Treat labour as the controllable cost it actually is.
Labour is usually a retailer’s largest controllable expense and its least understood. We build the finance-grade business case: where it leaks, what the fix is worth, and how the saving lands in the P&L.
What is labour-cost optimisation?
Labour-cost optimisation is the disciplined reduction of labour cost as a share of sales without sacrificing service, by fixing the planning that drives hours rather than cutting headcount across the board. It starts from a baseline and a conservative business case, not a target pulled from a benchmark.
Crude labour cuts are easy to model and expensive in practice: they hit service, conversion and retention, and the saving quietly reverses. The durable saving comes from removing the structural mismatch between paid hours and demand, so you spend less to deliver the same or better service.
We quantify the gap, size the opportunity conservatively, and frame it the way finance needs it: baseline, assumptions, sensitivity and payback. The result is a number your CFO can put in a plan and defend.
A point or two of sales is the whole game.
In retail, labour runs anywhere from 8% to 21% of net sales depending on format. Shaving even a point of that, without losing service, is often worth more than a year of hard-won like-for-like growth.
We model the saving from your own data, store by store, then discount it for risk. You see the conservative number and the upside separately, so finance signs off on a figure it can defend.
Across retail, labour runs from 8% to 21% of net sales by format. For an illustrative chain, a 1.5-point reduction in labour cost-to-sales is roughly S$3.0m a year on S$200m of sales. We size yours conservatively from your own numbers.
What the no-obligation scan gives you.
It starts with a free efficiency scan. For labour cost, that means a finance-ready read on the opportunity before you commit anything.
- Labour cost-to-sales read by store, format and daypart, benchmarked against comparable chains
- The size of the opportunity, with explicit assumptions and a sensitivity range
- A conservative business-case skeleton your finance team can pressure-test
- An agreed baseline, so any saving is auditable rather than theoretical
What good looks like.
Labour-cost optimisation: common questions
Find your labour-cost gap in one conversation.
A no-obligation efficiency scan gives you a numbers-first picture of where your roster is leaking margin, and what it's worth to fix. No software to buy. No commitment.