Managing Work vs. Managing Labor
To successfully plan and manage labor, you must first calculate workload at a level of detail that reflects the dynamics and complexity of real world restaurant operations. A workload management strategy accounts for all the diverse factors that affect changes in every day staff workload such as daily guest menu selections, LTO menu impact, differences in table turn times, menu changes, recipe changes, changes in brand standards, seasonal variations, differences in store layouts, marketing programs and changing consumer preferences.
Deterministics applies its restaurant operations engineering and software engineering expertise to offer a comprehensive labor management system that lets you accurately forecast workload requirements and create highly optimized labor schedules. Based on time-measured Labor Recipes, DLS uses the only approach that maximizes throughput and minimizes waste by considering the impact of business patterns and menu mix variations over time and across restaurants.
The Labor Recipe™ Difference
For the same reason that all operators appreciate the importance of standardized food recipes, Deterministics has developed a Labor Recipe methodology that defines labor requirements based on a time study analysis of all activities that consume labor in a restaurant. Whether it's guests arriving at the restaurant, which triggers the need for service staff, or menu item demand at the Saute station, Labor Recipes are used to first calculate the workload for each restaurant position by minute of the day, and then translate this work time into staffing positions for creating labor schedules with a new level of precision and accuracy.
How Labor Recipes work with Deterministics Labor System
A series of time studies performed by our engineering team at multiple locations determines the precise amount of work seconds built into the Labor Recipes. The results of the time studies are loaded into the Deterministics Labor System software, which then uses transaction data exported from the restaurants point-of-sale system to produce daily Opportunity Analysis reports, provide accurate data into the Forecasting and Scheduling Modules, and provide Modeling and Analytics to better foresee impacts of menu and process changes across the chain.
Labor Recipe Development Services
- Provides continuous support for creating and maintaining Labor Recipes.
- Accommodates changes in Labor Recipe standards with an easy to use, web-based toolset.
Opportunity Analysis
- Compares actual staffing to ideal staffing by time of day and position.
- Clearly identifies periods where staffing was not sufficient to cover demand resulting in an opportunity to improve customer service and periods where staffing exceeded demand resulting in wasted labor.
- Reports non-productive time resulting from company policies such as minimum staffing requirements.
- Reports Opportunity Analysis results to all levels of management in easy to understand formats including exception, comparative and historical versions.
Workload Forecasts
- Accurately forecasts workload by quarter hour and position.
- Tracks sales-impacting events such as holidays and severe weather with searchable event log entries.
Menu and Recipe Modeling/Analytics
- Evaluates the impact of anticipated process changes on total work time, throughput time and workstation load.
- Evaluates the impact of planned promotions and limited time offers.
- Predicts impact of planned recipe, menu and process changes on labor needs.
- Evaluates outcome of Labor Recipe changes at the ingredient level (e.g. changing from pre-washed and packaged lettuce to cut and wash in-house).
- Create “0” based financial budgets based on Deterministics’ projections.
Scheduling System Integration
- Evaluate current staffing standards.
- Deterministics Labor System can generate high precision labor requirements for in-house or third party labor scheduling systems.
