Shift-work planning across locations in the S Group

The S Group consists of 22 regional cooperative retail enterprises, 19 local cooperative retail enterprises and the central SOK cooperative and subsidiaries, owned by the regional and local cooperatives. The S Group is currently market leader in the supermarket trade in Finland and is also active in other sectors in Finland, the Baltic States and Russia. The S Group employs over 32,000 service professionals.

In the late 1990s, the S Group acquired the Mara-Plan shift-planning application from Pretax to help in its HR planning and management. The system is currently used for planning shift work at some 1,000 S Group locations. Mara-Plan automatically calculates shift bonuses and keeps track of working hours and free days. The system also feeds payroll information directly into the payroll accounting system. This arrangement has helped in keeping the S Group HR costs within their budgets, as the system also automatically calculates the total working hours in the shift plans.

HR expert Karlos Kotkas of SOK sees many benefits in the Mara-Plan application: "The system ensures better compliance with the terms of collective agreements and the Working Hours Act in the preparation of shift plans. On the other hand, the system also enables us to make the best use of the collective agreements, since it has tools, for instance, for using the evening-out procedure."

The diverse planning functions of Mara-Plan make it suitable for many different sectors. In the S Group, the system is used for planning shift work particularly in the hotel and restaurant business and the trade sector. "Mara-Plan has helped us improve the planning of working hours and payroll processes. We can plan shifts according to need, across departmental boundaries and even across locations within the company," Kotkas explains.

Image: Lauri Mannermaa

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