The white-hot field of workforce-scheduling applications got quite a shakeup this week as Wal-Mart elected not to go with Kronos as the supplier, as earlier reports in The Wall Street Journal and this blog previously indicated. Instead, the supplier that landed the global account is Workbrain, which is creating quite a reputation for itself in primarily the retail sector but also among manufacturing companies.Workbrain, which recently was bought by Infor, is finding greatest demand for its products among some enormous companies in the retail space: in that sector, its clients average 98,000 employees, $10 billion in annual sales, and offer three different brands of locations, according to John Orr, Workbrain's VP of industry solutions.

In a blog post on this topic, Gregory Flessas of software maker ScheduleSoft said, "All of the factors affecting retail are starting to affect what used to be traditionally unionized static environments where the excess cost of not scheduling employees to customer orders is the cost wedge that makes U.S. vendors noncompetitive." Meanwhile, Nikki Baird of Retail Systems Alert Group blogged thusly: "Automated scheduling can be a good thing for everyone -- and it's not the technology that makes it so, it's how people use it. It can provide an opportunity to remove manager bias from scheduling -- no more weighting heavily for his or her favorites. And it gives employees an opportunity to express the hours they would like to work -- something that was very difficult to manage without some sort of automation."

Read more from these and other posts here, and watch for more coverage of this dynamic field in the near future from InformationWeek.com. Join the conversation: Let us know if your company is evaluating or has begun to use these powerful new applications.