Born in France in 1969 and launched in the Middle East in 2007, Sephora has become a leading beauty products and personal care retailer in the region.
Sephora is renowned for offering a unique service-oriented environment for women and men to discover the latest and most advanced skincare, makeup, and fragrances from around the world. Sephora has exponentially grown to more than 75 stores in five markets (UAE, KSA, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait) with its flagship store in Dubai Mall ranking as the number one store worldwide.
In 2019, the team at Sephora Middle East (ME) realised they had a problem. After a previous project to implement an employee scheduling system failed to deliver, they were long overdue to move away from spreadsheets and embrace a digital platform. They had identified challenges in the current way they were operating and they were keen to address them. They decided to go back to the market to find a solution partner to help solve these challenges.
At the start of the project, they had four main goals to secure its success:
To accomplish these objectives, Sephora ME chose Rotageek’s data-driven Autoscheduling solution to power their employee scheduling. Sephora Middle East are using the Rotageek solution to...
Forecast customer demand to power rota creation via integration with RetailNext.
RetailNext is a traffic analytics platform that collects and measures shopper behaviour with industry-leading accuracy. By utilising this data history, Rotageek predicts Sephora's shopper traffic trends to forecast peak hours and shopping behaviour patterns.
Optimise their labour engine to create really smart schedules.
Our powerful optimisation engine creates millions of schedules in a matter of seconds and automatically balances a huge number of variable rules and people principles to create smart schedules that work for the business, the customer and the employee. Sephora Middle East are now creating rotas that comply with employee contract hours and availability, have a better labour-to-demand match and utilise labour budgets more effectively.
Provide a slick solution that employees love.
The main user base at Sephora - Middle East is made up of shift workers and their supervisors or management teams. They need a solution that works on the go, on all device types. It needs to function out of the box and be so intuitive that team members can simply download it and begin using it seamlessly.
Since deploying Rotageek and moving away from spreadsheets to a digital and automated rota management system, Sephora- Middle East has been able to:
Increase visibility across the whole organisation.
Using the Rotageek mobile app has enabled greater visibility with user notifications and reporting platform, Sephora can get much greater visibility at every level of the business of what’s going on and when and use that information to make better decisions for the future.
Save countless hours each month.
With the ability to auto-create optimal rotas based on forecasts made from real traffic data, managers at Sephora ME have a fool-proof process that ensures rotas are fit to meet customer demand as well as compliant to their operating rules and employee preferences. This has saved a lot of time every month for managers looking after large complex teams and means they can focus on the higher-value tasks.
Remove manual, paper-based processes from the business.
Having structured workflows for everyday occurrences such as shift change notifications, swaps, extra cover, T&A, timesheets and payroll sign-off has removed occasions where errors, miscommunications and mistakes used to happen. This has been a real improvement for employees, managers and head office teams together.
Ensure rota creation is truly fair, compliant and has full skill coverage.
Since Rotageek easily identifies an optimum rota based on what it knows is most important to Sephora ME, there are no more worries about fairness or whether there is the correct skillset on the store floor today. Employees can see and know that they are getting the right allocation of shifts, and managers have confidence that the right people are in the right place.