Fitting a Bigger Foot

The Finish Line, a one-stop casual footwear retailer, boasts that its high traffic mall stores represent "your Sport, your Life, and your Style." But the company, which has grown significantly over the past six years, needed to better manage labor across its 800-plus locations. In early 2008, The Finish Line chose Red Prairie's Workforce Management suite.

The Finish Line uses the Time and Attendance component of the Workforce Management suite to increase efficiency and accuracy of labor scheduling and labor cost tracking. RedPrairie's Time and Attendance product closely monitors labor hours and costs as they are incurred. The Finish Line benefits from the application's time clock integration. This feature provides automatic employee punch validation. Alerts notify managers of issues like employees approaching overtime and automated payroll closing. The retailer expects the product to improve overall associate and customer satisfaction.

"We selected RedPrairie because it is proven in our industry and provides the most highly integrated, end-to-end solution for managing the operations of our stores," said Roger Underwood, The Finish Line's senior vice president of information systems.

In the future, The Finish Line says it will add Red Prairie's Execution Management application. "Once we are fully implemented with both applications, we will be better able to forecast our labor and project execution needs to achieve highly accurate labor coverage to match the needs of our stores," he said.

The Finish Line is the industry's second largest athletic footwear retailer. It operates nearly 700 Finish Line stores, about 90 Man Alive stores and 15 Paiva locations in 47 states. It also sells merchandise online. Originally a franchise under The Athlete's Foot, the company underwent a massive expansion in 2002.

Emphasizing nationally branded, sport-inspired footwear, apparel and accessories, The Finish Line targets "action-addicted individuals." Known for its signature "shoe wall," a typical Finish Line displays 600 to 1,300 kinds of men's, women's and children's footwear. Brands include Nike, adidas, Reebok, New Balance, And 1, Oakley, Puma, Airwalk, Converse, Fila, Lugz, Saucony, Timberland and Vans.