In many locales, labor laws for the service industry severely limit the number of hours that a non-exempt employee can work.  Hours worked can be limited by the industry, age, job description (position worked), hourly rate, holiday, length of shift, or even the day of the week.  If your business works with service unions, these rules can become even more complicated, requiring that managers spend time tracking breaks and meal periods and indicating whether or not employees wanted to take their break.  Some states and insurance companies perform regular Labor & Industries audits, imposing heavy fines or insurance premium increases for non-compliant businesses.

Careful managers schedule around these frequently changing and complicated rules, ensuring that their business is compliant with all applicable labor regulations.  However, businesses can inadvertently land themselves in hot-water when employees fail to show up, quit, or are terminated for otherwise legitimate reasons.  Inexperienced managers, overburdened by other areas of schedule creation can forget about these rules, which are not core to the “making money” aspect of their business.  Stiff fines and lawsuits are the result of failing to be in compliance.

In uncertain economic times managers must be able to schedule labor correctly in a consistent manner, keep employees happy, and reduce fines imposed by legislative authorities, such as the Department of Labor.  Businesses should seek to use cost-effective computer systems, such as TimeForge, to ensure that proper scheduling techniques are utilized.  Effective scheduling software will be able to schedule meal and break periods, accurately calculate overtime costs, and archive previous schedules for managerial review.

Labor & Industries (L&I) audits are common in some US states (California, Washington, Oregon, and New York are especially common) in restaurant, food-service, retail, construction, and hospitality-related industries.  These audits are performed by the state or by insurance companies to verify that the business has complied with all applicable regulations.  Audits focus on unpaid overtime, minors working too late or too early, break and meal periods that are not properly documented, and other violations.  Rule infractions can be punished with stiff fines and/or insurance premium increases.

Make sure that all employees are aware of the applicable rules for the city, county, and state / province.  Follow federal / national rules (where applicable), corporate rules, and insurance regulations (if applicable).  Where possible, automated scheduling systems should be utilized to enforce these rules reducing the administrative burden placed on managers - allowing management to work on other pressing issues such as training, customer service, and management tasks which cannot be automated by cost-effective technology solutions.

We previously discussed the Wall Stree Journal article about Starbucks recent change in labor scheduling at most of their stores.  The change has been initiated by management to address issues of slower sales in the economy, save on labor costs, and to reduce turnover by providing more hours to (fewer) employees.

It seems that Starbucks baristas and others have written about the changes to the program on the Starbucks Gossip blog.  The first blog post / thread discusses the original WSJ article and its implications on the coffee shops and retail experience.  The second blog post / thread, discusses that a side effect of the new labor system is that baristas are allowed to make bad drinks - in order to save 5 seconds per drink.  That probably isn’t the desired side effect of an improved scheduling system.

Are complicated employee scheduling practices taking up precious time at your business? Are you making the best possible labor schedule? How much turnover is created because of bad, or late, schedules? Did you know that TimeForge can reduce turnover, improve retention and increase profits at your business? Sign up today for a free trial!

According to the Wall Street Journal, the largest coffee retailer, Starbucks, is changing its scheduling system to have fewer employees work longer hours at its various locations.  The goal of the new scheduling program is to reduce labor costs for the chain, while improving sales through customer familiarization with the on duty staff members.

Will the plan work?  It’s very possible.  With smart and accurate labor scheduling, Starbucks should be able to reduce turnover and keep employees happy while lowering their labor costs.  However, if Starbucks begins over scheduling employees, the plan may actually backfire on them — creating higher levels of turnover, decreased profits, and lowering sales.

Are complicated employee scheduling practices taking up precious time at your business? Are you making the best possible labor schedule? How much turnover is created because of bad, or late, schedules? Did you know that TimeForge can reduce turnover, improve retention and increase profits at your business? Sign up today for a free trial!

We just got back from four full days in sunny Houston, TX. We exhibited at the 2008 Southwest Food Expo, hosted by the Texas Restaurant Association. TimeForge occupied booth 1546 right next to the franchise pavilion and we had a great time in Houston! Throughout the show we became friends with many of our neighbors, dined on wonderful food, and spoke to a number of restaurateurs, hotel and retail owners – most need help with employee scheduling.

We really enjoyed spending time with our neighbors from Del Mar College and Ctuit.

• Del Mar is a wonderful establishment, and Chef Mark (heading their program) knows what he’s doing, with years of experience “on the floor”. Anyone looking to enter the hospitality industry – or needing to hire talented graduates – should contact Del Mar College.
• Ctuit is a leading provider of above-store reporting software that integrates with several different kinds of Point of Sale, Accounting / GL, Time and Attendance, and other software packages. Reports are sent to a central location and can be reviewed by corporate, regional, or district level managers. Thanks for demonstrating your product to us!

Next to us was the Franchise Pavilion, and it included reps from Boston’s Pizza Restaurants, Pollo Campero, Which Which, Dunkin Donuts, Baskin Robbins, Huddle House, and Franchise Times. It seemed to be a tough show for finding franchisees, but many of them kept the show very entertaining for us. If they (or their franchisees) need labor scheduling, they’ll know TimeForge can help!

Lance, Mike, and the rest of the Focus POS crew were on site, dressed down in their bright orange brand and ready to help restaurant owners find the right Point of Sale system. Of all of the Point of Sale vendors, Focus POS has one of the most full-featured labor scheduling systems. They understand that employee scheduling is hard - and try to make it easy for operators to build schedules. It was good to see them again.

Gary Peek, president of Intura stopped by and spoke with us about TimeForge and its applicability in international markets. I spent some time in the Intura booth on Tuesday learning about their mapping software and their ability to do sales analytics based on geographical sales locations. Very cool technology!

More TRA Expo highlights coming ….

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

Lubbock, TX – May 28, 2008 – Making a great work schedule week after week is often a painful managerial chore for businesses of all sizes. However, the increased store profits, lower turnover, and improved employee morale make employee scheduling software a worthwhile investment. Many operators in the restaurant, retail, and hospitality industries create labor schedules by hand using pen-and-paper methods that can consume up to seven hours a week in managerial time – an expense of more than $12,000 per year in manager time building and managing the labor schedule! Operators using spreadsheets still spend at least two hours a week scheduling labor.

Well-chosen software solutions can help operators control labor and increase profits, without incurring great expense. For example, TimeForge, a web-based labor scheduling product tightly controls employee labor costs and reduces turnover by providing a simple-to-use solution for scheduling employees. The TimeForge software program, available at http://www.TimeForge.com, ensures that managers spend more time “on the floor” and less time in the back office scheduling employees.

The most recent version, released on May 27, 2008 includes a number of improvements to the software and continues to build on TimeForge’s success as a quick, simple, and affordable scheduling solution for businesses of all sizes. According to Michael, the proprietor of Tiara Cafe in California, “The TimeForge scheduling system has not only increased our efficiency tremendously; decreased the errors in what is normally an error prone environment; it has also saved us ten times what it costs us each month.”

TimeForge turns employee scheduling into an automated task that can be performed in a few minutes every week – improving store profits by thousands of dollars every year for the store. Some advantages of the new TimeForge include:

• TimeForge now includes the ability to track employee tips, which can be entered when an employee clocks out, or later by management!
• Schedules and templates can be organized into departments (similar to folders) to easily differentiate between “Front of House” and “Back of House” schedules.
• New attendance reports are available for supervisors and managers.
• Managers can easily see why an employee cannot be scheduled – regardless if the employee is already scheduled at another location or in a conflicting shift, or if the employee is unavailable.
• Locations / stores / units can be organized into a Corporate Hierarchy so that managers can monitor scheduling practices for groups of locations.
• Many other improvements!

Independent and chain operators alike can benefit from the many time saving and profit improving features of labor scheduling systems such as TimeForge. Get back on the floor today!

About TimeForge
TimeForge 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 with both independent and chain operations in retail, hospitality, and many other industries. For more information about TimeForge, and to sign up for a free trial, visit the website at http://www.TimeForge.com

We recently received a customer testimonial from Michael Freeman, a TimeForge user since early February. Michael is the proprietor of Tiara Cafe, located in California. He had these kind words to say about the use of TimeForge as a labor management tool in his restaurant:

Wonderfully kind words from Michael! Thanks so much!

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

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?

Over the weekend, we began improving some of the internal systems on TimeForge.com to provide our users with an improved labor scheduling experience.

Demand for our simple scheduling system has increased over the past few months, and it was time to invest in more RAM, faster hard disks, and other improvements to ensure that TimeForge is available when you need it. The upgrade should have been a four - six hour outage, but instead spiraled into a twenty-one hour outage. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused, but really hope that you enjoy the new hardware!

All services have been restored to their normal operating conditions.

If you were affected by the outage, and would like some credit for the pain we put you through, please send an email to support@timeforge.com, and we will credit your account for two free days of usage (48-hours).

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?

It’s been one day since the release of TimeForge Version 1.9, which introduced a number of new features such as easy-to-use calendar availability, improved multi-location (multiple unit) scheduling, and many other improvements. And we’re excited to announce that more than 800 businesses have signed up for the most simple and powerful labor scheduling tool on the market: www.TimeForge.com

Although we are obviously excited by the number of TimeForge users, we are more excited about the time savings and cost savings that have been provided to our users. For example:

• On average, managers spend more than 2.64 hours making the schedule, every week with a spreadsheet program such as Excel, by hand, or with an inefficient scheduling system (like most Point of Sale systems).

• On average, managers spend 15 minutes making the schedule, every week using TimeForge.

• On average, managers in retail and hospitality businesses receive an annual salary and benefits package equivalent to more than $62,500. That’s more than $31 per hour.

• TimeForge is directly saving our users more than $59,272 every month! That’s more than $710,000 a year.

Of course, there are dozens of other benefits like reporting, employee notification, reduced employee turnover, less time fragmentation (employees calling your business), etc… which are more difficult to calculate in a direct dollar-to-dollar return on investment (ROI).

We are pleased to announce TimeForge version 1.9 – the easy-to-use employee scheduling program for food-service (restaurant, bar, club), hospitality (hotel, motel), and retail companies.

Thank you to our users who provide priceless feedback about the software can make their lives easier!

This version provides significant enhancements to all TimeForge users, and includes several dozen new and improved features. Some of our time-saving improvements include:

• Many areas of the scheduling system, including the creating schedules from templates, publishing a new schedule, and deleting schedules are significantly faster.

• A new field is available for employees, which allows managers to enter an identifier for tracking the employee (such as an internal employee number).

• Internationalization! TimeForge now works in Canada, the United Kingdom (England), Australia, Ireland, France, Spain, Scottland, and many other countries. The best labor scheduling system from the US is now available to anyone, anywhere. In fact, if you are a multi-location (or multiple unit) operator, with stores in different countries or locales, TimeForge will appropriately manage notifications for the whole team.

• Do you schedule more than one location from within your TimeForge account? The improved scheduling system in version 1.9 will automatically disable employees that are already scheduled to work at other locations. TimeForge already disables employees that are scheduled to work on other conflicting schedules.

• Day parts have been renamed “Work Periods”, which is … simple. More improvements with “Work Periods” and “Day Parts” are coming in Version 2.

• A number of minor bug fixes, improvements to Internet Explorer 6, and other changes.

Of course, we look forward to your ongoing comments about changes to the TimeForge scheduling system.

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 retail business, bar, club, or restaurant.