K-VA-T Food Stores, Inc. has extended its use of workforce management solution, adding time and attendance, analytics, absence management, and optimized scheduling to its existing hiring solution.

The Southeast grocer is working with Chelmsford, Mass.-based Kronos, which developed the hiring solution currently used by the K-VA-T. “The workforce management suite from Kronos will help us drive store productivity through complete automation and superior integration,” said Paul Widener, VP of information services for K-VA-T Food Stores, Inc. “We are now able to take high-quality store labor information and integrate it into our enterprise business operations, including marketing and sales, and determine how it impacts our payroll and overall labor costs.”

Prior to Kronos, K-VA-T relied on semi-automated systems for these critical workforce business processes, which are now being fully automated and centralized across 93 stores operating under K-VA-T’s leading banner, Food City, and 12 Super Dollar Discount Foods stores. The Kronos solution is being deployed across all departments.

With Kronos, K-VA-T plans to optimize its store scheduling to ensure that the right people with the right skills are in the right places at the right times. The solution leverages historical sales, customer demand patterns, and store profile data to derive accurate weekly sales and labor plans, which, combined with actual labor spend, provide enterprise visibility and control of store productivity.

Using the analytics solution from Kronos, the grocer will have real-time visibility into labor data to monitor scheduled hours and overtime, as well as project schedules based on employee input. This will help K-VA-T analyze the impact of workforce decisions on labor budgets and productivity.

Kronos is enabling K-VA-T to efficiently administer other workforce-related functions such as time and attendance, and absence management.

Abingdon, Va.-based K-VA-T operates 105 retail food outlets throughout the tri-state regions of southeast Kentucky, southwest Virginia, and northeast Tennessee.