NORWELL, Mass. – Darryl Demos isn't afraid to throw out big numbers. Like 500% ROI, and 33% of the market. Demos is founder and CEO of Demos Solutions and says his clients can expect a five-fold return on their investment in the first two years of using StaffSmart, a browser-based scheduling and resource management solution designed to allow managers to deploy branch staff and resources based on customer and non-customer demands. "We have a promise of 500% ROI on every project we do, generally in about a two-year time frame," Demos says. "We have good proof points behind that. Remember, we're dealing with scale here, and our whole pitch is about productivity, the increases in productivity our customers see." About 40 financial institutions are using StaffSmart, three of them credit unions. Users range in size from an eight-branch institution to giants like Wachovia, and Demos Solutions (www.demossolutions.com) says its software is in use at more than 15,000 branches, representing about 33% of the Top 100 banks' branches in the country. One of the Norwell, Mass.-based company's customers is Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union, a $1.9 billion CU in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. There, the whereabouts of about 205 of the organization's 524 staffers, including 121 tellers at 11 branches, are managed using StaffSmart. Lynn Enkler, branch lead manager at Hudson Valley FCU, says she can't put a number on her credit union's ROI with StaffSmart. "I know we saved salaries in the first year, but now it's become such a part of our system that it's hard to really say dollarwise what it represents," she says. Enkler says using StaffSmart has helped the growing CU "better predict demand, so we can staff according to historical volumes rather than intuition, and we've been able to reallocate to the hour in a lot of cases where and when we should have people to meet members' needs." Demos says his company would like to get legs in the credit union market, too, and says he already can see a difference between that niche and banks. "Credit union branches tend to be more operationally intensive, they have more traffic flow, and their staff can find themselves doing more and more non-member work, so this is a particularly good time for them to reap benefits from a program like this," says Demos. The increased traffic flow is something that 145,000-member Hudson Valley FCU (www.hvfcu.org) can attest to, Enkler says. "We went to a community charter and increased by 11,900 members last year. StaffSmart helped us ensure we have a head count that manages our member volume," Enkler says. "We're not really cutting back on staff, but we're hiring for the right times," she adds. "All our member service people are considered floating, so we shift staff to where they're needed. And we're now hiring for flex times, for instance, where someone might work Monday from 8 to 4:30 and then Tuesday 9:30 to 6 and then on Saturday. "We can more easily give them their schedule a month in advance this way, too, although that doesn't mean there aren't revisions at times." She also says, "Our managers are pretty empowered compared with our competitors, I'm pretty sure. I talk to other SmartStaff users and they usually have a lead person who does the scheduling, but our managers do their own. They talk to each other, but they don't need to go to a manager above them to make coverage decisions. They just use this program to do it themselves." The StaffSmart platform includes more than scheduling. Analytical tools help balance needs vs. available staff, as well as identify who might be the most likely mobile candidate to fill specific needs, and can help financial institutions make crucial strategic decisions, such as where to put a new branch. "For instance, our Arlington Branch is very busy, and we're now in the process of building a new one not far away to draw some of that business to the new site and to provide us an opportunity for growth there, too," Enkler says. Hudson Valley FCU has been using StaffSmart for four years and is likely to upgrade soon to the software's new Version 8.1, Enkler says. She doesn't expect much of a learning curve when that happens. "A core number of employees were trained on the system when we got it, and we have in turn taken all that information and train new managers on the job by using a model and going through the process of creating schedules," she says. "And their help desk has been good, too, although we really haven't had any downtime or a lot of technical difficulties to speak of." That model includes a number of non-member-facing activities, such as servicing ATMs and handling night deposits, along with other administrative functions, says Jennifer Tice, Demos Solutions' product support and services manager. "We're also able to make the unique to every branch, based on what the software knows and keeps learning about how that facility is used," she says. Tice says she has personally trained about 1,000 bank and credit union staffers to use the software, usually in about five hours of hands-on classroom work, and "they do fine, even those who don't have the best computer skills." In the backshop, care and feeding of the in-house solution requires "some analytical background on the part of the system administrators," Tice says, "but except for the very large clients with thousands of branches, you're really dealing with fractional IT resources." [email protected]