Walmart Workforce Planning Portal
Background
At Walmart, there are two roles that are responsible for workforce planning and workforce management – the store People Lead (PL), who are responsible for the store’s scheduling and store-level workforce management and workforce planning, and the People Operations Lead (POL), who are responsible for workforce planning, including short, mid, and long-term planning, at the Market level for Supercenters (the largest type of Walmart store) and at the Regional level for Neighborhood Markets (grocery-only Walmart store).
Challenges
Today, People Leads use a myriad of tools to perform their job functions within the store. These tools exist on separate platforms, can have redundant and sometimes conflicting data, and do not communicate with each other. This leads to inefficiency, frustration, and unclarity on the best action to take.
Meet the People Lead 
A PL assists leadership with associate recruitment, staffing, growth & development, succession planning, scheduling, and performance needs. In order to accomplish all these tasks and responsibilities, they use a wide variety of tools such as Tableau, Power BI, FMS Scheduler, Team Conversations, and My Walmart Schedule (aka Blue Yonder).
Opportunity
Design the experience and structure of a unified Workforce Planning Portal for People Leads that consolidates the disparate tools they use, innovates beyond the current capabilities of labor planning, and automates key tasks to reduce human error. A unified experience will streamline how data drives key actions by providing smart recommendations and actionable insights.
Process
We started our discovery phase digging into a PL’s journey and their jobs to be done. These were then used to formulate a story map as we looked to prioritize and tackle key problem statements head on. Working with our product, business and engineering partners, we led workshops and user research to ideate, rapid prototype, and validate. The entire process lasted roughly about six quarters and was a cross collaboration between four key squads. Each squad was responsible for a specific area of the portal – Analytics squad, Scheduling squad, Freight Planning squad, and the Platform squad. As the Principal designer, I was responsible for leading design and threading the needle between all four squads. The process was incremental in nature, releasing key deliverables in batches. Larger releases, such as the Scheduler, would first be piloted to a smaller subset of stores, then expanded to more stores and eventually taken out to chain (all stores). Once a release reached chain, legacy tools were deprecated and sunset.
Solution
The unified portal leverages a proprietary platform known as Polaris. The portal itself is the Workforce Planning Portal and it is comprised of Analytics tools, Scheduling tools, Planning tools, and Admin tools. All tools are housed in one central location eliminating the need to swivel chair from one application to another. The tools in Workforce Planning Portal are capable of speaking to each other, providing intelligent and actionable insights. Previously, a People Lead would need to dig into data, analyze and synthesize any potential problems, determine how to mitigate it, and proceed with the self-diagnosed best action. Now, a People Lead can see alerts and notifications on the dashboard of WPP and be provided not just the what, but also the so what, and most importantly, the now what. Analytics are always within reach and are leveraged to make smart scheduling decisions as the needs of the store shift depending on ever-changing circumstances.
With the development of Workforce Planning Portal, we’ve managed to sunset FMS Scheduler, Tableau, and the legacy Freight Planning Tool. The process of sunsetting other applications such as Power BI and Blue Yonder are underway.
Impact
Annual cost savings
By sunsetting 3rd party tools, operational expenses are greatly reduced.
User satisfaction score
By improving usability and understandability, ASUS score increased by 38 points.
Reduction in time
By providing actionable insights, associates are able to use their time more efficiently.