Sephora - Middle East

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: 

1. Save their managers time by removing complex, manual and outdated processes.
   As retail operating models are squeezed ever-further, the need for the management team to focus their time and effort on the most value-adding tasks in a store (such as team coaching and customer service) is vital and so removing low-value work that can be automated is paramount.
   
   
2. Ensure full coverage for every store for all the various tasks and skill requirements in a complex retail environment.
   In a real customer-focused retail environment, ensuring that the right team members, with the right skills, are on shift to service all the different services in the store at the right time is paramount for a modern retailer.
   
   
3. Create real fairness in rotas for their team members.
   Previous projects to look at better rota management did not provide the automation power to truly and fairly optimise rotas for team members against the ‘unpopular shifts’ - e.g. late shifts or weekend shifts. This would be a key success criterion for the team who hold employee experience very highly!
   
   
4. Improve visibility of workforce management at every level of the business - from team member to head office.
   By moving onto a digital platform, the team knew they would be able to offer real-time visibility to team members of their rota as well as vital reporting back to head office on a number of useful areas.

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.