What factors do you need to consider to build an effective schedule? This infographic is a great way to learn how enterprise workforce management systems are constructed to deliver the best outcome for your business.
Nikhil Kinikar Articles
Anatomy of a Staffing Forecast
Learn how workforce management systems forecast labor. Beginning with the final output, this infographic peels each layer of the forecast calculation to give you great insight into inner workings of labor forecasting software.
Microlearning Benefits for the Restaurant Industry
Approximately fifteen million individuals are employed in food service establishments, and 10% of the U.S. workforce is employed in restaurants. The industry is booming, and it’s estimated that the average household spends nearly 50% of its food dollars in...
Micro Learning Pitfall #3: You’re Missing Out on The Real Benefits of Micro Learning
There are design strategies available to avoid the bookend bloat we discussed in Part 2, it's not inevitable, but a focus on Seat Time alone ignores the under-leveraged benefits of Micro Learning: flexibility and digestibility. The power of Micro Learning isn't...
Is Your Micro-Learning Strategy Driving Efficiency? Part II
Over the past 5 years, Micro Learning has come into its own, moving from nascent buzzword to the de facto standard when planning next-gen learning rollouts. But is this trend helping, or hurting? Is Micro Learning delivering on the whiz-bang promise of more learning...
Why Micro Learning Fails (and what to do about it) Part I
Over the past 5 years, Micro Learning has come into its own, moving from nascent buzzword to the de facto standard when planning next-gen learning rollouts. But is this trend helping, or hurting? Is Micro Learning delivering on the whiz-bang promise of more learning...
Management of Appointments
An appointment is usually visualized as a commitment between two or more individuals or groups of people to meet at a specified time on a designated date. This may look like a no-brainer for a friend-meets-friend for coffee scenario but a customer appointment in a...
Appointment Booking Vendor Considerations
Selecting the right Appointment Booking software for your business is like conducting Interviews for an open position – no matter how rigorous selection process you go through, the end results are never guaranteed! Moreover, most vendors have the sales and marketing perfected to present well and make an impression, making the elimination process that much more difficult. So, as a company with multiple business locations, how do you determine which tool is right for you? Hopefully this blog will help.
Appointment Booking Is Here To Stay!
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...
Ensuring Associate Safety During Time Studies
Crowd sourcing time studies can help you guarantee associate safety and drive consistent labor standards. Here’s how.
Explaining The Nextenture Technology Stack
Integration, Collaboration, and Flexibility are the pillars of a modern cloud platform.
3 Features to Reduce Appointment No-Shows
Stock-out annually drains retailers of just under one trillion dollars. How can you avoid stock-out in your stores?
Importance of Skilling in Workforce Training
87% of organizations are handling a skill shortage in their organization. Here are the benefits of centering skills in workforce training.
Effective Staffing & Payroll During COVID-19
Stock-out annually drains retailers of just under one trillion dollars. How can you avoid stock-out in your stores?
The Four Cs Behind Every Successful Software Deployment
Over my years in working within retail, I've come up with a personal philosophy when it comes to driving a successful software development. I call it, "following the four Cs." --- Communication This is self-explanatory. Ensure that you have clear and regular...
Stock-out: Preparing Your Workforce for Every Store Manager’s Nightmare
Stock-out annually drains retailers of just under one trillion dollars. How can you avoid stock-out in your stores?
Nextenture Completes SOC 2 Compliance Certification
Leading provider of productivity solutions and services demonstrates commitment to client security and confidentiality.
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.
The Benefits of Effective Locations Management
How crucial is locations management? In this post, content strategist and industry researcher Anokh Rao explores the net gains that come from tracking locations more efficiently.
Grab and Go: Retail's Biggest Tool of Personalization
Old-school personalized service is back in fashion. Modern retailers have never-before seen amounts of customer information, due to the advent of next-generation data collection. According to RIS News, 51 percent of retailers named personalization capabilities their...
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.
Effective Product Upgrade Strategies
Everyone knows that you have to upgrade at some point, but the conversation often starts with the following question: Is it worth it?
Agile Scheduling Trends: The Evolution of Time Studies
How do you ensure consistent labor standards? The answer: through an application that lets you control your time studies the way you want, and saves you countless amounts in operational costs.
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?
Floresight: Delivering Tomorrow's Labor Insights, Today
Welcome to Floresight, Nextenture’s new experiential retailing platform.
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...
Perceived Utility: Why Your Enterprise Can't Have Better Designed Software
Ken Cooke, Nextenture’s chief experience architect discusses common pitfalls with the use of technology, and how more functions don’t necessarily mean better design.
Where Retail Implementations Fail: 5 Ways To Avoid It
Aside from picking the right consultant, what can retailers do promote success? Here are the five main areas that successful retailers focus on.
Appointment Booking: Retail's Newest Tool
Technology is redefining what many previously took for granted in the customer experience. In the age of Amazon, what can retail do to keep people coming back to stores?
What's Your Passion? Mine is eLearning.
Nextenture’s former eLearning director talks about the joy of instructional design, training, and its benefits.
Effective Parenting is a Journey!
Nextenture’s office manager talks about the similarities of parenting and Nextenture’s services.
What's A Perfect Forecast?
It’s often assumed that the greater accuracy a forecast has, the better the result for a retailer. But how valuable is a “perfect” sales forecast?
4 Lessons From NRF 2018
The National Retail Federation is a conference held every year that celebrates the best of what the retail industry has to offer. Held every year in New York City, this year in the Jacob Javits Center, NRF typically has a mix of big-time retailers, small-time retail...
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...
Winning The Retail Revolution: Part 2
In this series of posts, John Liebler shares his thoughts on how retailers can evolve and win as the industry changes. John’s perspective comes from his two decades worth of experience working at Signet, starting in full-time sales, becoming a district manager and...
Winning The Retail Revolution: Part 1
In this series of posts, John Liebler shares his thoughts on how retailers can evolve and win as the industry changes. John's perspective comes from his two decades worth of experience working at Signet, starting in full-time sales, becoming a district manager and...
Defining Dollars: Chatting About Training ROI
In this week's post, Ken Cooke, Nextenture's Product Architect sits down with Dave Crisante, a Training Content Developer who led efforts at some of New York's most successful healthcare unicorns. We share three things that every educator should keep in mind when...
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...