Hibbett Sports, Inc. (HIBB) operates sporting goods stores in small and mid-sized markets, predominantly in the South, Southwest, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. It offers convenient locations and a broad assortment of quality branded athletic footwear, apparel and equipment with a high level of customer service.
As of July 2016, HIBB operated over 1000 retail stores in 33 states. Through the years, HIBB has achieved phenomenal growth through some of the best practices and frugal approaches in the marketplace. That applies to how it optimized its labor spend, maximized conversion, and incented its employees.
HIBB had approached labor planning and budgeting with spreadsheet-based analyses. Without real-time data, managers were unable to determine what was happening in-store, adjust for the future and efficiently manage labor. The lack of real-time reporting meant making decisions after the fact.
In addition, HIBB operates an incentive program for its exempt store-level managers, called head coaches – projecting a sales goal and a labor goal for each store every month, and assigning the head coach a monetary bonus if the store meets or exceeds the sales or labor goals. However, tracking incentive data proved to be a laborious task, because sales, accounting and payroll data were imported into an Excel spreadsheet every month while each stores’ sales numbers were imported into a separate database to calculate the incentive amount. Validation and auditing for accuracy of sales and labor goals took a week, then the incentive payout process on the back end took another week leaving HIBB struggling to pay its head coaches their incentives in a timely fashion, while contributing to excessive administration time. The team needed a solution that would expedite processing time to calculate sales and labor projections per store each month, improve accuracy and provide visibility for labor while providing flexibility as the retailer grew. A solution that could efficiently generate the incentive pay by individual based on eligibility rules was required.
With Dayforce HCM, HIBB garners real-time data and insight into what a store should be scheduling when the trend varies from the plan.
The fully automated WFM system gives employees real-time access to their schedules from any Internet-enabled device. Store managers gain visibility into potential schedule overages or shortages, graphical views of labor schedule-to-budget data, and are alerted when predefined discrepancies or workforce compliance violations occurred. Furthermore, admin associated with tracking labor is streamlined. Also HIBB uses Dayforce Period Planning and Incentive Pay – a labor performance plan management and forecasting solution that unifies planning processes to create operational and financial targets and forecasts in line with corporate performance goals. The incentive compensation for managers is automated through the “Incentive Pay” feature that compares and presents actual performance with sale and wage achievement.
“We were looking for a way to not only automate the process based on sales volume and other factors, but to provide more visible reporting tools to the district and store managers so they could be more proactive in controlling labor spend. Now we are using our labor dollars more effectively based on volume, and can see where we need to improve in a much timelier fashion.” -- Cathy Pryor, Senior VP of Store Operations at Hibbett Sports
The Dayforce system integrates with the payroll system, allowing for accurate forecast for labor by location instead of using company averages. This speeds up the comparison of goals to actual results.
With the ability to create, review, edit, approve and signoff incentive pay – HIBB has the flexibility necessary to continue to plan and pay incentives monthly to store managers, more efficiently. Planning monthly goals allows for forecasting based on more recent trends and creates “buy-in” from the store teams and more frequent rewards.
HIBB has gained greater agility. “Since implementation our teams have a better way to react to plans based on trends that may occur after the overall plan is set. By reacting to changes in sales trends, we can better insure our stores are staffed appropriately, allowing us to manage labor while maximizing the customer experience," says Cathy Pryor.
Dayforce HCM provided return-on-investment in terms of time savings.
Since using Dayforce HCM, time spent creating weekly schedules has been slashed by 75%. Previously it took HIBB's “head coaches” (a.k.a store managers) as long as one hour to accomplish what can now can be done in is as little as 15 minutes. That time savings adds up when multiplied across Hibbett Sports’ 1,000-plus stores.
The company reduced the monthly labor and budgeting process from one week to two days.
The decision to deploy Dayforce solutions that include budgeting and analytics along with scheduling functionality helped streamline the operations of HIBB's incentive program – reducing the incentive payout time from approximately one week to two days.
Hibbett first began using the Dayforce solution in February 2010, and adopted the scheduling and time-and-attendance modules late in 2013. During this period, the chain grew from 750 stores to its current total of more than 1,000, with a workforce of more than 8,000 people.
With a goal of opening 60 to 80 new stores per year, Dayforce allows HIBB to spend less time on operations and more time focusing on customers.
Dayforce Human Capital Management – an HCM solution delivered in a single, reliable end-to-end, SaaS application. The single application from Ceridian includes Payroll, Workforce Management, Benefits, Human Resources and Recruiting.
Empowering HIBB managers and pay/HR teams with the ability to access scheduling and time tracking, at their fingertips so they can plan and react to trends, reward employees and focus on improving the customer experience has established HIBB as a forward thinking and technologically savvy company that caters to and cares about its most valuable asset: its employees.
Increased and improved communication, flexibility, sales conversion and an enhanced customer experienced, and engagement are the result of a winning combination of operational best practices with application technologies.
HIBB’s ability to sustain growth in an ever-increasingly competitive retail market, is testament to their operational best practices and strategic use of HCM technology solutions.
Hibbett Sports received a Retail Innovator Award for automating labor budgeting and scheduling with Dayforce HCM in 2016. The Retail Innovator Award honors executives in the retail industry focused on driving change through innovation.
