HANNAFORD INSTALLS PRODUCTIVITY SYSTEM

SCARBOROUGH, ME. -- Hannaford Bros. here recently installed a custom productivity solution that should allow the retailer to more effectively manage its labor pool by providing department level labor and sales data on a daily basis.

familiar with the situation.

"The system provides our managers with the ability to manage effectively employee productivity," said Jim Bongiorno, Hannaford's retail systems manager.

As the pool of available workers continues to shrink, retailers are looking for ways to maximize their current staff. According to industry observers, there will be a shortage of 500,000 cashiers by the year 2006.

Bongiorno noted that for a systems project that was custom built exclusively for Hannaford, there was a fairly rapid turnaround from the third-party supplier.

Hannaford's labor management system is from Softscape, Wayland, Mass.

The productivity and operational-analysis system provides Hannaford's 4,500 managers in 153 stores with the labor management information.

According to many supermarket industry experts, labor is the single largest controllable expense for retailers.

In recent months, other retailers such as Safeway, Pleasanton, Calif., Festival Foods, Mechanicsburg Pa. and Giant Eagle, Pittsburgh, have also installed or expanded labor management and scheduling software systems to maximize their labor resources.