing organizations do not yet understand the strategic value that workforce scheduling could provide to them.

Often, manufacturing companies (complacently or ignorantly) think that the existing practices and tools that they have in place for labor scheduling are “good enough” or that workforce scheduling for their environment is so unique and complex that it cannot be properly automated. Until recently, a few percentiles of improvement in labor utilization or productivity hasn’t been much of an incentive for manufacturing executives to invest in sophisticated workforce management (WFM) systems. Labor has been customarily viewed as a constraint (or even a necessary evil) to the successful movement of goods through the supply chain.

What a difference in attitude a protracted economic downturn can make. Because labor represents a large percentage of any organization’s controllable costs, many manufacturing companies have lately realized that the benefits of implementing automated workforce scheduling can be significant.

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