S Group

S Group is the retail market leader in Finland. The Group consists of 19 independent regional cooperatives and SOK Corporation, which provides the cooperatives with expert support and services.

Workforce Scheduling at Finland’s largest private employer

S Group is Finland’s largest private employer, with over 40,000 employees. SOK provides services for a wide range of S Group companies in retail and hospitality. The Group has been a long-time ORTEC customer. ORTEC Workforce Scheduling allows SOK to run a fully integrated workforce solution. Unifying all companies in one solution enables them to benefit from central governance, calculations, and reporting, while providing the flexibility to satisfy individual business needs.

Expanding Functionalities with Ad Hoc Planning

SOK was tasked with fulfilling ad hoc workforce demand for the cooperative group while honoring strict labor regulations. According to local labor law, staff eligible to work a certain shift should have the opportunity to bid on it. This meant SOK had to find an effective way to communicate, monitor and assign shift offerings to employees.

In the past, SOK used a dedicated (homegrown) solution for managers to offer shifts, which used SMS functionality for notifications and required much manual work. Since their portal became outdated and SOK strived for a fully integrated process, they decided to collaborate with ORTEC to expand the workforce management process with Shift Offering and Ad Hoc Planning functionalities.

A full suite for Workforce Planning

SOK worked closely with ORTEC to implement these additional functionalities. ORTEC’s Ad Hoc Planning enables SOK to support the planning of last-minute changes like sick leaves and other disruptions. It gives planners the possibility to quickly allocate replacement staff to unfilled shifts. Ad Hoc Planner is available as a mobile App, so planners can act at any time and place.

SOK also implemented ORTEC’s Employee Self Service for staff members to receive notifications on their phone when a shift becomes available, so they can request open shifts. Using a friendly mobile web application, over 2,000 of SOK’s team leaders can easily register absences, finetune shifts and send offers to eligible employees while monitoring the details. All within the comfort of their mobile phones.

Integrated Workforce Management Reporting

Besides supporting the Group’s planning needs, SOK worked with ORTEC to implement a BI module for reporting. This module collects data from separate human resource databases to centralize workforce management reporting. It enables them to run reports over the entire organization and easily export data from their BI database, relieving their operational system. Using this wealth of information, for over 40,000 employees, they are also better equipped to take strategic and operational workforce management decisions.

Solutions that Support Employee Engagement

SOK chose ORTEC’s solutions because they have a high degree of configurability, enabling them to support many different, local labor agreements as well as overarching labor regulations. ORTEC Workforce Scheduling already allowed them to avoid over and understaffing and create a balanced plan against chosen objectives. With the Employee Self Service and Ad Hoc planning modules, they can now support employee preferences more easily and respond to last-minute changes. This lowers the pressure on the planning team, allows them to react quickly to a shifting business landscape, and drives employee engagement. The reporting functionalities have also been well-received by the management team, who can now make more data-driven decisions with an eye on the future.

With these successful projects and an integrated solution to address planning challenges, SOK plans to further optimize their workforce with ORTEC.