Sprint Mart, based in Ridgeland, Mississippi, operates 90 convenience stores ― along with QSRs, car washes, and fuel distribution sites ― across Mississippi and in Alabama and Louisiana. Nearly half the chain is open 24 hours a day.
“In the first year of using [UKG Ready] Scheduler, we saw an immediate decrease in payroll dollars and hours worked. The scheduling module itself created enough savings to pay for our entire UKG Ready suite for a couple years.”
Chris McKinney
Director of Human Resources
Challenges
In the convenience store industry, most of what a chain store sells can be found at another chain store nearby. Sprint Mart’s mission, as stated in its employee handbook, is to provide the best convenience store experience that customers can receive. Fulfilling this mission, however, can be challenging in a continually tight labor market.
Sprint Mart has faced common retail challenges: locating talent, filling shifts, and meeting the needs of a constantly churning workforce. Paper-based HR processes ― from hiring to onboarding to benefits administration ― consumed staff time and slowed getting new hires working in stores.
Store managers created paper schedules for Sprint Mart’s team members, a process that provided no insight or reporting to demonstrate whether managers created best-fit schedules ― or whether staffing aligned with customer traffic and transactions. If employees wanted to check their schedules, they had to call their store managers or stop by the store.
Other inefficiencies included tedious payroll processing, which required three days of staff time and was prone to error.
Solutions
Having all data related to an employee’s lifecycle in a single solution was a driving factor in Sprint Mart’s selection of an automated human capital management solution for its 1,300 employees.
“UKG Ready™ came the closest to having everything that we were looking for, including scheduling, time and attendance, HR, and applicant tracking,” said Chris McKinney, Director of Human Resources at Sprint Mart.
Implementing UKG Ready has enabled Sprint Mart to more easily fulfill its mission by better aligning scheduling of staff with customer traffic to deliver an exceptional customer experience while better managing labor costs.
Results
“The differentiating factor for us is the experience that a customer receives when walking through the door,” noted McKinney. “The customer service experience is what we hang our hat on, and our mission is to be the best at this.”
Now, when new Sprint Mart employees are hired, their application information is automatically transferred within UKG Ready so they can quickly be in a store serving customers.
Having all employee information in a single solution also streamlines benefits enrollment and administration, saving HR staff significant amounts of time in managing this important employment benefit.
With Sprint Mart’s scheduling policies configured in UKG Ready, the company creates consistent schedules and limits overscheduling of staff. By optimizing staff scheduling, the company quickly generated savings.
“In the first year of using [UKG Ready] Scheduler, we saw an immediate decrease in payroll dollars and hours worked,” shared McKinney. “The scheduling module itself created enough savings to pay for our entire UKG Ready suite for a couple of years.”
Establishing clear, consistent attendance policies with employees and configuring these policies in the solution have delivered results too. “We saw attendance notations drop 60% in just five months by writing a new policy, communicating it to employees, and being consistent in a way we never could be before,” he said.
He added that the fair way in which Sprint Mart has implemented new policies “has had a tremendous impact on the feeling employees have working for the company.”
Also deepening employee engagement is the company’s use of the solution’s mobile app. From anywhere, employees can check their schedules, accruals, and pay information; update their direct deposit preferences; and request time off. McKinney said this self-service technology has dramatically changed Sprint Mart’s culture and is a valuable employee retention tool.
He has seen benefits with the solution too. While HR tasks such as open enrollment, weekly payroll, and ACA reporting can keep HR directors awake at night because of compliance concerns, he said he sleeps easier knowing UKG Ready handles these tasks and helps ensure Sprint Mart’s compliance with regulations.
The solution also has shortened the payroll process from three days to just three hours ― and payroll errors are virtually eliminated ― freeing up HR staff for more strategic tasks.
As to the advice McKinney would give to other organizations considering using a single solution for human capital management, he said, “You can’t realize the amount of work it saves, having everything in one place, until you experience it. We are testament to that.”
