How EMMA will Improve Over the Next Year

We believe that EMMA has the ability to contribute to the cause of improving the lives of working class Americans in it’s own small way by being a tool for the organizations who fight for this cause every day. Our commitment to this cause means that we want to be up front about our plans for the product and show the UFCW community that we will continue to add value to the product.

In this blog post, we outline a few of the major features that will be added to the EMMA product over the course of the next 12 months. The features are in no specific order.

Enhanced Schedules

The enhanced schedules feature will make entering schedules more efficient for end users. The existing schedule dashboard shows users who will be working each day, and an added feature in Enhanced Schedules will show reps a breakdown of the day and which members will be coming onto a shift within the next few hours.

The major components of the Enhanced Schedules feature are:

• Intelligent schedule dashboards

• Ability to enter recurring schedules

• Ability to enter future schedules for upcoming weeks

Mobile Signups

As the members of organized labor are becoming increasingly younger, Locals are finding that using mobile technology as part of their strategy to sign up members is providing them with an advantage.

The mobile signup feature will allow employees to become members by signing an application from their personal smartphone device. Members would simply text a phone number to receive a mobile application link on their phone.

This could be used by locals to either create promotional posters with the phone number, share the phone number in social media posts, or even used by staff at the Local to send mobile apps to people who call in asking for an application to be mailed by them. Replacing mailing applications with mobile applications could result in major savings for locals who send a lot of applications in the mail each month.

• Enable employees to sign applications from their smartphones

• Allow admins to track which sources are generating the most signups using signup campaign codes

• Automatic creation of people records from an applications completed through SMS

Enhanced Grievance Management

While EMMA can already be used to manage grievances to a certain extent, the enhanced grievances feature will add more sophisticated capabilities for managing grievances. These updates will allow UFCW Locals to track all official correspondence between members and employers, to more efficiently audit updates to grievance records, and to run reports and filters on grievance records. The feature will increase the visibility of grievances that need attention and the workload/efficiency of each rep managing grievances.

The major components of the Enhanced Grievances Management feature are:

• Configurable alert rules

• Email integration

• Meetings module (to track meetings about grievances)Personnel module (to track employers people, such as Store Manager, HR Manager, Shift Manager, etc.)

• Grievance change log

Record Management

This feature will focus on admins being able to delete and restore records, easily identify related records, and delegate permissions to other users to be able to delete certain types of records.

The major components of the Record Management feature are:

• Record delete and record restoration

• Set permission levels for different users in the system

• Delete activity log

Notification Center

Our current users of EMMA heavily use Notes and @mentions, which has caused us to want to take Notes and notifications to the next level. This will solve the problem of you missing an in-app notification because you weren’t looking at your computer screen when it popped up. The new notification center will have a notification history which will let you see notifications you have missed, as well as search or filter within the history.

The major components of the Notification Center feature are:

• A notification history that can be filtered, sorted, or searched

• Ability to mute or snooze notifications

• Ability to set reminders on notifications

• More reliable notifications

We hope that this update on the product’s development roadmap is helpful. If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to email me at katie.liesmann@epicom.com.