Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Convenience Retailer Reduces Labor Management Costs and Improves Customer Experience
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry: Retail
Customer Profile
Although the 450 QuikTrip convenience stores and travel centers are company owned and operated, each one runs as its own profit center, and employees profit proportionately from their hard work.
Business Situation
QuikTrip wanted to explicitly relate individual and store performance goals and measures with bonus eligibility and make personalized career path information available anytime.
Solution
QuikTrip developers created a self-serve human resource and career management solution by using Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET 2003 Professional development system.
Benefits
Greater employee satisfaction
Effective development environment
Increased developer productivity
High return on technology investment / “Visual Studio also lets us go back and interact with existing applications and older technologies. That results in a phenomenal payback for us.”
Stephen Hunter, Project Manager, QuikTrip
QuikTrip Corporation, with more than 450 owner/operated convenience stores and travel centers, is decorated with several quality-focused awards, including being on the list of Fortune magazine’s 100 best employers. Each store operates as its own profit center, and QuikTrip rewards success with bonuses and internal advancement based on individual and store performance. QuikTrip wanted an easy way to articulate these performance metrics to employees. The corporation also wanted to simplify labor management and reduce costs. QuikTrip developed a custom, self-serve human resources application that meets its cost reduction objectives (saving U.S.$320,000 a year in labor scheduling and time-off management costs alone). Accessing performance measures in this Web-based application, employees have a greater sense of ownership and self-determination and can see a bright career path with QuikTrip.
Situation
QuikTrip owns and operates more than 450 convenience stores and travel centers in 9 states. Its products and services include truck fleet diesel-fueling programs. Last year, the company did over U.S.$4 billion in sales and ranked thirty-eighth on the Forbes List of Privately Held Companies. The company’s commitment to excellence in everything it does and sells has earned QuikTrip a national reputation for quality and customer service.
QuikTrip has also earned accolades as an employer. For the last three years, Fortune magazine has named QuikTrip as one of the top 100 best companies to work for, this year coming in at number 19. The company commitment to employees is evident in ways you might expect: The company offers competitive wages, benefits, flexible schedules, and a strict policy of promotion from within.
In evaluating its operations in light of tight retail margins, QuikTrip found that human resources-related tasks—such as scheduling personnel, timekeeping, and vacation authorizations—were extremely labor-intensive and, therefore, costly. In fact, these tasks required one full-time employee in each of QuikTrip’s eight divisions. The manual, paper-based processes burdened both store employees and regional managers with a lot of administrative tasks, left room for errors, oversights, even lost paperwork, increased costs, and ultimately had a negative impact on customer experience.
Explains Chris Truesdell, Director of Technology at QuikTrip, “Sometimes we’d be overstaffed in one store and understaffed in another. Balancing resources on the spot required a lot of phone calls. Understaffing might require someone to work a double shift, incurring higher costs in the form of overtime pay.”
Because each store is its own profit center, employees are responsible for all aspects of the business and profit directly from their hard work and attention to detail. To support this profit-sharing model, the company collects myriad reports related to employee and store performance, reports such as cash handling and analysis accuracy, voids and refund processing, store inventory results, and so on. QuikTrip uses this data to determine employee performance and eligibility for bonuses and advancement. The company wanted to put this performance information into hands of employees, believing that doing so would give employees an even greater sense of ownership, control, and pride in their work.
“Every employee wants a certain amount of control over his or her own destiny, but in so many companies, the objectives and measures can be obscure, or might only be measured and reported periodically—for example, at annual review time,” says RJ Jeffers, Vice President of Operations Systems, QuikTrip.
Already recognized as a supportive employer, QuikTrip nevertheless wanted to go the extra mile for its employees. Jeffers elaborates, “To give employees a sense of control and self-determination, we wanted to make performance goals and measures, bonus eligibility, and personalized career path information available anytime and in a format that’s as concrete and clear as possible.”
QuikTrip sought a way to provide store employees and managers with self-directed human resource and career management services and solutions while, at the same time, automating human resources–related aspects of its operations, thereby lowering costs.
Solution
A team of developers created Employee Profile Information Center (EPIC) by using Microsoft® Visual Studio®.NET 2003 Professional development system. More than 5,500 store employees and managers use EPIC daily.
Developers created the Web-based EPIC system by using the Microsoft Visual Basic®.NET 2003 development system. To write custom classes that encapsulated the company’s business logic, programmers used the Visual Basic.NET or theMicrosoft Visual C#® .NET 2003 development tool programming languages, depending on developer preference.
The application uses Web services to access databases that are running either Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition or AS400 DB2 database. The application connects with the QuikTrip back-office financial and human resources system, which is JD Edwards’s World.
A total of 15 developers worked on the application, which was developed in three phases:
In Phase I, the company created labor management elements of the application, including code for the biometrics hardware. In this phase, former AS400 DB2 developers experienced in COBOL and RPG programming were able to quickly get up to speed in Visual Basic .NET 2003 programming and working in the Microsoft .NET–connected environment.
In Phase II, developers created elements of the application related to personnel and human resources data, including the Web interface used by employees and store managers.
In Phase III, the team developed the parts of the application that process employee information related to training, benefits, and so on.
Developing the Front End
The solution uses biometrics hardware (a thumbprint reader) at the stores for employee timekeeping. Every hour, the timekeeping interface at each store checks for updates locally. Updates include the profile, including biometric information, of every employee who is supposed to be on duty.
Developers used Visual Basic .NET to code the system that interfaces with the biometrics hardware. Because the system also can be accessed by applications that were written in Microsoft Visual Basic version 6.0, this part of the solution was exposed as a component object model (COM) interface by simply placing a compiler attribute on the class modules in the code, so that the class modules could be registered as a COM object.
Each store employee has a personal Web page for accessing EPIC, and can view personal performance measures and comparative standing within the division. Developers designed and created the various Web interfaces by using Microsoft ASP.NET in order to give store employees and managers Web access to EPIC from anywhere.
Automating Labor Management
EPIC automates personnel scheduling and vacation staffing and, by doing so, replaces paper forms with an online application used by supervisors and employees. Employees submit vacation requests at the beginning of the year. The back-office system then approves or rejects time-off requests by making determinations based on seniority, position, and other factors.
“You can see how, in just one division, Atlanta—for example—with 1,500 employees, vacation planning could get pretty involved,” says Jeffers.
The division personnel manager would previously spend days collecting and inputting requests. Now, employees input their own vacation requests into EPIC, and EPIC automatically notifies them by posting a notice on their personal Web page when their request has been approved or denied.
EPIC even schedules vacation relief staff far in advance, so they know when and where they’re scheduled to report to work. The system also handles relief coverage for time off due to illness or bereavement. Employees who need time off call their manager. That manager updates EPIC. EPIC then assigns the relief worker, and the manager notifies the needed replacement.
EPIC also helps QuikTrip better handle personnel management. The system reduces paperwork by automating the tracking and notifications related to personnel actions, such as training requirements, benefits eligibility, performance reviews, and disciplinary actions. A batch process that runs nightly posts notices to an employee’s personal Web site when, for example, they are eligible for benefits or must attend a required training course. Employees access the notices from their personal Web page. For items that require a personal acknowledgement of receipt or acceptance, employees use the thumbprint reader to provide a digital signature.
Benefits
Because of its investment in EPIC and use of the Visual Studio .NET development system, QuikTrip has increased efficiencies across its operations, vastly improved labor management operations, and met the company’s goal of improving employee ownership, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.
“EPIC raises the bar on our commitment to excellence and links operational improvements with a better customer experience. The system does a lot of great things for the company and even more great things for the employee,” says Truesdell. EPIC reduces labor management costs considerably. Cost savings for the company due to the improvements in labor scheduling and time-off management, alone, have been estimated at$320,000 a year, and QuikTrip continues to tally the benefits.
Greater Employee Satisfaction
With EPIC, employees are more in control of their own performance achievements and can set personal goals and chart a career path. Employees can view concrete measures along with their relative standing among other employees in the same position and division.
“Store employees and managers benefit from a Web interface that is familiar and easy to use because it is quite similar to other Web browsing they might do,” says Truesdell. “More importantly, they now have the tools to monitor their own numbers and divisional ranking, any time. Compared with industry averages, we already have one of the lowest turnover rates in the nation among our full-time store employees and managers; with EPIC, we expect it will fall even lower. Employees are self-informed and self-motivated to strive for even higher levels of excellence, and that leads to increasingly satisfied customers.”
EPIC vastly improves vacation planning, approvals, and relief-staff scheduling, and reduces effort, costs, and errors. “Previously a vacation request form might have been lost or misplaced, and no one wants to miss out on a vacation because of an error. EPIC greatly reduces that risk,” says Truesdell.
Effective Development Environment
Working with Visual Studio .NET, QuikTrip developers were highly productive. They benefited from the ability to merge datasets, which, unlike their previous environment, “makes querying data from SQL Server and AS400 DB2 at the same time possible and fast,” according to Billy Walton, Programmer/Analyst for QuikTrip.
Creating user-friendly reports that make the most of company data and databases was easy for the QuikTrip development team. Walton explains, “With .NET databound controls (for example, datagrid, dropdownlist, and calendar), it was easy to intercept return data from a dataset and re-direct the output so that it is in a user-friendly format.
We were able to intercept what was going to be rendered and change it ‘on the fly’.”
The team used Visual Studio .NET to design and develop a number of Web services. They used remoting and Web services in a number of places in EPIC. “Remoting and Web services provide a very powerful, yet simple, means for communicating with remote devices, such as our store-based biometrics systems,” says Walton.
Increased Developer Productivity
Using ASP.NET saved developers a tremendous amount of time. Says Walton, “I doubt we could have accomplished what we did, were it not for ASP.NET. Had we been using ASP with DHTML, we would still be working on Phase I of EPIC today.”
Developers also benefited from the rapid development nature of ASP.NET. “The ability to quickly create prototype pages and get them in front of internal customers and managers and, then, whip through a large number of iterations and screens quickly was a big help,” says Walton.
Adds Stephen Hunter, Project Manager, “Developer productivity is a big thing. Developers reused approximately 20 percent of the code they wrote. This 20 percent code reuse reflects Web services and a variety of components for display and retrieval of information.”
High Return on Technology Investment
“Because we are using a variety of technologies together, such as ASP.NET and remoting, we benefit from the fact that the frameworks are consistent with one another,” says Hunter.
With Visual Studio .NET, the QuikTrip development team can develop cutting-edge, connected applications. But the benefits don’t stop there. “Visual Studio also lets us go back and interact with existing applications and older technologies. That results in a phenomenal payback for us,” remarks Hunter. “For example, we use [Microsoft] Access 2.0 in a few applications in our stores, but it’s still very convenient and gives us a high return if we can upgrade software on some of our devices but retain and access legacy systems.”
The savings of $320,000 a year in labor scheduling and management costs is just one example of the efficiencies QuickTrip gains from EPIC and the Visual Studio .NET development system. Labor scheduling and vacation authorizations once required eight full-time staff. Now, these staff can be re-assigned to other important positions in the company. Increased automation and reduced paperwork result in better and more accurate scheduling and staffing, and lower labor costs.
“EPIC has resolved scheduling issues and reduced incidents of double coverage or under-coverage. It has also reduced the number of vacation-relief employees on the clock at any given time,” concludes Truesdell.
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is the rapid application development (RAD) tool for building next-generation Web applications and XML Web services. Visual Studio .NET empowers developers to rapidly design broad-reach Web applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio .NET is fully integrated with the Microsoft .NET Framework, providing support for multiple programming languages and automatically handling many common programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications using their language of choice.
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Microsoft .NET Framework
The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows® component for building and running the next generation of applications and Web services.
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