Last week, I attended task and workforce management vendor Reflexis’s first ever analyst day. It represented a milestone of maturity for a company I have been following since 2002.

CEO Prashanth Palakurthi points out that I was the first analyst to write about Reflexis and task management back when I was with AMR. In reality, the “tip ” was given to me by Scott Duby, now with TruFit, who was a client contact at the time. He saw the elegant simplicity in monitoring store tasks, and I had to agree. Since then, it has been great to watch the space, and Reflexis, continue to grow.

If you look back on all the blogs my partners and I have written about Reflexis’s user conferences, you find they always seem to include the term “love fest. ” There is no doubt that retailers who take the time to come to Reflexis’ conferences really do love it. Due to a scheduling snafu, I was unable to attend the conference this year but the three retailers who joined for part of our analyst day continued that tradition. All three had started with the task management solution and were either in process, or had just completed transitioning to their labor scheduling application as well. It turns out that the combination of labor scheduling and task management makes for a better in-store environment.

Here are some of the updates and upgrades that were highlighted over the course of the analyst day:

• Machine learning is now baked into the application. This is not surprising, but anything that makes both task and workforce scheduling more routinized and intelligent is a good thing.
• The company now has a free service to help retailers learn to use the technology better. This initiative is headed up by Murtaza Ghadyali and Bob Fabrizio. Their team comes back after a year to ensure the retail client is getting maximum value from the software.
  
  For example: if the system calculates that the company needs 3.4 people to fill a shift, should the company round up to 4, or round down to 3? The answer is, “It depends ” on variables that the Reflexis team helps the company sort through to gain maximum efficiency. It’s an interesting problem and it’s one the company is committed to help solve.
• They are even tackling that oh-so-tricky problem of putting ten pounds of feathers in a five pound bag – over-scheduling the people in the stores. As part of their analysis of system usage, Reflexis found that one company was simply sending too many tasks to stores. It is good to hear that problem acknowledged, named and called out. I hear store managers cheering everywhere as they read this.
• The company can now implement in as few as two days. And since one of their strong suits is product recalls, they are contemplating getting into the “recall as a service ” business. This has implications beyond the retail industry, and in fact, we talked about other industries that could use their help both with recalls, with labor scheduling and task management. I know they are contemplating banking (through an ironic quirk of fate, I found out my brother-in-law was briefly an advisor to them for that vertical, totally without my knowledge), and I personally can’t get my mind off of healthcare, and the number of tasks that should be routine that simply don’t get done correctly.
• The company now has a document repository solution that can replace what everyone who knows retail store operations thinks of as “the big books. ” These books of operational guidelines are a famous mess in most stores, with updates, dog-eared pages, and generally things out of sequence. To this I say, “It’s about time! ” Those books have always been a nightmare.
• The company even has an in-house chat solution called QNotes. It’s a private social network that allows for simple communication beyond email while keeping the employees on topic.
• They also have added a feature called “Arbitrary File Management ” which is a bit like an ETL application.

Of course, the company has the de rigueur requirements of the day: Cloud-based, mobility for associates, gamification and schedule-swapping within the rules of any state.

The bottom line for me is that Reflexis, labor scheduling and task management time and usefulness marches on. We believe as click and collect and buy online return in store continue to escalate, task management and labor scheduling will become ever more important. It has been fun to watch both the company and the space in general mature over the course of my career. It really is an interesting time to be part of the retail industry!