Client

National multi-brand retailer.

Challenge

Our client is a large, complex multi-brand/multi-channel retail enterprise. As a retailer, they manage complex shift schedules across hundreds of store locations and thousands of locations. It is crucial to automate as much of the employee shift management process as possible. This includes updating employee details, including phone numbers and other contact information, so that schedules can be coordinated directly with employees via text message and other convenient means.

Workday is a primary source of truth for employee demographics, contact information, and lifecycle events, including hires, organizational changes, promotions, leaves, and departures. Because of the nature and scale of the organization’s retail operations, this data changes hundreds of thousands of times each year.

The client challenged us to build an integration between Workday and their shift scheduling system to capture and update all relevant information necessary for efficient scheduling.  This information is core to the scheduling algorithms, and therefore must have a high degree of accuracy. The client wanted to implement real-time shift adjustments and notifications via SMS. Having the absolutely most up to date contact information is required; waiting for overnight file exchange would not meet the requirements for keeping contact information synchronized.

Solution

Dispatch built a near-real-time integration in Workday Studio using REST APIs with the scheduling system. This integration passes updated contact information for eligible employees to the scheduler approximately every ten minutes. A substantial amount of logic was developed in the integration to address eligibility criteria – including consideration of events such as hires, leaves of absence, terminations, and role changes that impact whether the employee can be offered shifts. Notably, the integration synchronizes the preferred method of contact (e.g., mobile phone or landline, and text or voice.)

This project was highly visible and critical to get right. Issues or errors could inconvenience thousands of employees and significantly impact the ability to staff retail store locations appropriately. As such, an advanced error-detection and alerting system was implemented using Dispatch’s Sentinel product.  Sentinel was configured to monitor all attempted and completed transactions for this integration. This monitoring system provided instant visibility regarding the number of contacts changed, data quality issues (such as lack of a phone number), and employee lifecycle events. Failures triggered instant notifications to client management for immediate review and rectification.

Figure 1 Sentinel Custom Dashboard for Shift Scheduling Integration

Outcomes

This integration has significantly improved the quality of information used to schedule employees at hundreds of retail locations across the country. Data is far more accurate, and manual intervention has dropped significantly. It is a reliable integration, and the Sentinel monitoring system provides confidence to management that any problems will be detected and resolved quickly.