Managing Restaurant Labor Growth

With nearly 13 million employees, America's restaurants are the nation's second-largest private-sector employer and job-creator. According to recently released projections from the National Restaurant Association, restaurants will add approximately 428,000 jobs this summer alone. And this number is expected to grow by more than one million positions within the next decade.

"Restaurant industry job growth has been positive for the first five months of 2010, paving the way for additional growth in summer employment," says Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of the research and knowledge group for the Association.

HotSchedules: HotSchedules' enterprise online scheduling solution helps operators to streamline the scheduling process, while providing employees and managers with effective communication and labor management tools to control time and labor costs. Designed to be implemented in restaurants of all sizes, HotSchedules' solution allows operators to build weekly staff schedules through a template generator, which reduces the time it takes to develop schedules and to manage the influx of shift changes and requests. With advanced sales forecasting, HotSchedules removes the guess work from workforce management by helping operators to easily and more accurately project their targeted labor budget to align with projected sales.

SpeedLine: POS Module: The operations planning suite built into SpeedLine's restaurant POS software accurately forecasts sales to build efficient schedules. An intelligent scheduler recommends ideal labor targets, with a breakdown by day part and order type. Drag-and-drop scheduling provides instant feedback on the costs associated with scheduling decisions, including salaries, payroll taxes, and overhead. The scheduler also integrates with the time clock and can export labor data for fast, accurate payroll.

TimeManagement Corporation: TimeManagement Corporation's TMx is a comprehensive enterprise workforce management solution that includes such features as performance-based scheduling, dynamic labor forecasting, embedded workflow for employee hiring, and the ability to check schedules via the Internet.

A key feature of the TMx solution is its ability to seamlessly integrate with numerous point of sale, property management and payroll systems. One such integration partnership, announced in February 2010, is with Agilysys. As a result of the partnership, Agilysys customers who use the Eatec Solutions inventory and procurement system, InfoGenesis POS system and Visual One PMS, are now able to leverage the TMx solution.

TMx also provides multiple clock devices including the TMx PC Clock which can function on many popular POS systems. With this module, the POS system takes full advantage of all of the features the TMx system can offer including schedule enforcement, approaching overtime reporting, actual vs. scheduled reports and more.

Schedulefly: Schedulefly is a Web-based restaurant staff scheduling & communication application that allows operators to manage staff ability and create schedules online. Once created, operators are able to broadcast schedules and other important messages to staff via e-mail, text message, Facebook, and iGoogle. Additional features include the ability to monitor labor cost forecasts, post and share important documents, post job openings and enable online applications. The solution also allows for immediate access to staff information from anywhere through a mobile website for Web-enabled devices. Employees can also use this tool to trade and request time off. A Fly Notes feature offers operators an electronic option to replace traditional paper manager logbooks. With Schedulefly, there is no software to install or maintain and only one version of the solution is available. Schedulefly is a pay-as-you-go service.

CyberShift Inc.: CyberShift provides secure enterprise solutions that can help hospitality organizations to proactively plan, manage and control their workforce operations, resulting in lower labor costs, reduced compliance risk, higher productivity and decreased employee expenses.ガ‚¬CyberShift's Workforce Management solutions keep pace with customer service demands through automated time and attendance services, contingent labor management, absence management and employee scheduling solutions accessed through a POS terminal, the web, by phone or a variety of mobile devices.

CyberShift's global solutions are available through our industry leading Software-as-a-Service (CyberShift On Demand) delivery model or as an On Premise license, putting the power of choice in the hands of the customer.