In 2020, Retail & Service industries relied heavily on appointments for a very simple objective - Regulate the flow of customers and make everyone feel safe. And it worked. Customers booked appointments, they showed up - if they could, and completed the objectives...
Nikhil Kinikar Articles
Breaking Barriers: Reflecting on Nextenture's Past
Heading into the second half of the year, CEO Nikhil Kinikar, spoke with content strategist Anokh Rao about Nextenture’s humble beginnings.
Putting the "Retail" Back in Banking: The Value of Greater Customer Engagement
‘Retail’ must be reintroduced in Banking. Investing in ‘Workforce Management’ tools and technologies similar to stores will help Banks ensure availability of skilled staff in branches and optimize their human resources.
Copilot™: A DIY toolkit for better deployments
Successful implementations are at the forefront of everything that we do at Nextenture. Here’s how we drive first class solution deployments.
Three Myths of Change Management
It’s been proven time and time again that effective change management brings results that last. What myths exist that prevent others from using change management to secure results?
Effective Retail is a Journey: Five Years of Nextenture
From 5 years ago to 2018, here are CEO Nikhil Kinikar’s thoughts on the tremendous growth of his company.
The Island Talks
As a programmer, I got my chance to go on my first work trip abroad: Anguilla in 1998. I boarded the plane after having enjoyed a satisfactory amount of jealousy on my friend’s faces. After all, it’s not every day that one gets to visit the...
What's Your Passion? Mine is eLearning.
Nextenture’s former eLearning director talks about the joy of instructional design, training, and its benefits.
The Secret to Successful Retail Implementations
How often have you watched a carefully managed implementation fail because end-users didn’t use the software effectively – or at all? You’re not alone. A McKinsey report found that, 72% of the time that projects failed, the reasons included either “management...
Which Path?
With so many choices to make when implementing Workforce Management software, we put together a simple chart to help you find your way.
Take-it-easy policy
If you are going everywhere, where exactly are you going? If everybody everywhere is talking of productivity, where is the talk taking us? I do think that the more we talk of something, emptier our words get. 'Productivity' is inching in that direction, nowhere. Soon...
No Retail in Top 10?
It is a curious fact that Bureau of labor statistics, CNN Money, Payscale.com and other web sites make no mention of Retail in any of their Top 10 lists. Retail, the largest employment market with over 6.5 million workers covering a wide variety of duties is...
Business forecast accuracy – Does it matter?
Retail store manager needs a forecast of her business to decide number of shifts she needs to staff. Most enterprise workforce scheduling softwares, as a pre-cursor to calculating labor needed in the store, provide a module to forecast sales ($sales, customers etc)....
On Project Management
"But the earlier manager did report all the extra hours we worked! So why shouldn't I?", the new project manager questioned my decision to report only forty hours to the customer, no matter what the reality is. "Because then, the customer was happy to know that we...
A Multi-course ROI Meal
The toughest challenge in a WFM implementation is to not lose sight of the big picture. There are just so many moving parts that projects get tangled up in all kinds of routine obstacles. It takes hardly any time for the big picture to fade away and for the day-to-day...
Ms. Navarro of Starbucks
Recent news in nytimes.com about Ms. Navarro is really an opportunity in disguise for materialistic workforce scheduling specialists like myself. After many a years, the word 'scheduling software' has made any kind of headline! I must ignore Ms. Navarro's plight and...
Great Things Have Humble Beginnings
It had rained cats & dogs through the night. Next day morning I reached work and found out that my workplace, rented basement of someone's home in India, was flooded with over three feet deep water. Most of the computers and monitors were swimming in it. The water...
Sense of Belonging
I have been around employee productivity and retention reporting all my career. I can tell you without hesitation that the real productivity and retention are purely a function of emotional & social attachment to the workplace. The sense of belonging brings out a...
Role of Seniority
Chris is a 60+ employee of a convenience store chain. Been there a decade. Late night, standing outside his shop, he shares a few thoughts with me over last cigarette of the night. Today, he is quitting his job for another local shop a couple of miles down the road....
Fear of the Unknown
Many a studies have shown that people have a very reliable and tangible preference for traditions. We genuinely prefer to perform a task in a particular way if that's how we have been doing it for a long time. We are convinced that ours is the most efficient way...
Analyzing WFM Analytics
In Seven Habits, Stephen Covey told us to "look at the lens before looking through it". With all the advances in human capital management and related technologies, we are approaching the high noon on workforce management. It's time to trim away any deficiencies in our...