Predictive Entitlement
Let predictive entitlement see the future for you and predict when staff uniforms will need replacing.
Predictive Entitlement
Predictive entitlement gives you an insight into uniforms that are due for re-issue in the future.
The portal looks at historical data and projects forward month by month both the quantity and value of replacement uniforms.
This prediction allows you to plan both your re-issues and your budgets going forward.
Buyers are notified which staff in their branch(es) are due for new uniform.
On ordering the new uniform, the portal will automatically populate the re-issue sizes and quantities ready for a quick checkout.
So what happens if predictive entitlement says that the uniform is due for replacement but the uniform being worn is serviceable?
Predictive entitlement does not force the buyer to order, just to check if the uniform is due for replacement.
If the uniform is not replaced, then the buyer will receive another message the next month to check the uniform. So that you do not receive lots of unwanted messages, the buyer has the option to extend the entitlement due date for a garment by 30, 60 or 90 days.
For example, if staff are issued a top coat, but this is rarely worn, you may suspend the re-issue for 90 days or longer. Should you discover that all staff have coats lasting longer than the entitlement period, then we can change the entitlement period from 1 year to 2 years.
Checking re-issue
Deep dive
If you want to know how predictive entitlement works in detail, this is how its done behind the scenes. We will concentrate on entitlement by quantity.
In the wardrobe deep dive section, we learnt that entitlement controls are stored on the wardrobe, e.g. the entitlement quantity, the entitlement period and the entitlement group.
In order to calculate how many garments the staff have been issued, we start with today’s date and look back at the staff history for the entitlement period, which is usually 1 year. If garments have been issued in the last year, then they are totalled and the quantity issued is now known. The quantity issued is then subtracted from the entitlement quantity and the balance is the amount of uniform remaining to be issued today.
So we can see how to calculate entitlement today, what about predicting the future?
The prediction is now a simple case of moving the entitlement start date from today to a future date. The entitlement period can be considered to be a “bucket of time” going into the past. As we move the time bucket forward, items purchased more than 1 year ago fall out of the time bucket and are not counted towards the quantity issued to the member of staff.
The member of staff is now under their entitlement allowance at that future date.
If we move the time bucket forward 2 months, then more items fall out of the time bucket until we move the time bucket to 12 months in the future when there are no items left in the bucket and the full entitlement is now due for re-issue. This is providing that the entitlement periods on the wardrobe items do not exceed 12 months.
Deeper Dive
So when does the portal refresh entitlement?
Every time you look at a member of staff in the portal, entitlement is updated for that member of staff. This keeps the data you are looking at live and fully up to date.
As you can imagine, updating the entitlement for the 30,000 staff on our portal is a big task, so entitlement updates for TODAY are run overnight.
As predictive entitlement is looking into the future, we run these reports at a month end. The data is time stamped so you can clearly see when the data was refreshed. We would recommend that you create predictive entitlement reports at the beginning of each month.