But that doesn’t mean that auto supply store managers can get sloppy about employee scheduling and attendance monitoring. In fact, dealing with an uptick in business in a downturn makes auto parts supply employee scheduling and attendance monitoring even trickier—you need to schedule enough employees to handle your customers, without over-staffing or watching your profits leach into unnecessary overtime. Without careful management, relatively small successes can lead to large failures. 

Even in more normal times, auto parts and supply employee scheduling and attendance monitoring can be a headache. The manager building the schedule has to consider employee abilities/skills, anticipated sales volume, employee availability, individual work requests, accrued PTO, labor laws for employees who are minors, overtime, and overall labor costs.

Make a mistake with any of these details, and the store can lose sales, employees, or be fined. Managers have to communicate the schedule (and every shift swap or schedule update) to all the employees. They have to keep an eye on late or missed shifts, early clock ins and late clock outs, or buddy time punching.

It’s tedious, it’s time-consuming, and it’s crucial.

These are dizzying times for auto parts and supply store managers. The industry—and key players—seem to be changing on a minute by minute basis. Efficient auto parts employee scheduling and attendance monitoring is essential, but there are plenty of other urgent issues vying for a manager’s attention.

That’s where a powerful employee scheduling and attendance software system like Time Forge comes in.

With TimeForge you can…

• Create a schedule in 30 seconds rather than hours.
• Manage schedules at one or many locations.
• Schedule those with particular skills or the most experience in the high volume time slots.
• Notify employees of upcoming schedules and schedule changes by email or text message – eliminating confusion and missed shifts
• Monitor attendance from a remote location using the web, a cell phone, or even Facebook.
• Stop early clock ins and late clock outs or buddy punching to provide immediate labor cost controls.
• Accurately forecast future scheduling needs and labor costs.
• Save hours every day that can be used to solve pressing problems not untangling scheduling snafus.
• Increase profits by 3-5%.
• And much more…

Read more about TimeForge Scheduling, TimeForge Attendance, and TimeForge Daily Log.

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Training Costs Money Too

All new employees, even experienced hires, must be trained appropriately.  Employees should be trained in the corporate vision, customer service, and the details of their specific job.  Duties that each employee is responsible for performing will need to be demonstrated by a competent manager or trainer, and then must be repeated by the newly hired staff member.  Training entry-level workers can often take more than a week of management time, and properly training salaried managers may occupy several months.  In addition to the management time utilized training employees, new hires must be paid during their training.  Make sure that training is streamlined and hiring practices are refined to reduce the cost associated with hiring.  Consider Internet based tools to assist staff training, where appropriate.

Employees Become Lucrative Assets Over Time

Employees are expected to learn new skills while working, often referred to as “on-the-job training”.  Most work-related skills can be learned on-the-job, including new equipment skills, customer service skills, and business skills.  These new skills are passed to employees through interaction with managers and other employees at the business, and is the foundation of many promotions.  Hourly wage workers can grow into Assistant Managers.  Assistant Managers can climb the ladder to become General Managers.  General Managers become District Managers, or Vice Presidents.  Each employee becomes a trusted asset, and finding a replacement for an employee that leaves the business will always cost more than the direct salary of that employee.  In addition to training costs, there is an obvious and direct cost when employees are absent and customers are not adequately served.

Keep Assets (Employees) in Mind While Scheduling Work

When scheduling employees, managers should remember that employees are assets necessary to help the business grow and profit.  Employees that excel at certain job duties should be scheduled where their talents can improve business profitability.  Employee requests for time off, changes to the work schedule, and holidays should be honored where possible – and the business should establish rules and regulations to facilitate constant communication between employees and managers.

Turnover Is Expensive — Really, Really Expensive

Turnover is not cheap.  Indeed most managers under-estimate its cost and the learning curve of working in a new restaurant.  Approximately 70% of the cost of turnover is the loss of productivity before an employee leaves, as the employee’s attitude toward the business becomes detached and fewer customers are served.  Turnover in most hospitality-related industries (restaurants, bars, clubs, hotels) averages around 100% annually – meaning that a store with 30 employees has hired 30 employees in the last twelve months!  Using a cost of $2,000 per staff member, that is an annual turnover expense of more than $60,000!  Reducing turnover should b e a primary concern for any business.

Internet-based scheduling tools, such as TimeForge, can assist managers when building and maintaining labor schedules.  These tools can allocate labor appropriately for your business, track employee availability and time off, meal and break periods, and alert employees when their scheduling needs are, or are not, met.  Your business will not always be able to cater to your employee’s needs, but constant communication between salaried managers and hourly-wage employees will reduce turnover at your business and preserve the value of your employee assets.  Payroll may be a liability, but employees are business assets.

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Stop using Microsoft Excel, and start communicating with staff!  Profit from employee scheduling!

Read more about the pricing for TimeForge Scheduling

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In many industries including retail, hospitality, food-service, hotels, and manufacturing, salaried management staff are usually several times more expensive than non-salaried staff at the same business. In many cases, one member of the salaried staff can be more expensive than five or six non-salaried staff members. In addition to their hourly-wage, managers are eligible for benefits such as life insurance, health insurance, expensive overtime, or additional perks like free food or discounted merchandise rates.

Schedule Managers to do Management Tasks

Businesses should ensure salaried managers perform managerial tasks while on duty, and leverage non-salaried employees for work-related duties that do not require a manager. Some tasks that managers may be charged with during a regular work day could include performing quality control, placing vendor orders, building employee schedules, training employees, processing payroll, and working with customers. Whatever management does while at work, make sure that it is something that is representative of their cost to the business.

Managers should be able to jump in and work when other non-management staff members do not show up for work or unanticipated spikes in demand require more line workers. This ability implies that the business does a good job of cross training employees, and the business is not overly reliant on any one staff member. However, if it is common practice for managers to mop the floors or clean bathrooms because other staff members do not show up, than a re-evaluation of hiring and staffing practices is recommended.

Managers are routinely asked to create efficient schedules for their business on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. Accurately scheduling the work force several weeks in advance provides employees with a defined work schedule and allows managers to estimate upcoming expenses (payroll is often the largest expense in retail, restaurant, hospitality, and similar industries). During the process of preparing an accurate schedule, managers will check employee availability, review request logs, consider federal/state/local and corporate regulations, update employee work preferences, revise employee capabilities and training, make overtime considerations, ensure minimum work hours all while maintaining budgets and other business requirements. The entire schedule process commonly occupies a manager for 10% of every week, costing the business at least several hundred dollars each week!

Changing the Employee Schedule Uses Manager Time, Which is Expensive

In addition to creating the schedule, managers often change the schedule on a daily basis. Employees may become available (and want more shifts), suddenly be unavailable (illness or termination) and not able to work, or forget when they need to be at work. Shift swapping is also common in many industries and requires a manager to spend time on each trade – employees give up shifts that were assigned to them originally, or pick up shifts that others cannot work. A shift or request log may be used for employee initiated shift trades. Managers cannot monitor theft, interact with customers, train employees, or perform quality control at the business if they are in the back-office working on a labor schedule.

To ensure that management staff time is spent appropriately, use technology tools to perform tasks that can be done by computers. Software tools such as TimeForge improve staff retention, and decrease the amount of time that scheduling labor consumes. TimeForge includes a number of additional tools that will assist managers in time management, including a daily manager log book, payroll processing, and other similar tools.

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• Availability Requests have been upgraded and are now easier to use. Outstanding employee availability requests are presented as part of the schedule making process and employees are constantly informed of any changes to their availability.

• Never accidentally schedule staff before or after closing the store! Open and closing times can be configured while making the schedule, and warnings are displayed when staff are scheduled before the store is open or after the store is closed.

• Employees are automatically notified by text message when management approves a shift swap.

• Export punch-in and punch-out times to payroll for easy processing. TimeForge has partnered with CompuPay, a leading provider of payroll for small-to-medium retailers and restaurants. Hours can be exported to CompuPay with a single click!

• Easily identify which employees need to work in specific stations or sections, and schedule these positions with a single click. No more typing “Section 1” or “Pizza” or “Lane 3” when making schedules!

• In accordance with state and federal laws, each position (or job code) can have multiple pay rates, depending on the time of day. Always make sure that employees are paid appropriately!

• Employees can now search for a shift to pick up, or can pick up any shift that has been given up shift by another employee – if approved by management.

• Support for delivery drivers is now included! Drivers can enter tips and mileage for their shifts directly into the TimeForge Time and Attendance module.

• Support for break and meal periods has been enhanced, and managers can now create specific break and meal periods for each shift when building the labor schedule.

• Decisions about your business that include the weather can now be made directly from TimeForge. TimeForge includes weather forecasts on the “To Do Today” page.

• New reports! New TimeForge reports include summary reports for time and attendance, as well as several new scheduling reports.

• Are employees asking for the ability to print the schedule, or a copy of the request log? A setting inside of TimeForge will allow employees to print their own copy of the schedule, breaks, or requests.

• Does your shift need more information than TimeForge normally provides? You can now enter shift notes directly on to the schedule while building shifts!

• Significant improvements to TimeForge Attendance were made – time and attendance entries can be sorted a number of different ways, and a note can be entered for each attendance entry.

As always, feedback on the new TimeForge functionality is always appreciated!

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So, what’s new in TimeForge? A lot! Some of our recent improvements include:

• Messages about your schedule are available on all of the schedule views (including the daily, weekly detail, and weekly summary views). You can see which “rules” have been broken by your management team while building the schedule, whether the shifts were created by the AutoScheduler or by management.

• Day Parts are now displayed in the schedule (on the day view), and can be used to segment your day into different parts (for instance morning, afternoon, and evening shifts).

• Day Parts are also visible when looking at employee availability. You can quickly see what shifts employees are available to work.

• When editing an availability request, you can click on the day of the week to make an all-day request.

• A new report: On the report page, there is a new 7-day schedule, called “Condensed 7-day schedule, sorted by position.” This new report is a variation of the Condensed 7-day schedule, where all of the employees are grouped by the position / department.

• Templates have been updated to look like the Daily Schedule View, including graphing and different views of the day (sort by position or employee).

• Additional numerous small improvements were made to the software ….

How long does it take to make your labor schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your retail business, restaurant, bar, club, or hotel?

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However, because the article is part of a member-only website, it will only be removed from the general public in a few weeks, and you’ll need to be a member to purchase it. We do suggest becoming a member, but in the meantime, the article is re-published below for your convenience:

TimeForge offers a web-based employee scheduling system for restaurants. We spoke with Anthony Presley, the Founder of TimeForge about his business and some of the potential ways it benefits restaurant operators today.

RR: Paper schedules have worked for a long, long time — why web based labor scheduling?

AP: Because paper schedules are difficult and time consuming. Building a paper schedule requires that the manager building the schedule consider many different factors including employee abilities / skills, anticipated sales, individual work habits, food preparation, employee availability, individual work requests, certifications required for handling alcohol, and overall labor costs. If any one of those factors is incorrect, the establishment can lose sales, personnel, or be fined. It’s a tedious and time-consuming task that few operators enjoy doing.

Web based labor scheduling allows managers to input many of the scheduling factors into an easy to manipulate format, and the software remembers – forever – everything that the managers (or employees) input. If “John” asked for Monday off, and the manager agreed, then John is not available to be scheduled on Monday.

RR: What do employees think of the system?

AP: Employees LOVE the system. We recently began entering data for a client in Connecticut, and as part of our data entry, we setup all of his employees to be able to login into TimeForge. Our setup process can take between 2 and 4 days, and by the time the owner was using TimeForge, his employees had already submitted more than 40 requests for time off, had been receiving daily email and text message alerts about their schedules, and told him that it was “Very Cool!”

RR: The notification aspect of your system seems like a neat feature — talk about this a bit.

AP: Notifications keep employees “in the loop” anytime a schedule is created, a request is approved or denied, or a shift swap is approved by management. More specifically, with TimeForge, employees can input their email address and/or their cell phone numbers to allow TimeForge to contact them. Of course, employees can check the status of upcoming schedules, shift swaps, or request / availability changes at any time by logging into the website.

When schedules are published or modified by management, employees are sent an email with the updated schedule. Employees receive schedule emails on a “rolling” basis – meaning that they receive an email every day, which includes that day’s schedule, and the next several days (up to 30) worth of schedules. Additionally, employees can receive text messages before their shift. These messages go straight to their cell phone, and can be setup by the employee to ring up to 24 hours in advance of the beginning of the shift.

The notifications keep employees informed, which makes them happy, which reduces turnover. A win-win for the business!

RR: So, have you seen the system positively effect employee turnover?

AP: Yes, yes we have. Many of our users have seen a 5% – 8% reduction in turnover after using our system. Why? Because requests are tracked, employee schedule preferences are tracked and both requests and preferences appear on the schedules every time. Employees are notified when they need to work. Schedules can be printed, emailed, and sent via text message. Employees stay happy, because they always know what is going on, and don’t have to wait for management to post the schedule on Sunday night to see who works on Monday morning.

RR: If a restaurant operator says “tell me in 15 seconds why your product is a good idea”, how do you respond?

AP: We have a simple pitch…it is designed to be simple, because our software is simple. The response is always: “Can you make a schedule in 30 seconds? Our software can, which means you can be doing something else with your time.” I don’t know many operators, even with only a few employees, who can build a schedule in 30 seconds.

Once the restaurant operators digests the fact that TimeForge can, in fact, build a complete schedule in 30 seconds…then we start talking about employee notifications, shift swapping, overlapping schedule capabilities (kitchen, dining room, patio, catering, etc.), multiple locations, strength/skill level ranking, multiple position tracking, reduction in turnover, etc.

RR: How much time does a typical owner/manger have to spend with the scheduling system on a weekly basis? And how have you seen that differ from what they experience with their existing scheduling system?

AP: Most of our users are able to pick up the basics of the system within minutes. We have several tutorials, as well as more than 100 FAQ questions and embedded help screens to assist our users.

However, once fully proficient with the software, the typical managerial user can expect to spend about 3 – 5 minutes per day with the software. This time is used to print out the daily schedule, review any employee requests that are outstanding, and approve or deny employee shift swaps. Additionally, when it is time to make the schedule, managers can expect to spend another 5 – 10 minutes creating the schedule for a medium-sized restaurant. When they are happy with the schedule, they just click “Post”, and all of the employees on the schedule can see the schedule. That’s it!

Comparatively, scheduling with excel (or by hand) or a POS system requires that the manager first locate the request book, the availability sheets, the notes that were taken outside of either of those documents, a separate sheet for each individual’s labor costs, and they will need to keep track of several other factors in their head (such as employee skill sets, and min/max hours per employee). Once they’re done (a process which could take between 2 and 6 hours per week), they need to make sure the employees are notified. This probably means going into their email system, copying the schedule, and emailing it to their employees. A lot more work, a lot more than can go wrong.

TimeForge.com

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your business, bar, club, or restaurant.

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Lubbock, TX – October 22, 2007 – Labor is one of two large cost centers in the food-service business, and can account for more than thirty-percent (30%) of the expenses in a well managed restaurant or club. Managers spend hours every week deciding how to schedule their labor force – time that could be spent with guests or managing other aspects of the business. Poorly scheduling the work force can result in severe negative consequences for the business including higher turnover, reduction in morale, and increased payroll expenses. In development for almost three years, the latest version of TimeForge.com provides a quick, simple, and affordable solution for managers to schedule their work force.

According to a recent study performed by TimeForge.com, managers in the restaurant, bar, and club industry spend between one and eight hours every week building their labor schedule. Scheduling employees is a complicated and thankless task, requiring that managers juggle availability sheets, request and manager log books, and sticky notes in addition to memorizing overtime regulations, labor laws, and the staffing needs of the business. With an average salary and benefits package of more than $62,500 per year, managers can cost a restaurant more than $1,000 a month to maintain a basic labor schedule. The latest version of TimeForge.com turns employee scheduling into an automated task that can be performed in a few minutes – saving thousands of dollars every year for the store.

TimeForge.com is an easy-to-use web application that can be accessed remotely by both employees and managers. The software currently assists more than 600 businesses schedule their employees, including many hospitality and food-service establishments such as restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs. However, other companies such as retail centers, health clinics, movie theaters, and realty companies are taking advantage of the easy-to-use and affordable scheduling software. “… I know that it is geared towards restaurants, but we are a real estate company and we love it because it is inexpensive and it is so easy to use.” said Nicole, Managing Administrator for Exit Premier Realty.

The labor scheduling software comes with a number of features designed to make managing a schedule simple:

• Managers can display schedules in list, grid, or graphical formats.
• AutoScheduler™ system builds a complete schedule in seconds.
• Requests and employee availability are stored indefinitely, and automatically appear on the schedule.
• Employees are automatically notified by email and text messages of any posted schedule changes.
• Managers can compare theoretical schedules and actual payroll costs to calculate performance.
• Employees can swap shifts with other qualified employees.
• And much more!

Other users, such as Sherry, a manager at Music Man’s BBQ, enjoy easy employee scheduling with the TimeForge.com AutoScheduler™ system. According to Sherry, “It’s cut my time to make a schedule in half!” The AutoScheduler™ system considers millions of employee combinations based on factors such as availability, labor costs, employee strengths, and overtime regulations. The best schedule available for the business is calculated in seconds, and management can modify it where necessary.

If you manage employees, online labor scheduling software is a worthwhile investment. Properly managing labor saves time and money for the business, and improves the job satisfaction of both employees and managers. For more information about TimeForge.com, and to sign up for a Free Trial, visit the website at http://www.TimeForge.com

About TimeForge.com
TimeForge.com is the premier employee scheduling software, designed to provide fast ROI benefits to the business, and to meet the growing demands of the work force. TimeForge.com is affordable software that works for both independent and chain operations.

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, club, or business.

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