The retail time and labor management software application market continues to mature. This is good news for retailers, because a large percentage we have spoken with are still doing timekeeping and staff scheduling manually. Gartner believes that this reflects the current state of many large retailers, bringing to the forefront the continued opportunity for improving efficiency and effectiveness in stores for retailers.

Since our last evaluation, several vendors have improved their functionality and are expected to add integrated task management to their solution footprint during 2009. As a result, we have raised the bar on expectations of vendor product/service capabilities in this analysis.

For this analysis, we evaluated 12 vendors that have developed next-generation, Web-based industry offerings that could deliver integrated time and attendance (T&A) and/or scheduling and/or task management capabilities to fulfill the requirements of large retailers. In addition, Gartner interviewed 35 retailers that had recently completed deployments of a particular vendor's application to automate — and in many cases transform — the effectiveness of their store-level workforce. We also spoke with five retailers that had made a recent selection decision. Overall, most (64%) selected their vendor partners on their ability to deliver an integrated T&A and scheduling application as part of an integrated suite.

The selection of companies for this evaluation was based on analysts' ongoing research and knowledge of vendors, as well as client interest. This research can help retail clients identify solution providers that can assist them with their store workforce management strategies. Retailers should note that, despite the turbulence of the financial markets and the economy at the time of this publishing, Gartner maintains that retailers are staying the course with their implementations and rollouts for these solutions. The efficiency and effectiveness gains that can be made from time-and-labor solutions have been proven. For retailers trying to weather the current storm, there is no better time than now to consider investing in the processes that enable their workforce to better staff and run stores that improve the service experience for customers.

Retail time-and-labor solutions affect many more users that must touch the application than most other store technologies. It's very important that retailers spend enough time prior to launching an RFP defining their requirements and understanding how they want to use this type of application to improve time and labor management and, more importantly, organizationally commit to using the system to manage the process. Knowing what you need upfront will make it easier to identify the right vendor and suitable solution that can meet your needs.

The sizable upfront license for time and labor solutions — which, depending on what is licensed, can range from US$500,000 to more than US$1 million for retailers with more than a few hundred stores — and the significant change management required have resulted in some retailers' multiphased projects moving slowly, taking multiple years in some cases. The exception has been stand-alone task management initiatives, which are more typically rolled out to the entire chain in a few months, rather than years.

The critical key findings that emerged from this updated evaluation are:

• Time and Attendance and Scheduling: Ten of the 12 vendors have integrated time and attendance and scheduling in a suite application. By year-end 2009, Gartner expects all 12 vendors in this analysis will have T&A and scheduling capabilities. Although Oracle has the capability to deliver on a single platform, additional investment is required by retailers to integrate the scheduling application (Oracle Workforce Scheduling or OWS) with PeopleSoft E-Business Suite (EBS) or Oracle E-Business time and attendance.
• Task Management: Only JDA, RedPrairie and Tomax have the capability today to deliver a complete time-and-labor solution footprint that includes task management. Three additional vendors (Infor, Kronos and WorkPlace Systems) are expected to release task management capabilities to further enhance their footprints in 2009.
• Implementation Strategies: Despite the availability of a complete retail time and labor solution from three of the vendors (JDA, RedPrairie and Tomax), Gartner has not identified a retail customer that has implemented a single vendor's entire time and labor suite. Many retailers have deployed a single vendor's task management solution as a stand-alone initiative and have also separately deployed another vendor's T&A and/or scheduling solution. Given the level of investment in these separate initiatives, no retailer seems ready to define and fund the integration between different vendors' products.
• Project management and delivery: Nearly all retailers that we talk to about their time-and-labor management projects are doing their own project management and implementation directly with the vendors. However, the complexity associated with defining requirements, project scope and change management is still creating a good opportunity for specialized consultancies and vendors with labor standards and workforce management experience.
• Labor Standards: Some retailers do not have good labor standards in place when they kick off their projects, nor do they recognize the importance that standards may play in moving to optimized scheduling. Although the evaluated products can incorporate and apply labor standards from other sources or applications, none of the time-and-labor vendors evaluated manages labor standards in their applications. This capability is a potential development opportunity.
• Knowledge Transfer: From our interviews with retailers, Gartner believes that the vendors are getting better in their ability to guide retailers, particularly those with little to no experience automating their time and labor process. However, generally speaking, there is more work to be done by all vendors when it comes to transferring the knowledge and expertise of their implementation teams to improve the ramp-up and rollout experience for all retail customers.
• Configuration: More retailers in this analysis are using the full scheduling optimization capabilities available from vendors than in our past analysis. However, retailers must play a more active role in understanding and managing the configuration of the optimization engine to avoid "black box" syndrome. The value of optimized schedules is dependent in the ability of the retailer to identify "superusers" who can tune the tool to their business requirements as needed.
• Localization: Vendors need to invest more in implementation and support resources in expansion territories to support customer localization issues, particularly around language and regional operating requirements. This will continue to be a growth issue for most vendors, whose main presence in non-home-country territories is limited to business development staff.
• Change Management: No matter what the project scope, change management at the store level was revealed by retailers as something that was consistently underestimated for nearly all completed deployments.

Time and labor management deployments are very complex and resource-intensive initiatives. The most-enthusiastic and satisfied retailers interviewed for this analysis viewed their vendors as partners that helped them through the challenges and change management issues necessary to complete their deployments.

Gartner's definition of workforce management in retail encompasses all the activities and processes related to an associate's employment terms and retention, including:

• Recruitment
• Employee onboarding
• Labor budgets
• Labor schedules
• Timekeeping/time capture
• Employee evaluation
• Compensation/payroll
• Task management and labor standards
• Training/e-learning
• Employee separation/off-boarding

This MarketScope focuses on a subset of retail workforce management applications: time-and-labor management, which includes scheduling, T&A and store task management. Store task management provides corporate visibility into store-level execution of tasks and enhances the design, planning, execution and monitoring of such projects in stores. Task management functionality continues to drive the innovation and development efforts of more than half of the vendors included in this analysis.

The processes that support store-level time and labor management for large retailers have existed for years, often supported by highly customized packaged solutions and homegrown applications or paper/manual processes. As retailers continue to increase their focus and investment in store-level technology, many have asked Gartner for help identifying the best-of-breed, Web-based applications for managing a large, distributed and churning labor pool.

Retail time-and-labor vendors that met the following criteria during our evaluation period (May 2008 through August 2008) were invited to brief Gartner for this MarketScope:

• Can present proof of a productized offering for retail in general availability or pilot for time/attendance and/or scheduling and/or task management
• Have several installed customers, including at least five retail customers with more than 25% of stores installed
• Can provide at least three retail customer references
• Are engaged in selling and supporting solutions for time/attendance and/or scheduling and/or task management solutions directly to retailers in the U.S., Canada and Western Europe

Based on the published criteria, two vendors (InVision and Torex Retail) were added to this year's analysis, while two vendors were eliminated. The two excluded vendors — Cybershift and Park City Group — were included in previous versions of our MarketScope, but could not meet one or more of the inclusion criteria for this update.

Overall Market Rating: Promising

We continue to rate this market as "promising" because retail-focused, integrated, Web-based time and labor applications are still maturing. Gartner expects that demand for task management as a stand-alone solution will continue for at least the next couple of years, because some retailers will still seek quick wins for store operations with solutions that they can deploy rapidly and see fast payback from. However, we also expect to see more retailer RFPs and deployments seeking a fully integrated solution from a single vendor. This is especially true because more vendors are expected to expand their capabilities in the next year.

Standardizing operating processes to drive consistency in store execution across global operations is an important trend for large retailers. We expect several vendors will continue to invest resources to expand their operations into new territories to support large retailers, which will require even more focus and expertise to address localization and global growth challenges.

Finally, Gartner expects vendors to continue refining their complete offerings, especially their ability to deliver integrated store task management and managing labor standards. We expect future product road maps from time and labor vendors to evolve and address these retailer requirements.

In June 2007, Infor completed its acquisition of Workbrain. Retail is Infor's top-performing vertical market, representing 60% of its workforce management revenue.

Infor has more than 40 large retail customers that represent a number of retail sectors, including big box, department stores, specialty, grocery and fairly scaled environments, as well as a dozen retailers that have completed or are in rollout with the current release.

Gartner talked to several large Infor customers that had originally signed contracts with Workbrain/Infor in 2005 and had recently completed their rollouts or upgrades to version 5.0 (HCM Workforce Management — formerly know as Workbrain for Retail). No customers reported any significant implementation issues from Infor's closing of the Workbrain acquisition, which occurred during their rollouts. However while most customers were satisfied with how the product is now performing, Infor received the lowest score from its customers in overall customer satisfaction in our analysis. A large retailer that used a consultant for its implementation shared that it had selected Workbrain because it included functionality that was more closely aligned to their business goals, but during testing, identified several quality issues and gaps in the product that required customizations to meet their needs. And although some improvements are being made, the retailer thought that much more progress is needed to mature and tune the product for large deployments.

Although Infor has demonstrated progress against the claim to improve the product for large deployments with a steady stream of retail enhancements, in Gartner's opinion, Infor customers have been slow to adopt these enhancements. It should be noted that we were unable to speak with references who had adopted Infor enhancements as part of this analysis.

The solution is based on the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) J standard. Feature packs are enhancements delivered to customers and are included as part of customer maintenance agreements with Infor. The Infor product road map calls for two additional feature packs to be released during 2009, and Infor is expected to release its integrated task management module sometime during 2H09. The next major release — version 6.0 — is expected in 2010. In June 2008, Infor released a Business Edition of Infor HCM Workforce Management, which is a solution targeting the needs of smaller, midmarket retailers. The product is said to be easy to configure, is built on the same code base as HCM Workforce Management and features a T&A solution with basic scheduling, reporting and dashboard capabilities. Business Edition will continue to be sold by Ultimate Software and Infor.

Gartner continues to believe that Infor's Workbrain acquisition is one of its strongest retail assets, given the earlier success of the Workbrain products. However, their retailer wins during the year under consideration, some challenges encountered by current customers, and the slow adoption of new releases by current customers have Gartner concerned about Infor's ability to evolve and support a clear, unified retail strategy. For all of these reasons, we rate Infor Promising.

Rating: Promising

InVision is a German-based vendor that became a public company in June 2007. InVision has good penetration in Europe and is particularly strong in German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). It has a presence in 12 countries, including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, the U.K., Sweden, Estonia, South Africa and the U.S.; however, most of its business is in Europe. For 2007, company revenue grew by 48% to €15.9 million ($23.3 million), with nearly 50% of revenue attributable to retail store workforce deployments. InVision has recently expanded operations into the U.S., with four offices supporting approximately 5% of revenue projected for 2008.

InVision has traditionally focused on call center workforce management, and only in the past couple of years has expanded its focus to deliver an integrated, Web-based time and labor solution built on the .NET platform. Today, it has nearly 10 customers live or rolling out its time and labor solution for stores. Although the overall solution is modularized, T&A does not work as a stand-alone solution without significant customization. For this analysis, Gartner was not able to speak to any InVision customer that had completed a rollout of both scheduling and T&A. In addition, InVision has not identified task management on its road map as a future development opportunity.

The current release is version 4.6.0. Customers implementing the InVision solution in stores include a few of the non-English-speaking country operations of Ikea stores, one of the leading grocers in Spain and a Swiss department store. InVision is targeting large retailers with more than 10,000 employees or as few as 1,000 employees.

InVision has used implementation partners such as Accenture, Atos Origin and Capgemini to develop and support some of its very large retail installations. However, none of the retailer references we spoke with used consultants as part of their implementation.

InVision's strength is in its localized operations in greater Europe. Although Gartner has not spoken to any customers that have completed a multicountry, scaled deployment, we believe that InVision's international expertise warrants consideration from global retailers. InVision's greatest opportunity remains building market awareness of its capabilities and support in key markets, such as North America, to make it onto more multinational retailers' shortlists.

Rating: Promising

JDA Software is known for its retail modules, and unlike other vendors in this space, JDA is seeing more demand for its time and labor solution as a part of larger JDA customer initiatives. JDA's Workforce Management WFM solution (formerly known as Portfolio Workforce Management) is JDA's Web-based solution that is Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) standard-compliant, consistent with JDA's store system architecture strategy.

Since our first MarketScope, JDA has worked on improving its marketing and messaging capabilities for this solution. In June 2008, JDA delivered an update to customers, and its current go-to release is 7.5.1, which includes enhancements in the way retailers can use optimization, corporate reporting and clock management. JDA has approximately 20 WFM customers, and Gartner spoke to one customer that is testing and is expected to roll out task management sometime during the next several months. When live, this customer would provide JDA with one of the first referenceable customers using a single vendor product for end-to-end time and labor management.

In August 2008, JDA announced a merger with global supply chain provider i2 Technologies. Although this merger is not finalized, Gartner does not expect this acquisition to affect JDA's strategy or investments in its WFM solution, because i2 had no competing time and labor product. Most of JDA's customers have completed or are in rollout on version 7.5. While other JDA applications have typically targeted Tier 2 retailers, JDA has larger U.S.-based customers, including department stores, general merchandise and specialty retailers, using the WFM application. In addition, JDA has completed rollouts in South America and Central America. JDA WFM is well-suited for grocery, specialty and regional chains.

Rating: Positive

Kronos continues to build on its long track record in retail for labor scheduling and T&A, and is one of the few vendors in this research focused exclusively on workforce management and talent management solutions. It has more than 70 customers that have licensed or completed their rollouts of Kronos for Retail representing major segments of retail, including specialty, big box, department stores and grocery.

Two-thirds of Kronos customers are large, U.S.-based retailers with more than a couple hundred stores, while international retail rollouts are in predominantly English-speaking countries.

Kronos for Retail is built on a Java EE standard. During 1H09, Kronos is expected to make available an integrated task management module. All the references Gartner spoke to about the deployment of the Kronos for Retail product had very positive things to say about product functionality and were confident that, if they had to do a project like this again, they would make the same selection. However, despite a strong positive rating, there were a couple of localization issues highlighted by two non-U.S. grocery customers that had completed their deployments that are worth noting for clients deploying solutions into global markets:

• Local Country Support: One customer shared that the Kronos U.S. team worked very hard to satisfy their needs and any open issues. This was in contrast to this customer's experience in dealing with the local (non-U.S.) Kronos team, which was primarily a sales organization vs. a services organization, and was not on the same page when it came to resolving implementation-related issues.
• Language/Translation: Although the Kronos application had been fully translated into the base language for use in the customer's native country, it was not a perfect version of French/Spanish that is consistent with common usage of these languages based on the location of stores. For example, the version of French used in Montreal is different from a French translation that might originate from a translator in France, just as Mexican Spanish is different from Spanish that comes from a translator in Puerto Rico.

Kronos continues to have a strong presence in retail and is a major vendor in time and labor management software. Kronos for Retail time and labor management solutions are most appropriate for retailers with a few hundred stores and more than a couple dozen employees per location.

Rating: Strong Positive

Oracle has a number of good pieces that can provide a complete Web-based time and labor management solution for retail. The Oracle EBS and PeopleSoft Enterprise (E) product lines each have time and attendance solutions; however, PeopleSoft Enterprise Time and Labor has more retail customers.

Oracle has just completed its third release of its OWS product, based on the acquired TempoSoft intellectual property (IP) that can be deployed as a stand-alone product. OWS can be integrated with the Oracle or PeopleSoft Platform. Although there are a few customer commitments to license OWS as part of a larger Oracle enterprise contract, Gartner is only aware of one large retailer in the U.K. that is in project planning for OWS.

Previous references have been relatively positive about Oracle's capabilities. For this update, Gartner spoke with a large, multidepartment retail customer that is using Oracle EBS for T&A and encountered an issue when it came to integrating T&A with its Oracle EBS HR system upgrade. Out of the box, Oracle HR is not designed for the distributed hierarchy of managing timekeeping in stores, so customization was necessary for this customer. According to Oracle, this customization would not be required for users of PeopleSoft Enterprise HR and Time and Labor.

Retailers should consider evaluating Oracle's time and labor solutions, particularly if they are an existing Oracle PeopleSoft or EBS customer. However, be aware that due diligence should be done to match up your business requirements with Oracle's capabilities, because its product features and capabilities are lagging the best-of-breed vendor solutions whose product capabilities continue to evolve as a result of active user and advisory group input.

Rating: Promising

In 2006, RedPrairie made two major acquisitions in the retail time and labor management space that forms the basis of its store-based time and labor solutions: BlueCube Software and StorePerform. RedPrairie has since rebranded all pieces under its E2e Solution, which continues to contribute to RedPrairie's overall growth in retail.

RedPrairie can deliver an integrated time and labor solution via its product footprint, which includes its core T&A and scheduling solution (formerly known as "BlueCube," which was built for the .NET operating platform) and its task management solution (formerly known as "StorePerform," which was built for the Java operating platform). However, Gartner is not aware of a customer that has deployed the entire RedPrairie time and labor management footprint. Retailers interested in deploying the entire footprint for store workforce management should be aware that the RedPrairie solution can be deployed entirely on the Microsoft .NET deployment architecture. At present, RedPrairie has not defined a road map for moving to a single operating platform.

RedPrairie has more than 40 customers contracted for its Web-based time and labor solutions, nearly one-half of which have completed time and labor rollouts. The remainder of its customer base is in rollout or planning for deployments during the next 12 to 18 months. Most of its workforce suite customers are U.S.-based retailers; however, RedPrairie has secured large, international enterprise deals with customers such as Tesco (multicountry) and Reliance (India). RedPrairie continues to work aggressively with customers to provide a referenceable example of an end-to-end time and labor management process, and Gartner expects that it will have a customer using the entire time and labor suite by YE09.

Nearly all the customer references Gartner spoke to about the deployment of the RedPrairie time and labor solutions had very positive things to say about the impact the deployment was having on their operations. Account management rated high in our analysis, reflecting the strong relationships that customers have with RedPrairie. But as is the case with all vendors, there are still opportunities for improvement as reflected in these comments from customers:

• Product testing and documentation: A couple of customers commented that more work needed to be done in quality assurance before releasing the product to customers. Also, documentation was less than desirable and needs to improve.
• RedPrairie's responsiveness to resolving open customer issues with product fixes has been slower than expected.

RedPrairie continues to invest resources to evolve its workforce management and store-execution strategy to suit its retail customer needs. One clear differentiator that stood out in our analysis is the impact of its retail user group on RedPrairie's development process. Its retail user group is mostly self-organized and plays an active role in providing input to RedPrairie about their collective priorities for future features and enhancements to the core product. Every retail customer is invited to participate and has a voice in influencing the development process, something unique in this market space.

Rating: Strong Positive

Reflexis is a privately held company that offers Retail Execution Management software, including its flagship task management application. Although most other retail time and labor vendors focus on integrating timekeeping and scheduling, Reflexis' Retail Execution Platform focuses on task management and several other modules that provide improved planning and management visibility for the completion status of activities related to merchandising and store-level execution. The Reflexis architecture is based on the Java EE standard, is highly configurable to support rapid implementations, and delivers a fairly simple, user-friendly and Web-based user interface.

Nearly all of Reflexis' more than 50 retail customers have deployed task management modules as a stand-alone application. Most customers report moving from pilot to full rollout in three to four months from signing the contract. Reflexis customer references are consistently positive about the capabilities and benefits delivered in its core task management application, which has become a primary communication and workflow tool for customers. Customers we interviewed for this analysis rated Reflexis the highest in overall satisfaction and in the quality of the release. However, Reflexis does not currently have a complete time and labor management solution as defined by our research because it does not have a T&A module.

Reflexis recently expanded its time and labor capabilities by releasing an integrated scheduling application that several task management customers have contracted to deploy. Although Gartner is not aware of any customer that is in rollout with the Reflexis scheduling product, one customer confirmed testing the product for an upcoming store pilot. And although Reflexis does not have a T&A solution as part of its footprint, Gartner understands that it is developing this capability to fill the gap to deliver an integrated time and labor management solution in the next 12 months.

Rating: Positive

SAP provides an integrated labor scheduling and T&A solution to retail customers. Its current release, Workforce Management version 3.0, has been in general availability for just over a year and is the first generation of its stand-alone, Web-based time and labor management product.

Although SAP has several customers still using the client/server solution acquired from Campbell, there are currently only a handful of customers deployed on the current version 3.0 or version 2.0 of the Web-based solution, and more than a dozen contracted customers are in various stages of implementation planning for future deployments. One customer that had upgraded its stores to WFM 3.0 scheduling — which is integrated with an existing SAP/Staffworks T&A deployment — and is not an enterprise SAP customer, strongly recommends that customers evaluating the SAP WFM 3.0 as a stand-alone solution bring in a third-party consultant experienced in setting up the required SAP server and hardware environment. This expertise is critical to configuring and running the application, which can save significant time and money invested in the deployment.

SAP has most of the pieces required for a complete retail time and labor management solution, with the exception of store task management capabilities. SAP has partnered with Reflexis to enable an end-to-end time and labor management solution. However, at this time, Gartner is not aware of a joint customer that has enabled the end-to-end process. SAP's time and labor management solutions are most appropriate for retailers that want to standardize on the SAP for Retail product suite.

Rating: Promising

Stromberg, a subsidiary of Paychex, differentiates its WFM solution to retailers with its lifetime pricing model: Customers pay a one-time upfront license, and all future major upgrades and product updates are part of their ongoing annual maintenance agreements, which averages about 20% of the license.

Stromberg's current release is Stromberg Enterprise version 4.1.542. However, a new release, version 4.3, is scheduled for release in 1H09 and will feature integration with Enterprise Scheduling, a product that is 100% Web-enabled on the .NET platform. The new release delivers improved ad hoc reporting capabilities as well as uses a portal application to improve the ease of use of delivering updates to applications in the stores.

Stromberg serves a number of industries besides retail, including hospitality and manufacturing, with their heavy union environments. Stromberg claims 98% retention of its retail client base and has approximately 40 U.S.-based retail customers.

All customers in our analysis confirm that their selection of this solution was based on pricing. However, customer references were mixed on their experience with the product and company. While one customer was satisfied because the product does what they need it to do and is easy to use, another does not believe it is the best-quality product. This same retailer also commented on issues related to release quality and documentation.

Stromberg is not a new provider to retailers. Its acquisition of Labor Resource Management's client/server scheduling product a couple years back (which it continues to support for existing customers) increased its penetration and visibility in retail. Earlier this year, Stromberg worked with Denver-based ScheduleSource to jump-start its advanced scheduling capabilities and is reselling this as Stromberg Enterprise Scheduling. It also entered into a partnership with Cornerstone OnDemand to expand its capabilities in talent and performance management.

Stromberg has several Tier 1 retail customers, but is best suited for retailers with smaller footprints, fewer than a couple hundred stores and smaller staffs per site. Gartner advises customers to explore the functionality of this application and ensure that you talk to similar types of retail references to determine if price is the right trade-off to enable your store workforce strategy when defining your vendor shortlist.

Rating: Promising

Tomax is a private, retail-focused company providing a number of solutions, including point of sale, merchandising, performance management, and time and labor management delivered via its Web-based Retail.net application suite. Its solution includes T&A, scheduling and task management capabilities. The Retail.net user interface is straightforward and conducive to enabling associate self-service, and its rule engine is fairly configurable. Tomax is based on the Java EE standard.

Tomax's current version (5.4.3) was released in May 2008 to improve the calculation engine used for pay rules to pick up wage and premium pay. The solution has all the pieces to deliver an integrated retail time and labor solution, including enabling associate self-service capabilities. However, customers we have talked with have only implemented the Tomax scheduling product, not T&A or task management.

Gartner spoke to several customers that shared insights for this analysis and recommends that potential clients speak to Tomax customers as part of due diligence. One customer that is happy with Tomax's labor-scheduling solution in its more than 500 grocery stores shared that the company removed itself from consideration for task management and referred this customer to another vendor after identifying requirements that the company's standard product could not satisfy without customization. Another grocery customer reported that Tomax worked with it to successfully deploy in more than 100 newly acquired stores under an aggressive schedule that also included a new tech stack (database and application server). This customer found itself doing work-arounds while the new tech stack was stabilized, but was satisfied with the support it received from Tomax throughout the process. Finally, we spoke to a customer that was the first to deploy Tomax's new T&A solution, and the first to deploy the company's workforce suite under Tomax's new software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model. This customer encountered some significant challenges that required involvement from executive management of both companies to resolve.

Tomax has nearly a dozen time and labor management customers, and all but two are in grocery. Tomax is best suited for grocery retailers or retailers interested in a SaaS deployment model.

Rating: Promising

In June 2007, Cerberus European Investments completed its acquisition of Torex and commenced the process of reorganizing. Torex's main focus had been on its point-of-sale solutions, but it continues to refine its go-to-market strategy for its HCM portfolio, inclusive of store workforce management and a number of retail applications that enable key time and labor processes, including Torex Workforce Management and Torex Productivity Management (formerly known as "ePerformance"). Torex Productivity Management is the core product for Tier 1 retailers and is suitable for multisite, complex and global retail organizations.

Torex focuses on retailers such as petrol/convenience, co-op, general merchandise and department store formats and has about a dozen or so Western European-based retail clients, mainly in the U.K., using its solution. Customers include a department store, a drugstore retailer, an electronics retailer and several convenience format co-ops. In addition, Torex has deployed the solution for clients in non-English-speaking regions, such as Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Half of Torex's customers are deployed on a newer, Web-based version of Torex Productivity Management solution (versions 1.x or current GA version 1.32), and three have deployed T&A and scheduling functionality.

Recently, Torex released version 1.34, a maintenance release that globalizes products for 3,000 stores and helps with scaling. Torex is targeting two releases per year. Its next major release, version 2.0, is targeted for December 2008 and will feature enhanced user interface and self-service features.

The greatest challenges Gartner sees for Torex include articulating its retail time and labor product strategy and direction, and supporting non-English-speaking deployments.

Rating: Promising

WorkPlace Systems is a U.K.-based vendor that offers labor scheduling and T&A solutions across a number of vertical markets, including retail. WorkPlace's Workforce Management solution has one of the largest multinational Web-based deployments of retail labor scheduling and T&A, and has solid functionality for both. Although most WorkPlace customers are in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Gartner recently confirmed its first U.S. customer contract. The solution supports a Java EE standard.

WorkPlace Systems continues to develop its solution to best suit the varying operating requirements of different-sized retail operations and has three Workforce Management products: WorkPlace Enterprise, which is the core solution that can be configured and used for managing enterprise scheduling, including optimization capabilities; WorkPlace Enterprise Express, which was recently launched to deliver simple manual scheduling and T&A with minimal configuration on the same code base as Enterprise; and WorkPlace Online, also released recently as a SaaS solution built on IP acquired from WorkBuddy. WorkPlace Online is designed to support smaller-format retailers or retailers with minimal IT budgets that urgently need to automate scheduling and manage timekeeping compliance. In addition, WorkPlace Systems is developing a task management module that could be delivered either stand-alone or fully integrated to its core WorkPlace Enterprise product. This module is currently in pilot and is expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2009.

Like a few of the other vendors in this study, WorkPlace has enjoyed a steady pipeline of activity as a result of strong interest by retailers in workforce management solutions. As WorkPlace continues to expand into new territories, it must focus investments on localization and support to ensure that customers can maximize their investments in the time and labor application.

WorkPlace's recent U.S. customer win shows that it has made good progress integrating its LSI consulting operation with its core application business. However, there is clearly more work to be done positioning LSI as a total solution provider, especially given its expertise in labor standards and implementation. Retailers that need help defining their business case and labor requirements, or multinational retailers that want a scalable, flexible labor scheduling and time/attendance solution, should evaluate WorkPlace Systems' capabilities.

Rating: Positive