Marks & Spencer, a leading retailer delivering top quality food, clothing, home products and financial services, is focused on using industry-leading technology to create efficient, insight-driven stores led by empowered colleagues. With more than 80,000 colleagues, workforce engagement is critical to M&S’ success. The retailer has embarked on a new engagement strategy with JDA and ecosystem partner, REPL, to make the combination of JDA Workforce Management and Microsoft Teams the cornerstone of the strategy. This has enabled M&S to ensure that at each of its 700 stores it has the right colleague working the right shift at the right time.
To simplify its in-store operations, M&S needed to combine its employee communications channels to unite employee engagement functions in one place. M&S selected JDA Workforce Management and JDA gold partner, REPL, to achieve this, empowering the M&S workforce no matter where they are, to see and swap shifts, review their schedule and make changes as needed.
“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, M&S. “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.”
M&S is also one of the first JDA customers to leverage new integration with Microsoft Teams, so colleagues can easily connect and collaborate via desktop or mobile. The latest version of JDA Workforce Management leverages Microsoft Azure and by opening up connectivity to Teams, colleagues can easily swap shifts, make holiday requests and more.
“In line with M&S’ digital-first strategy, we created development services to integrate JDA Workforce Management with the Microsoft Teams interface to allow shift information to be synced up with Teams in near real-time,” said Chris Love, Managing Partner, REPL. “This is significant as 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. This has been a very exciting project for us and the end result has been testament to the collaboration between us, Microsoft Teams, JDA and M&S.”
“We’re proud to play such a vital role in M&S’ transformed workforce management strategy, delivering capabilities like long-range staffing, the ability to build optimal and accurate schedules, coupled with the self-service requirements today’s workforce demands,” said Mark Morgan, Chief Revenue Officer, JDA. “This project is also a testament to our partner ecosystem which has systematically been involved in the entire life cycle of M&S Digital Transformation, giving it a flexible, agile and powerful footprint to adapt to the changing needs of the workforce – and shoppers – worldwide.”
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