July 18, 2017

Case Study: Restaurant Schedule Management

SwipeClock helps restaurant transform schedule management, control expenses, and maintain a dedicated workforce.

Coat and Thai is a contemporary Thai restaurant whose owners are planning to open a second location with hopes of franchising in the future. It struggles with the challenges common to the restaurant industry; service peaks, specialized staff, and high employee turnover.

Overwhelming Workforce Management Challenges

Coat and Thai’s sole manager was the only one doing the hiring, scheduling, and time tracking, creating a bottleneck that soon became an unmanageable burden. She was handling employee time, attendance, and scheduling with a 90’s era punch clock, Excel spreadsheets, and a small dry erase board hung in the kitchen. The business has staff members working from 5:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m., seven days a week, further complicating the logistics of scheduling.

Additional complications included maintaining adequate staffing for every shift, adapting schedules to sudden surges in business, managing schedule requests, tracking employee meal breaks, and keeping skilled chefs and experienced servers from jumping ship to newer restaurants opening in the neighborhood; a sour prospect for any business.

Workforce Management Suite Sweetens the Sour

Coat and Thai concluded that the first order of business was automating employee time and attendance. TimeWorksPlus allows employees to clock in/out from their mobile devices, eliminating the need to crowd the kitchen during critical shift changes, and allowing staff members to merge in and out of shifts with increased efficiency.

Patrons are appreciating better service, and Coat and Thai has put an end to costly guesswork and back-dating when congestion forced staff members to skip clocking in. Mobile clock also permits their head chef to clock in off site when acquiring produce at local farmer’s markets, saving time and reducing time card errors, something both management and employees appreciate.

Reduced Labor Costs

Coat and Thai has seen a decrease in labor costs as a result of incorporating integrated clock in/out features for unpaid meal times and breaks. Before Workforce Management Suite, employees often punched out for a meal and forgot to punch back in, creating problematic back-filling and costly guesswork. With Workforce Management Suite PunchLogic, busy employees are only given logical options when accessing the clock in system to reduce mistakes, gather better records, and expedite payroll.

Filling holes in the schedule has become much easier with the TimeSimplicity Virtual Trade Board. Previously, the manager would circulate shift change requests to the staff, and then re-circulate when options were proposed. Now, employees simply enter requests on the Virtual Trade Board. Managers can rapidly view, monitor and confirm shift request changes online. Once a shift trade is authorized, TimeSimplicity automatically alerts the appropriate associates. Since the transition, the restaurant has rarely been caught shorthanded. Job codes and pre-set requirements make scheduling easy so classifications such as the age requirement to serve alcohol don’t get missed during shift swaps or replacements.

SOLUTION — Workforce Management Suite

• TimeSimplicity for automated restaurant scheduling and mobile coordination.
• TimeWorksPlus for integrated time and attendance tracking.
• Mobile access provides employee access and management control.

The team members love the Virtual Trade Board because it has significantly reduced the time it takes to manage work schedules and submit time cards. Many team members are college students whose schedules change each semester. Configuring schedules to better offer staff flexibility has dramatically improved worker morale and curtailed turnover.

Ready for Expansion

The owners of Coat and Thai are better prepared for projected expansion into new venues and franchising. With a handle on the complexities of crew scheduling, and seamless integration with payroll, owners and management can now focus on service and growth. Custom templates make schedule replication quick and easy, and centralized reporting permits the organization to monitor and adjust to changes while decreasing costly overtime, scheduling conflicts, and peak service emergencies.

Most importantly; associates are happy to participate in the growth of the organization and share their enthusiasm with their increasingly satisfied diners.