Cashier Trends

WILCOHESS, located in Winston-Salem, NC, is a leading operator of travel plazas and convenience stores in the Southeastern United States. 
Wilco owns and manages 300+ stores that offer first class convenience and value to patrons.  Wilco offers a dynamite coffee program, monthly specials on soft drinks, and the best petroleum products available.

Challenge

Wilco monitored cashier behavior by tracking and trending end of shift point-of-sale data in a "Trend Book" ledger. District Managers and Store Managers performed this manual process on an ongoing daily basis.  Wilco's challenges were to automate the accurate, consistent generation of the cashier trend book and to proactively identify changes in cashier performance that may require manager intervention. 

An automated solution was needed to:

• Quickly and automatically generate trend reports of cashier performance through an easy-to-use desktop application accessible on each Wilco store PC. 
• Provide silent installation from a CD requiring zero input from store managers.
• Automate the nightly load of daily POS transaction data into the Cashier Trends database tables. 
• Calculate average "Norms" and "Concerns" based on category thresholds established by Wilco.
• Provide quick visual clues to cashier performance with color coded concern values and provide standardized suggestions for manager action.
• Provide report flexibility so managers can review historical and current trends across multiple shifts and registers.
• Summarize "Concern" levels for individual cashiers so managers can take pro-active measures to correct poor cashier performance.
• Allow for the export of reports to Microsoft Excel and to PDF documents that can be saved locally on the store PC.

Solution

Stratapult developed Cashier Trends to capture key register information generated by cashiers during a shift and provide store managers an easy to use application to monitor cashier performance. The desktop application was developed using VB.NET 2.0, SQLExpress and embedded Crystal Reports. Cashier Trends is easily installed on a store's PC by users with little technical knowledge and is easily accessible by clicking on an icon on the desktop. Cashier Trends provides users a Daily Trend Report and a Daily Cashier Trend Analysis Report with a host of report variables to provide users the performance information needed to make actionable decisions regarding cashier behavior.

Wilco determined the categories to be monitored and set threshold levels to identify transaction behavior as a "Concern" for any given cashier. Categories being tracked include Overages/Shortages, Drawer Opens, Drive Offs and Line Voids among others.  The Analysis Report provides managers with a summary of "Concerns" and what action should be taken based on the concern percentage.

The tool allows users to pull this information with a variety of variables such as choosing one or all cashiers, end date of reporting period, number of weeks to report on, etc. Users also have the option to print the report or export it to a PDF, Excel, Word or RTF document once the report results are generated.

Impact

Cashier Trends instantly completes the analysis and identifies problematic areas of cashier's behavior that suggest theft in a specific category. Automating this tracking and reporting process increases operating efficiency and improves manager accuracy. It also reduces response time to identify concerns and take action based on documented metrics. The program is intuitive and is designed to quickly benefit the corporate loss director down to the store manager.