Labor Management. NOW Simple.

As operations managers and HR professionals know, managing labor is much more than building staff schedules and managing time and attendance for employees.  There are many other aspects of human resources and labor management, including:

• Talent management
• Tracking staff training and continuing education credits
• Skills tracking and ranking
• Onboarding and hiring processes
• Background verification and skill assessments
• Certifications and qualification tracking
• Raise requests and workflow
• And much more …

In many of these HR areas, we recommend that our users utilize a best of breed solution to ensure the best results for our customers.  For example, Corvirtus is simply the best company around to perform skills assessments in the hospitality and restaurant industries, and we recommend our customers look at Corvirtus for any unmet assessment needs.

However, a few of the these HR areas are easily managed inside of TimeForge’s best-of-breed labor management solution.  Historical raise requests, qualifications, skill tracking and ranking, and others are already available in TimeForge, and more will become available in the near future.

Let’s review employee certifications …

Did you know that TimeForge can track certifications for staff members?  Using TimeForge, you can track any number of certifications (staffing qualifications), testing dates, renewal dates, and test scores.  Each certificate can also include a note about the staff member’s qualification.

Specifics of a Certification / Staff Qualification

TimeForge allows savvy managers to set up certifications which are required before the staff member can be scheduled.  TimeForge can then stop you and your management team from scheduling employees who are not qualified for the job position.

For example, in the state of Texas, a server (waiter) that serves alcohol needs to have taken an alcohol awareness and training course.  Serving alcohol, of any kind, without this certification can land the employee and the responsible manager in jail for the evening.  With a single click inside of TimeForge, managers can ensure that staff are only scheduled if they are qualified to be scheduled.

Add a Certificate, Restrict who can be Scheduled

As an added bonus, TimeForge will notify managers and employees 6 weeks before the certificate expires, so that managers and staff members both know that it’s time to renew the qualification.  The certification reminder also appears inside of the Daily Log.

Use certifications to make your life easy!

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Do you use the TimeForge Daily View while building your schedule?  If you haven’t tried the Daily View, you should give it a try!

The TimeForge Daily View provides immediate insight into your daily labor operations, by providing at-a-glance charts to show when your business is over-staffed, or under-staffed.  You and your management team can use the Daily View to quickly and easily locate staffing issues before they become a problem.

The Daily View now includes two new staffing metrics:  the number of hours, and the number of shifts that each staff member has been scheduled for your current week.

While building the schedule, you can easily identify which staff members need additional shifts, and which staff members are already booked for the week.

Use these staffing metrics to identify which staff member to schedule while building the schedule.

How long does it take to make a schedule for your staff members? It should take less than 5 minutes!  Did you know that TimeForge can reduce labor costs and streamline labor management by effectively scheduling your restaurant, hotel, bar, club, grocery store, or retail business.  Sign up for a trial today!

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The restaurant, retail, and service industries are plagued by fluctuating labor costs, minimum wage rules, and complex overtime regulations. Although overtime and minimum wage regulations affect each state and country in different ways, several areas stand out with complicated overtime rules (such as California and New York labor laws, or many European countries).

TimeForge now understands many of these complex rules, and makes sure to schedule employees in a manner that minimizes overtime when using our AutoScheduler™ tool. When overtime is likely to occur, you and your management team will receive a warnings while making the schedule, and again before you post your schedule. Additionally, TimeForge calculates overtime for all employee shift swaps, and warns your team if the exchange will create overtime for the employee picking up the shift.

How long does it take to make your employee 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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The TimeForge v1.9.2 scheduling system includes a number of new improvements to the scheduling and template systems, including multiple views of the schedule.

Three new views are available to help you (and your management team) build the schedule: Weekly Detail View, Weekly Summary View, and Daily View. The “Daily View” has several visualization options designed to streamline the schedule creation process.

The default “Daily View” chart is a graphical representation of the shifts for the day, sorted by position. Shifts can be edited by clicking directly on the horizontal bar for the shift you want to change.

By clicking on “Sort by Employees“, the graphical chart is rearranged and sorted by employee. Again, to edit a shift, just click on the graphical bar.

If you click on “Shift List“, the graph is replaced by a list of shifts for the day. The shifts are grouped by position (department).
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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As previously mentioned, the team behind the TimeForge employee scheduling software has been working hard on version 1.9.2 of TimeForge – released today, Jan 1, 2008. Happy New Year!

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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Nation’s Restaurant News recently posted a blog worth at least $20 in immediate lost sales, and perhaps several hundred in lost future sales. The picture is reposted here for reference:

We have no idea what occurred to keep the employee away from their customers for 30 minutes. However, based on our experience one of two things happened – and both scenarios can be prevented with a good labor management system such as TimeForge.com

Possible Scenario One: Managers were too busy with other details of the operation and could not oversee the staff and customer interactions. Management could be mopping the floor, paying bills, training new staff, making the schedule, or any number of other tasks. Regardless of the job they were performing, the managers were preoccupied and could not properly manage their store to ensure that customers were being served promptly.

Solution: Regardless of which task occupied the manager’s time, they were not available to manage the store floor. If the store was using TimeForge.com to build their schedule, and manage their labor, management would spend 4 more hours on the floor, not in the back-office making a schedule. A good workforce management solution could give the management team another four (or more!) hours per week “on-the-floor”.

Possible Scenario Two: The manager responsible for the schedule was inexperienced or unable to schedule the workforce correctly. Too many employees may have been scheduled earlier in the day, and too many of those were sent home. Or, perhaps too few were scheduled all day, and those that were scheduled could not keep up with the increased customer demand.

Solution: Inexperienced and experienced managers both benefit from TimeForge.com’s graphical scheduling capabilities, more than 20 labor reports, and many schedule visualization tools. Users of TimeForge.com can quickly see employees that are scheduled or not scheduled, which staff members are “on call” or “extras”, and when employees are available to work.

Regardless of what happened at this restaurant, poor staffing and labor management led to lost sales, and a bad reputation.

Are you ready to go home early? It should take less than 5 minutes to make the employee labor schedule for your business! 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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As announced last week, the next version of TimeForge will include a brand new graphical availability and request tool. We expect to release the tool with version 1.9, after Thanksgiving, and like all of our updates, it will be available to all of our customers at no additional charge.

With the new tool, managers can easily see when employees are available, differentiate between one-time requests and ongoing availability, and can quickly click-and-drag to make new requests. Behind the scene, our proprietary (and powerful) request software continues to allow your management team to make both simple and complex requests with a single mouse-click.

The TimeForge development team was gracious enough to provide us with two preliminary screen shots. Obviously, these are not the final, polished product that will be released next week …. but they should give you an idea of how simple the new employee request and availability tool will be.

As always, feedback from our users is greatly appreciated!

Are you ready to go home early? It should take less than 5 minutes to make the employee labor schedule for your business! 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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