Archive for May, 2007

Our team at TimeForge.com completed a survey of local hospitality establishments (restaurants, bars, and clubs). We were interested in how many hours of every work week are committed to scheduling employees. Our findings are located can be read from a previous post.

After looking at the numbers, the question quickly becomes … How do the spreadsheets and pen-and-paper methods compare with a simple automated scheduling system, designed specifically for restaurants, bars, and clubs … like www.TimeForge.com?

Restaurant, Bar, and Club managers who make employee schedules using TimeForge.com:

• … Spend between 0.083 and 1 hours, every week, making the schedule.
• … Spend 0.25 hours on average, every week, making the schedule.
• … Spend between 0.21% and 2.50% of their week making the schedule!
• … On average, spend about 0.63% of their week making the employee schedule!

Those of you paying attention to the numbers probably noticed that TimeForge can have a massive impact on your bottom line … On average, TimeForge:

If your manager is making $30,000 every year, that is an annual savings of more than $2,152.

If your manager is making $60,000 every year, that is an annual savings of more than $4,305.

How long does it take to make an employee schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses? TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, or club.

We have wrapped up a survey of various restaurants, bars, and clubs in our area to see how much time is spent on employee scheduling by the management team of each establishment.

The results are interesting and enlightening - and illustrate why an automated employee scheduling system, like www.TimeForge.com, should be utilized by every restaurant, bar, or club.

Averages:

• The average restaurant, bar, or club manager spends 2.64 hours, every week, making an employee schedule. That’s 6.61% of the work week!
• The average restaurant manager, using a spreadsheet, spends 3.14 hours per week on employee scheduling. That’s 7.86% of the work week!
• The average restaurant manager, scheduling with pen-and-paper, spends 2.21 hours every week scheduling employees. That’s 5.52% of the work week!

Restaurant, Bar, and Club managers who make employee schedules using a spreadsheet:

• … Spend between 1 and 8 hours, every week, making the schedule.
• … Spend 3.14 hours on average, every week, making the schedule.
• … Spend between 2.50% and 20% of their time making the schedule. Time that could be spent working with employees, customers, and other aspects of their business!
• … On average, spend almost 8% of their time making the employee schedule!

Restaurant, Bar, and Club managers who make employee schedules using pen-and-paper:

• … Spend between 0.17 and 7 hours, every week, making the schedule.
• … Spend 2.21 hours on average, every week, making the schedule.
• … Spend between 0.42% and 17.50% of their time making the schedule. Time that could be spent working with employees, customers, and other aspects of their business!
• … On average, spend almost 6% of their time making the employee schedule!

How long does it take to make an employee schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses? TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, or club.

Lubbock, TX – May 21, 2007 – TimeForge.com, a scheduling application designed for the food-service industry, was released in February and has been quickly adopted by the hospitality industry. For years, electronic scheduling has been a growing alternative to “pen-and-paper” scheduling, but most electronic systems have been overly complex and cumbersome to use. Employee scheduling is now simple! The TimeForge.com software is easy to use, quick to implement, and provides an effective combination of quality software and extensive features, with monthly programs starting under $10 / month.

Along with the basic ability to quickly and easily create schedules that work for your business (including multi-week or monthly schedules), TimeForge.com includes AutoScheduler™, an automatic scheduling tool developed with leading industry experts. The AutoScheduler™ program simplifies the creation of schedules by accurately balancing employee requests, payroll costs, and staffing requirements. With the click of a mouse, the AutoScheduler™ can create an entire 7-day schedule for your business in under 30 seconds! Blazing fast scheduling combined with industry-leading reports puts you and your managers back where you belong …. on the floor with your customers.

TimeForge.com will automatically alert employees of newly posted schedules and schedule changes on a continual basis. Employees can be notified through the TimeForge.com website, email, or even daily text message alerts. Multiple notifications provide a solid scheduling system that eliminates any confusion about staff responsibilities. TimeForge.com also reduces the amount of time that managers spend on the phone with employees. Employees can log in to their individual TimeForge.com accounts and enter a work request (time off, school schedules, work preferences, etc…); the manager can then approve or deny employee requests at their convenience.

TimeForge.com can save your business time and money, and can reduce confusion and tension between the management and staff.

Sign up for your free trial at www.TimeForge.com today!

About TimeForge.com
TimeForge.com is an employee scheduling application designed for the hospitality and restaurant industries. Currently used by more than 100 restaurants, bars, and clubs from all over the United States, TimeForge.com is designed from the ground-up to simplify the complicated process of employee scheduling, with a single task in mind: to put management back where they belong – on the floor with customers.

As previously mentioned, our team at Resolution Systems has been hard at work developing the latest version of our ground-breaking employee scheduling software, www.TimeForge.com

Version 1.4 went live yesterday (Sunday), with more than two dozen new features and improvements (and a reporting bug which we quickly fixed this morning).

We’re calling this release:

Some notable improvements in the software include:

1. Improved “User Wizard” will streamline your data entry the first time you use TimeForge.com
2. Multiple Managers! Now, your business can have managers for the Back-of-House (BOH) and Front-of-House (FOH), for the bar, for catering, or however you setup your business. Each manager can build their own schedules, and they have access to the other schedules as well!
3. With Multiple Managers …. we now detect schedule conflicts, and warn your managers before they publish the schedule.
4. Many improvements were made to Employee Requests …. including the ability for you and your managers to dictate how early employee requests must be made. IE, if day-off requests should be made at least 3 days before they occur, TimeForge will enforce your business practices.
5. Employee Requests that are approved or denied are now emailed directly to the employee, in addition to appearing on the employee’s own web page.
6. Employees who are scheduled for a shift cannot be double-scheduled into another shift that conflicts. Although our AutoScheduler™ has always done this, our manual scheduling tool now enforces these rules as well, resulting in faster schedule creation and fewer data-entry errors.

Of course, there’s been many under-the-hood improvements and the website and other pages should now load up to twice as fast (this will depend a lot on your own connection to the Internet).

Let us know if you experience any problems / bugs with the latest updates, or if you have any ideas for improvements. We take user-suggested improvements seriously, and are in the habit of handing out years of free service to users who are as excited as we are about TimeForge.com as we are.

How long does it take to make an employee schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses? TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, or club.

Apparently, even the best scheduling tool for the hospitality industry isn’t safe from having software bugs. We try and keep our software bugs to a minimum, but sometimes it just is not possible …

We had a massive update this weekend, adding more than two dozen new features to TimeForge.com. However, our first major bug appears to have been discovered in the reporting section. If you are using Internet Explorer, I apologize, but your reports probably will not be working until some time later today.

We’re trying to get it fixed …. and will notify you as soon as it is fixed.

Update: Problem fixed. Reports now work in every browser we could get our hands on including Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and Safari.

How long does it take to make an employee schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses? TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, or club.

We have been hard at work on the next version of TimeForge.com, version 1.4. Our team is currently in the last stages of testing for the software, which will be live in the next few days. Don’t worry, if you are already an existing TimeForge.com user, there will be no extra charge to use the new features. New users will continue to receive a no-obligation free trial to use the software.

Some of the new features will include:

1. New reporting / graphical charting capabilities.
2. The ability to Approve and Deny requests.
3. Your restaurant, bar, club, or business can have multiple managers, and they can all create their own schedules (or edit schedules for other managers). The back-of-the-house and front-of-the-house can now use the same tool, without stepping on each others toes!
4. The User Wizard has been extended to allow your staff to enter pay-rates and skill levels quickly.
5. Editing schedules has been enhanced with the ability to copy shifts from one day to another, and you can now easily edit shifts.
6. Enhanced error detection ensures that your scheduling team makes fewer mistakes while making schedules.

Our team is already at work on version 1.5, due out by the end of the month (late May). Feel free to send us your comments, concerns, and suggestions. We will certainly see about incorporating your needs into the next release of the TimeForge.com!

Labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses; TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, or club.

Last week, after some feedback from our users, we updated the look-and-feel of the TimeForge.com website to make the site even more Simple to use!

In addition to a new logo, the Free Trial is now easier to locate, and some new graphics have been developed to enhance your viewing experience. Additionally, the prominent “Login Here” will help your staff locate where to go to retrieve their schedules or request the day off.

Labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses; TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective restaurant employee scheduling.

The annual National Restaurant Association (NRA) trade show is coming up, May 19 - 22, at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL. The show is the nation’s largest food show (I believe the second-largest is the Southwest Foodservice Expo, being held in Dallas, June 24 - 26 this year), and we’ve been registered attendee’s for the past three years.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, we won’t be able to show up as attendee’s or exhibitor’s this year. We may, however, be at the more technology-centric FS-TEC in October.

The NRA’s show is an amazing place to learn about the latest and greatest trends in everything regarding food service including technology, time management, management techniques, culinary trends, food safety, cooking, cleaning, marketing, and everything else. You’ll find everyone from huge fortune 500 companies to the small, family-owned company that makes the most exquisite toothpick holders. The latest list of exhibitors can always be found online.

We have always enjoyed the training and learning sessions that are offered free of charge to all attendees. It’s fun to sit in between the CTO of a huge multi-national fast-food restaurant company, and the 3rd generation owner of a single-unit mom-and-pop Italian restaurant, and see what type of perspective they can offer on any given topic.

If you get a chance, the NRA show is definitely worth attending. If you don’t get the chance, make sure to visit the Southwest Foodservice Expo in Dallas.

Labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses; TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective restaurant employee scheduling.

Standard Operating Procedures, Employee Training, and Evaluations

Developing written Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) will address all front and back of the house operations. An effective SOP, coupled with a comprehensive employee training program, and an ongoing evaluation program, will show remarkable improvement in not only the environment within your restaurant, but also the profit that your business sees.

Properly trained employees not only contribute to a positive customer experience, they also contribute to cost control by adhering to portion/inventory control procedures, by following other cost containment procedures identified by management. While food costs may be one of the biggest expenses faced by restaurant owners and operators, they can be manageable with effective systems and procedures enforced in the restaurant.

Labor costs could be as much as 30% of your expenses; TimeForge can help streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling.

We’re proud to present the latest version of TimeForge, version 1.3, the most advanced employee scheduling software available for the restaurant and hospitality industry.

After weeks of testing, and more feedback from our valued users (thanks for your feedback!), we have added new features to ensure that TimeForge works the way you, and your management team, work.

Some of the new features include:

• Improved tab interface provides easy navigation around TimeForge.
• Our new Setup Wizard will have you up and running within minutes, streamlining the input of positions, base pay rates, and employee specific information.
• Skill levels can now be applied to shifts and employees to build more accurate schedules that reflect your needs to have experienced staff at certain times. Skill Levels now work with the AutoScheduler™!
• Text message notifications for your staff will now consider your time zone, and will notify employees during appropriate business hours.
• Easily copy existing schedules or templates with one click - create a schedule for next week in a matter of seconds.
• Many of the reports have been improved.

Version 1.4 should be released to our customers (at no extra charge!), with new features, on May 11, 2007. If there are any features you’d like to see in the software, which might help your spend more time “on-the-floor”, and less time sitting in front of a bunch of sticky-notes, please let us know!