Scheduling Apps For Restaurants
QUESTION FROM: Terry in WV
“Saw this ‘IMPORTANT RESTAURANT HACK!!!!’ [and we adopted it] at my job. We call it: Changing The Destiny.
If it's looking like it's going to be a slow shift we do this:
Step 1. (The earlier the shift the better) You have a small time window in order for it to work send some staff home or start a project that you wanted to do that takes a long time.
Step 2. Watch customers come in.
Bonus tip: if you send home your better guys the busier you'll be.
Double bonus tip: you send staff home and start a project you'll get slammed.
What do you think!? Any similar or better ideas?
AND REMEMBER IF IT'S IN THE INTERNET IT'S GOTTA BE TRUE ;)
LOL!”
HH ANSWER:
Your hack is not a hack. It’s mismanagement.
If you send staff home and then watch guests come in, that’s bad.
The point is not to be busy because you’re understaffed...The point is to offer great guest service for as many guests possible.
It’s about them- not you.
If a manager sends staff home early / at the beginning of a shift (let alone their star performers), they should know that the restaurant would be better off if they sent themselves home.
Google “self-fulfilling prophesy” and remember: if you’re going to error on the side of caution, it’s better to overstaff than to understaff…and if you’re short staffed - you limit the number of available tables. You don’t overwhelm your guests AND your staff. You accomodate the number of guests for whom you can provide the level of service you’ve promised to deliver and they’ve come to expect.
And if you find yourself frequently overstaffed, take a closer look at LW, LM & PY sales and PMIX (as well as local calendars) to better forecast your sales and subsequent staffing levels (preferably 3 weeks at a time / in advance).
Base expectations for the next 2-4weeks on: prev weeks, prev month and same month last year. Consider same direct and indirect impacts on traffic that existed PY and that exist now...like: reservations, local events, school, theatre, holidays, competitions, surrounding retail sales / events, specials / promotions / marketing you ran, coupons issued / redeemed, weather, gas prices (which effect travel), % up or down from PY, etc...
Also note that the numbers of weekends are not identical in some months when comparing them to previous years - that’s important when it comes to both forecasting and budget writing.
There’s a lot of software out there that helps simplify scheduling but before you look at them (or any app to simplify basic operations) make sure you know how to do it without the app. In other words, if you can’t calculate labor hours and create a fiscally responsible schedulke, you’ll never know if the app is a good one or if it’s even working properly.
Remember, the basic concept behind writing an intelligent schedule (whether on paper or on an excel / pages file) is to know the number of people needed for each shift, each person’s hourly rate , their availability and your daily, weekly and monthly Sales per Labor Hour (SPLH) goal.
If you don’t have a SPLH goal, you should calculate your current SPLH and simply try to get it lower and lower. (A decent goal / benchmark or baseline is usually around $45/labor hour).
If you’re new to this, SPLH is calculated by dividing your total sales (be it by day, week or month…and hopefully all 3) by your total labor hours for that given period as follows:
Total Sales Revenue / Total Labor Hours = Sales Per Labor Hour
SPLH will give you a snapshot of how efficiently your business is staffed during that time frame. SPLH should vary from hour to hour, day to day and week to week. The trick is to consider SPLH across multiple time periods so that you can see snapshots of how and when your staffing levels match how busy you are. The key is ensuring that you have just enough staff to keep your customers happy but not so many that you waste money on labor you don’t need (See “self-fulfilling prophesy above).
This is what owners and managers mean when they say they are “optimizing their labor”… Staffing the right people at the right times and why many of us resort to staggered in-times in order to fine tune / maximize efficiency.
Conversely, if you flip the formula, you can calculate the total amount of labor hours needed:
Anticipated Sales / SPLH target = Labor Hours Needed to Schedule (put this LHNS # at the bottom of each day and add up the total number of hours you’ve scheduled to double check your work)
Of course there are those apps that simplify the process but, like inventory, doing this by hand guarantees you or your managemet team will have a better understanding of the business and be better able to predict the ebbs and flows as well as (or even better than) software that relies purely on sales history. Knowing and discussing the multitude of reasons WHY sales are what they are is a helpful exercise that makes it easier to forecast future sales and teaches managers to seek out new ways to take ownership by developing their sense of awareness in all areas.
But here are those apps:
Betterchains
7 Shifts
Shedwool
Schedulefly
Homebase
Hot Schedules
When I Work
Pulse
Orbital Shifts
At most locations, its not that hard to identify the drivers and get a pretty good idea of whats going to happen in your restaurants and relying on an algorithm / app for this specific function only distances a GM from the pulse of their outlet and everything that contributes to that pulse.
Here’s a link to how I like to do it with simple SUM cell Excel(pc) or Numbers(Apple) equations: https://www.hospitalityhelpline.com/labor/2018/3/3/old-school-scheduling
Hope this is helpful,
Josh Sapienza
Ubiquity Group