Retailers Look to Workforce Optimization as Critical Success Factor in 2006; CyberShift...

NEW YORK & PARSIPPANY, N.J. -- With one in five U.S. workers employed in the retail industry, leading retailers are taking advantage of a technology solution that can address many of their key workforce challenges, including deployment, in-store management and regulatory compliance. Using workforce

management software and services from CyberShift, retailers improve tracking, accuracy and consistency of employee scheduling and time and attendance. CyberShift will be showcasing its solution this week at the National Retail Federation's 95th Annual Convention and Expo in New York City.

With its focus on the top two controllable expenses in business today - labor costs and employee expense management - CyberShift enables retailers to address key industry trends ranging from customer service and profitability improvements, in-store management to regulatory compliance and increasing shareholder value.

Workforce optimization through CyberShift's employee scheduling and time and labor management coupled with managing employee-related costs can be the single-most effective way to streamline expenses and immediately impact the bottom line in addition to addressing industry trends, including:

--Customer Service and Profitability: Monitoring and managing the deployment of a workforce directly affects a retailer's ability to achieve customer service goals, drive sales, maximize profits and reduce employee turnover. Employee scheduling is key to supporting customer service demands, ensuring an organization's needs are met with the optimal number of employees, in the right place at the right time.

--Store Management: Retail operations today are not homogeneous in their requirements. Therefore, workforce management systems must address enterprise-wide requirements to more effectively optimize the overall benefits at the individual store level. A rules-based approach personalizes staff planning and allocations to business needs. These tools adjust in real-time to local activities, with proactive alerts and notifications of changes, to help track the time and related costs at the direct source of each activity.

--Compliance: Regulatory compliance mandates like Sarbanes-Oxley and other retail regulations, such as minor work rules, have spurred a wave of interest on how to collect critical employee data while complying with industry regulations. A Web-based workforce management solution provides accurate and instant employee data that can impact financial statements and withstand audit scrutiny of internal controls and processes involved in financial reporting.

--Shareholder Value: Workforce management solutions enable companies to access critical employee and business information in real-time, providing visibility to workforce movement and metrics across the enterprise. Optimization of workforce resources across an enterprise increases, helping an organization more effectively meet its business goals, increasing shareholder value.

"With an emphasis on customer service and profitability, workforce optimization becomes a critical factor to success," said Robert E. Farina, CyberShift's chief executive officer. "CyberShift addresses two of the largest areas of opportunity for operational improvement in retail operations today, labor and employee expenses, bringing to market a comprehensive solution that can rapidly achieve business value for retailers."

CyberShift's workforce management and expense management software and services can be deployed in-house or delivered and maintained using the CyberShift On Demand(TM) ASP model.

About CyberShift

CyberShift, Inc. (www.cybershift.com) is a leading provider of workforce management and expense management software and services focused on helping large, complex organizations optimize and manage the deployment of their people and resources. CyberShift's rules-based platform delivers a fully integrated solution for the management of all aspects of time and attendance, scheduling optimization, time and labor management, expense management and workforce analytics under a unified workforce interface. The enterprise-class suite reduces costs and improves processes for a variety of industries, including manufacturing, retail, transportation, financial services, media and entertainment, business services and the public sector. CyberShift is the workforce management and expense management solution provider handling the top two controllable expenses: labor and employee expenses for many of the largest organizations throughout the United States and Canada.