Align Labor to Demand: Cutting Costs Without Sacrificing Service
What if daily staffing decisions could be informed by real-time data?
A troublesome, daily decision that happens in nearly all restaurants is “the cut:” do we send someone home early, and when? It’s often a decision that relies on intuition—but what if it was driven by real-time data?
Inaccurate Forecasting: An Industry Issue
Inaccurate labor forecasting is a widespread and chronic condition in the restaurant industry. It’s one of those inborn challenges that every restaurant, large or small, deals with to varying degrees. An appropriately-staffed restaurant yields good service and an optimal guest experience, typically leading to a profit on the day; an over or understaffed restaurant yields costly problems in the form of too much labor or a poor guest experience.
The trouble lies in the decision to cut, or not to cut. Managers have to make a call in real-time, largely relying on their gut or historical data to haphazardly “predict” what the necessary workforce will be. Does it “feel” like it’s going to be a busy night? What were the numbers on this night last year? It’s not usually the most confident decision—but those are the tools at their disposal.
Now, ORCA can add a new tool to the kit, giving shotcallers the real-time data required to make agile staffing decisions during a shift.
How?
Real-Time Labor Optimization
In ORCA, restaurants can craft a workflow that connects multiple data sources with analytics to directly address this confidence issue. It’s a real-time feedback loop that constantly compares live sales data with scheduled labor costs, providing managers with an up-to-the-minute view of labor cost percentage.
This finally allows managers to make confident data-driven decisions about sending staff home early during slow periods to control costs without jeopardizing service.
Here’s how it works in ORCA:
Trigger: A periodic, time-based event (e.g., “every 30 minutes”) initiates the workflow.
Enrichment Pipeline: The engine queries the POS system for sales data from the last 30 minutes and the labor management system for a list of currently clocked-in employees and their wage rates. A labor analytics service calculates and appends the current labor cost percentage and the variance from target—how much it’s on or off-mark—for that daypart.
Subscribers (Conditional Logic): The enriched data is sent to a manager's dashboard. If the variance from target exceeds a predefined threshold (e.g., +5%) for a sustained period, a conditional subscriber sends an alert to the manager's mobile device, recommending an early clock-out for a specific, non-critical employee.
With this workflow, managers have a solid, data-based foundation to make drawdown decisions over the course of a shift. More conveniently, they don’t have to go to the office to check a computer to do so—they can still be present, on the floor or in the kitchen, receiving a mobile alert only when action is recommended.
If the manager doesn’t receive an alert? Then they know they have the right-sized team for the job.
It’s yet another longstanding industry headache solved through the new connectivity of the tech stack—via ORCA.
