SwipeClock helps restaurant transform schedule management, limit expenses, and maintain a dedicated staff.
Coat and Thai is a stylish Thai restaurant whose owners are planning to open a second location with hopes of franchising in the future. It deals with the challenges common to the restaurant industry; service peaks, specialized staff, and high employee turnover.
Overwhelming Workforce Management Challenges
Coat and Thai’s lone manager was the only one doing the hiring, scheduling, and time tracking, creating a bottleneck that soon became an all-consuming 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 team members working from 5:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m., seven days a week, exacerbating the logistics of scheduling.
Additional complications included maintaining adequate staffing for every shift, adapting schedules to sudden surges in business, managing schedule requests, tracking worker meal breaks, and keeping skilled chefs and experienced servers from jumping ship to newer restaurants opening in the neighborhood; a sour prospect for any organization.
Workforce Management Suite Sweetens the Sour
Coat and Thai determined that the first order of business was automating employee time and attendance. TimeWorksPlus allows associates to clock in/out from their mobile devices, eliminating the need to swamp the kitchen during critical shift changes, and allowing staff members to transition in and out of shifts with increased efficiency.
Patrons are experiencing 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 allows 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 reduction in labor costs as a result of incorporating integrated clock in/out features for unpaid meal times and breaks. Before Workforce Management Suite, staff members 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 decrease mistakes, gather better records, and streamline payroll.
Filling holes in the schedule has become much simpler with the TimeSimplicity Virtual Trade Board. Previously, the supervisor would sling change requests to the staff, and then re-circulate when options were proposed. Now, team members simply place requests on the Virtual Trade Board. Managers can rapidly view, monitor and confirm shift request changes online. Once a shift trade is confirmed, TimeSimplicity automatically notifies the appropriate staff members. Since the system implementation, the restaurant has rarely been caught shorthanded. Job codes and pre-set requirements make scheduling simple so classifications such as the age requirement to serve alcohol don’t get overlooked 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 offers employee access and management control.
The employees love the Virtual Trade Board because it has significantly reduced the time it takes to manage work schedules and submit time cards. Many staff members are college students whose schedules change each semester. Configuring schedules to better deliver staff flexibility has greatly improved employee morale and curtailed turnover.
Positioned for Growth
The owners of Coat and Thai are better prepared for projected expansion into new venues and franchising. With a handle on the challenges 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 company to monitor and adapt to changes while decreasing costly overtime, scheduling conflicts, and peak service emergencies.
Most importantly; associates are excited to participate in the growth of the business and share their enthusiasm with their increasingly satisfied customers.
UPGRADE TODAY
SwipeClock offers Workforce Management Suite, the powerful, fully-integrated Workforce Management Suite that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your managers, employees, and business.
Workforce Management Suite includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorks Mobile. Workforce Management Suite is created for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and reduce labor costs.
How much can you save? Check our SwipeClock ROI Calculator.
We can get you up and running with Workforce Management Suite in minutes. Contact us today to book a demo.
