Product

A product is an operational section that has its own measures, staffing needs, tasks, etc., allowing coverage to be planned independently within the service.

Some examples of products within services are as follows:

  • Clothing store

  • Restaurant

"WOMEN" women’s section, "MEN" men’s section, "KIDS" children’s section.

"GENERAL" for the restaurant, "HD" for home delivery.

A single product can be established for the entire service. By convention, it is called "GENERAL".

Use in Orquest

Employees

At the linkage level, an employee works for a product or section, not for a service. However, it is possible for any employee to work in a product regardless of the product they belong to.

Measures

A measure can be visualized at the product level, with the same type of measure existing for the different sections or products of the service. For example:

  • Clothing store

  • Restaurant

"sales_women" for the women’s section, "sales_men" for the men’s section, "sales_kids" for the children’s section, and "total_sales" for the sum of all sections.

"tickets_general" for the restaurant, "tickets_hd" for home delivery, and "total_tickets" for the sum of all sections.

Tasks

Tasks can be established at the product or section level. In this sense, not all products need to have all the tasks available from the task catalog defined at the business level.

  • Clothing store

  • Restaurant

The task "fitting_room" is selected for the "WOMEN" and "MEN" products, but not for "KIDS".

The task "customer_service" is selected for all products or sections.

The task "kitchen_opening" is selected for the "GENERAL" product, but not for "HD".

The task "training" is selected for both products or sections.

Although the task catalog is established at the business level, it is also possible to define tasks at the node level, allowing the creation of specific tasks for a service without including them in the catalog.

Needs

A need is defined by a period of time, a task (location) and the number of people required to perform it. Needs, therefore, refer to the staff hours that need to be invested each day and by time slot to cover the activity of a service, specifying both the number of people and the tasks to be performed.

There are several types of needs:

  • Variable needs: these are automatically calculated by the system according to the established measures and the needs generator configured in the business.

  • Fixed needs: these are not calculated by the system but must be configured through a needs template, as they are linked to essential organizational tasks such as opening, closing, receiving merchandise, etc.

  • Liquid needs: these are linked to tasks that have a determined duration but can be performed within a time range specified by the user. The engine will decide when it is most optimal to cover this need and in what way.

At the business level, various methods can be established to calculate needs, that is, the number of people per place and day broken down by tasks. Once defined, they can be applied to each product or section.

Needs Templates

Needs templates are predefined schemes or matrices that specify the fixed needs required to carry out the operational tasks of a store at different times. These templates are configured in the Store configuration > Needs templates section and are used to ensure that there is always sufficient staff available to perform specific tasks, regardless of sales volume.

Once a needs template is generated, it can be applied to a product or section for a determined period of time.

Employee distribution

For the calculation of needs, it is essential to establish the distribution of employees to cover the different variable tasks.

Productivity rules

Orquest provides the possibility of reporting different productivities for each type of day and time slot to capture the differences in activity in the store for each hour. Productivity will depend on the selected measure.

Replacement product

The replacement product is a feature that allows using the data of another product or section as a reference when there is not enough historical measure data (less than one year or no data).

In those cases, the system uses the replacement product’s data to feed the forecast. The most common scenarios are:

  • A new product has been opened and there is no own data yet.

  • An old product has been replaced by another.

  • There are gaps in the measure history.

Correction percentage

Along with the replacement product, a correction percentage can be configured that scales the substitute’s values before applying them. The percentage acts as a correction factor on that reference data, for example:

  • 0% → uses the measures as is.

  • 25% → scales up by 25%.

  • -30% → scales down by 30%.