Retail managers spend an average of 10 hours per week on scheduling. That’s not management — it’s administrative overhead. While their teams handle customers, inventory and sales targets, these leaders sit in back offices adjusting shifts.
Brandon Hall Group™ spoke recently with Mitri Dahdaly, VP of Strategy and New Verticals at Legion Technologies, and VP of Product Marketing Malysa O’Connor. The conversation revealed that Legion has spent nearly a decade building workforce management technology that treats labor optimization and employee satisfaction as complementary goals, not competing priorities.
The discussion was one of 15-20 provider briefings Brandon Hall Group™ conducts weekly. Legion has earned multiple awards in the Excellence Awards programs, including recognition for their AI-driven approach to workforce management.
The Retail Labor Management Problem
Walk into any retail location and you’ll see the symptoms: understaffed shifts during peak periods, overworked managers, high turnover and inconsistent customer experiences. The root cause is 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 time and attendance capabilities integrated with broader HCM functionality. Their strength is deep payroll integration and enterprise-scale deployments.
Workday brings enterprise capability with strong financial and HR integration, making it attractive for organizations seeking unified platforms. Their workforce management capabilities serve large enterprises 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 planning tools, though 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 — running forecasts, generating schedules and auto-approving certain time-off requests based on simple rules.
Legion built something different: decision automation powered by AI models. Here’s what that means:
Data pipeline intelligence. Most workforce management systems demand clean data as a prerequisite. That 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, including weather and 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’re 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. 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 and footwear brands 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, and retailers managing multiple brands under one corporate umbrella. Legion currently supports 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, and environments where employee turnover directly impacts customer experience.
Distribution and Fulfillment Operations. Warehouse environments with dynamic labor needs, distribution centers supporting retail operations, and 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, and 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 the briefing, a question emerged about how Legion communicates its data pipeline advantage. The company’s 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, according to Brandon Hall Group™ analysts.
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 with 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 the 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 Brandon Hall Group’s 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.
For organizations evaluating learning technology infrastructure or vendors considering strategic partnerships, Brandon Hall Group™ provides independent research and advisory services to help navigate these complex decisions.
