Supercharged scheduling: making the most of integrated or standalone labor schedulers

Nation's Restaurant News,  Oct 8, 2007  

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Why does one restaurant hum along, making schedules with little more than pencil and paper or a spreadsheet, while others see reason to spend tens of thousands on sophisticated labor optimization technology. Selecting what's right for a particular operation means making a clear-eyed assessment of the complexity of labor demands and the goals of the business.

BACK-OFFICE OR BEST OF BREED?

One key decision for restaurants is whether to employ the labor-scheduling functionality built in to many point-of-sale and back-office restaurant management applications or to turn to a third-party, best-of-breed labor-scheduling or workforce optimization application.

For Fazoli's, a Lexington, Ky.-based Italian chain, a history of poorly integrated, standalone applications left the 315-unit chain feeling exposed, so it sought a fully integrated suite that included a strong labor component. "Any time you have humans type in the numbers, there is opportunity for honest or intentional mistakes," says John Hesselbrock, a Fazoli's IT business analyst. "If it's not locked down, managers can change matrices." An integrated system "keeps honest people honest."

Fazoli's selected the Menulink back-office suite, which includes a labor scheduler instead of integrating a best-of-breed scheduler. The company then made some customizations and proposed a template for a labor forecasting model that would help produce schedules based on high-quality sales forecasts. Menulink adapted the forecasting screen and weekly schedule analysis report to help managers shape schedules that account for fixed, non-server tasks as well as guest service positions scheduled according to demand. The same report "looks at each manager's coverage of the day's business" Hesselbrock explains. "If a general manager is scheduled from 11 [a.m.] to 8, that may cover, say, 73 percent of the day's business. If they worked 7[a.m.] to 4, they may be only 36 percent. We want the aces in their places. That was key to getting our money's worth."

Deploying a fully integrated suite, including labor scheduling, also cut 30 minutes from closing by eliminating manual data entry. "All our food and labor is in one big software program" Hesselbrock says. Managers also can check labor use throughout the day. "Thirty minutes times four or five people times hundreds of locations times 365 days a year means tens of thousands of dollars" in savings, he adds. Hesselbrock estimates the chain saved 20 to 25 labor hours a week per restaurant while attaining schedules that "meet the needs of the business, not the people."

Nashville, Tenn.-based 150-plus-unit Logan's Roadhouse sought features and functions that weren't available in the labor scheduler built into its SquirrelOne POS suite. So Logan's chose Time Management's TMx, a Squirrel Systems integration partner.

Logan's was looking for added functionality that included centralization through the Web and the ability to shape schedules according to service level demand calculation. The chain considered the possibility of having ultimately went with TMx because the new functionality already was featured or in development. "Because Time Management and Squirrel are So tightly integrated, the resulting integration is seamless," says Chris Newcomb, senior manager, POS systems. "In the interest of time and cost, we took on some of the integration ourselves"

Logan's also wrote custom automations to speed up nightly closing and reporting, marrying POS and labor-scheduling functionality. The 143 company-operated Logan's locations are beginning an upgrade from TMx version 4 to version 5. Later in the process, Logan's plans to add integration with human resources and roll-out enterprise reporting functions.

"We want to maintain a kickin', upbeat atmosphere" says Newcomb. "We're reliant upon this to schedule staff the right way in order to take care of guests." The company plans to measure the success of the upgrade by tracking the resulting increases in guest traffic and sales and the response from scheduling managers and team members, he says.

MATCHING JOBS TO DEMANDS

Among the more advanced labor-scheduling capabilities is to create algorithms that equate tasks and labor needs with staffing levels--i.e., this many guests equals this many servers. Users and applications vary in how they set up these calculations. T.G.I. Friday's, for example, starts with recipes and measures how they trigger everything from prep to service according to expected volume, while Fazoli's bases service positions on forecasted guest counts. But all must start with a careful measurement of their operations and determination of best practices for each position. Users also require a way to modify the math as new menu items and operational changes are unveiled.

"We're not looking at it as a way to control costs; we're looking at it as a deployment solution" says Jay Johns, vice president of strategic operations for T.G.I. Friday's, a division of Carrollton, Texas-based Carlson Restaurants Worldwide. Friday's rolled out a labor management solution from Deterministics four years ago, which now is in use in 500-plus corporate restaurants, contributing to the chain's strong results since then.