Retail managers spend an average of 10 hours per week wrestling with schedules. That’s not managing people — it’s managing spreadsheets. While their teams deal with customers, handle inventory crises and try to hit sales targets, these leaders sit in back offices shuffling shifts.
Brandon Hall Group™ recently spoke with Mitri Dahdaly, VP of Strategy and New Verticals at Legion Technologies, and VP of Product Marketing Malysa O’Connor, to understand how they’re approaching this problem. What became clear is that Legion has spent nearly a decade building something the workforce management market desperately needs: technology that treats labor optimization and employee satisfaction as complementary goals. In our conversation — one of the 15-20 provider briefings we conduct weekly at Brandon Hall Group™ — Legion demonstrated why they’ve earned multiple awards in our Excellence Awards programs, including recognition for their AI-driven approach to workforce management.
The Retail Labor Management Crisis
Walk into any retail location and you’ll see the symptoms: understaffed shifts during rush periods, overworked managers, high turnover rates, and inconsistent customer experiences. The root cause? Legacy workforce management systems that automate processes but don’t make decisions.
Here’s the current competitive landscape:
UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group) dominates retail workforce management with UKG Pro, offering comprehensive time and attendance capabilities integrated with broader HCM functionality. Their strength lies in deep payroll integration and enterprise-scale deployments.
Workday brings enterprise muscle with strong financial and HR integration, making it attractive for organizations seeking unified platforms. Their workforce management capabilities serve large enterprises well for basic scheduling needs.
Blue Yonder (formerly JDA) built its reputation on supply chain optimization and extended into workforce management. They understand retail operations and offer robust planning tools. However, they’ve largely stepped back from competing aggressively in frontline scheduling.
Quinyx provides workforce management with European regulatory expertise and mobile-first employee experiences. They’ve gained traction in retail and hospitality with modern interfaces and solid scheduling capabilities.
Logile specializes in labor management for grocery and retail, with particular strength in forecasting and budgeting. Their technology requires significant manual intervention.
Decision Automation vs. Process Automation
Every legacy vendor claims they “automate scheduling.” What they actually do is process automation, which includes running forecasts, generating schedules and auto-approving certain time-off requests based on simple rules. Legion built something much different: decision automation powered by AI models. Here’s what that means in practice:
Data pipeline intelligence. Most workforce management systems demand clean data as a prerequisite, which requires customers to detect anomalies, identify outliers, cleanse missing data, and define special events before forecasting can begin. Legion ingests raw data in whatever format exists, then applies models for automatic anomaly detection, outlier identification and event tagging. The system correlates historical data with external sources (weather, local events) without manual configuration. This eliminates the need for dedicated data science teams just to feed the workforce management system.
Constraint-based scheduling. The platform considers multiple variables simultaneously: business demand, labor standards, employee preferences, skills and certifications, union rules, regulatory requirements, and budget constraints. Rather than presenting all available shifts to employees, the system curates shift offerings based on individual preferences, past behavior and probability of acceptance. As employees swipe left or right on shift offers (similar to consumer apps), the system learns and refines recommendations in real-time.
Contextual AI assistants. Purpose-built assistants handle specific tasks: schedule summaries, forecast explanations, shift editing, content authoring and translation. They are trained on the semantics of Legion’s optimization models and can explain why specific scheduling decisions were made. Managers can ask natural language questions like “Why is my forecast 20% higher than normal?” and receive explanations that reference detected events, promotions and historical patterns. The impact is that Legion customers report significant reductions in the time managers spend on scheduling administration, freeing them for coaching, customer interaction, and actual store management.
Who Benefits Most
Legion’s customer base reveals clear patterns about where this approach delivers maximum value:
High-Variability Retail Operations
- Convenience stores
- Specialty retail
- Footwear brands
These environments face unpredictable demand swings and need sophisticated forecasting to avoid chronic overstaffing or understaffing.
Multi-National Retail Brands
- Organizations deploying across 20+ countries with complex regulatory environments.
- Companies needing consistent scheduling practices across diverse locations
- Retailers managing multiple brands under one corporate umbrella (currently supporting 32 languages).
Quick-Service and Food Retail
- Restaurants with high transaction volumes and tight labor margins.
- Operations where small scheduling improvements generate substantial cost savings.
- Environments where employee turnover directly impacts customer experience.
Distribution and Fulfillment Operations
- Warehouse environments with dynamic labor needs.
- Distribution centers supporting retail operations.
- Pick, pack, and ship operations requiring flexible scheduling.
Healthcare and Education Services
- Veterinary hospital chains managing multiple locations.
- Early childhood education providers with complex staffing requirements.
- Any service operation balancing professional certifications with variable demand.
The common thread: operations with genuinely variable demand, dispersed hourly workforces and business models where small efficiency gains or turnover reductions create significant financial impact.
Translating Innovation Into Market Position
During our briefing, a question emerged about how Legion communicates its data pipeline advantage. As we discussed with their team, their capability to automatically cleanse data, detect anomalies and correlate external factors without requiring data science resources represents a significant differentiator that deserves more prominent positioning. Through our Strategic Marketing Services for solution providers, Brandon Hall Group™ helps technology vendors like Legion translate technical capabilities into compelling market narratives that resonate with buyers.
The strategic question for buyers: Do you need an all-in-one HCM platform with integrated workforce management, or best-of-breed optimization that connects to your existing systems?
For organizations where labor is the largest controllable expense and schedule quality directly impacts both costs and revenue, Legion’s specialization makes sense. Their extensible platform connects to existing HCM systems (including partnerships with SAP) without requiring full replacement.
What’s particularly notable is their approach to international expansion. Rather than just translating software, they’re deploying go-to-market teams in Europe with localized support. Their recent win in getting business from European food delivery company Wolt (owned by DoorDash) opens doors into broader fulfillment and logistics applications beyond traditional retail.
The time and attendance challenge Legion mentioned in our briefing is real. Competitors position their payroll integration as a reason not to take risks with forecasting and scheduling innovation. Legion’s counter needs to be demonstrable ROI from better schedules and retention, not just feature parity on time tracking. Organizations evaluating workforce management platforms benefit from accessing independent research and benchmarking data. Through our Enterprise Membership program, corporate HR and operations teams gain access to our extensive technology database and advisory support to navigate these complex buying decisions.
Looking Ahead
The workforce management market is evolving quickly. AI is enabling a fundamentally different approach to how organizations plan and deploy labor. The question isn’t whether to use AI for workforce management, but which vendor has built their AI strategy around solving real operational problems rather than chasing technology trends.
Legion’s nine-year focus on turning “hourly jobs into good jobs” through intelligent automation has produced a platform that retail and service organizations should evaluate seriously, particularly those struggling with turnover, inconsistent service delivery or managers drowning in scheduling administration.
For companies where labor represents 50-70% of operating costs and frontline workforce stability drives customer experience, the business case for optimization-native workforce management deserves close examination. The technology has matured beyond early-adopter risk into proven capability at scale.
