Inside Petco's HCM Overhaul

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

January 2015 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

How Petco’s replacement of an aging and loosely integrated WFM (workforce management) infrastructure rejuvenated HCM (human capital management) practices and minimized compliance risk.

By no means does Petco need an introduction. The pet specialty retailer operates more than 1,300 stores nationwide and in Mexico staffed by approximately 27,000 full- and part-time store, DC, warehouse, and front-office associates. Those associates play a number of roles related to the care and safekeeping of our four-legged friends, from product allocation to pet grooming, from customer care to dog training. While the company’s size and success speak for themselves, streamlining the HCM infrastructure that supports such a large and diverse population of employees proved challenging as it grew. By 2010, the organization found itself maintaining three separate systems to collect time punches and calculate hours worked — stores operated on one system, DCs on another, and the corporate offices managed time and attendance on yet another disparate, Excel spreadsheet-based system. Its most recent time and attendance rollout had been completed in 2000, and it required the maintenance of more than 1,300 software licenses, distributed support, and rapidly diminishing accommodation of the company’s new business processes. Integration with its homegrown scheduling system was cumbersome at best, adding to the company’s struggle to align time and attendance and scheduling with corporate KPIs (key performance indicators).