Case Study: Streamlining Labor and Employee Lifecycle Data at Columbia Hospitality
How Columbia Hospitality is eliminating time consuming data transfers between Toast and Dayforce through orchestration.
This is Part 1 of a series exploring our active pilot with Columbia Hospitality, covering the problem, solution, and onboarding. Future parts will feature initial results and future opportunities to expand this work.
Columbia Hospitality had an inefficiency issue. Every day, their location employees would clock in on Toast POS; and later, that time data had to be manually transferred into Dayforce, their corporate HR software—a process that took hours each cycle. Multiply that across 30+ locations, and the time adds up quickly.
They might have solved this problem the traditional way, by dedicating even more time and resources to directly integrating the two platforms.
Instead, they took the opportunity to solve it in a new way, through ORCA’s orchestration capabilities.
ORCA’s solution allows Columbia Hospitality to not only eliminate the redundant and inefficient process of manually moving employee hours from Toast to Dayforce; but simultaneously lays the groundwork for countless future enrichments to their tech stack.
Columbia Hospitality’s VP of Technology Nancy Wolff says:
"We launched this initiative to elevate our F&B operations through smarter system integration and more strategic use of data. ORCA stood out as the right partner because of their deep F&B expertise and focused approach, helping us unlock meaningful opportunities today while positioning us for long-term growth and innovation."
The Problem
Columbia Hospitality had an inefficiency issue. Employees clocked in on Toast POS, and later, their time entries had to be manually transferred into Dayforce by management. Hours spent reconciling data, on a weekly basis, per location and occasionally at the corporate level, added up to a clear opportunity to improve.
On top of the headache of the manual workaround, the data being logged also suffered from inaccuracies and inconsistencies. These gaps in the data could impact employee payroll and lead to even more time reconciling to fix those issues later.
The common solution—to connect Dayforce and Toast through point-to-point integration—would cost significant time and resources, and result in a lengthy process of setup, debugging, and maintenance.
Columbia required a solution that not only connected the two systems, but ensured that the data was being recorded accurately and promptly, so their team could be paid consistently, appropriately, and on-time.
ORCA’s Solution
Through orchestration, ORCA achieved Columbia’s initial goals. After onboarding Columbia, Toast POS, and Dayforce to the connectivity layer, the two apps now communicate seamlessly, with possibilities of future integrations and automations to activate even greater efficiencies down the road.
To illustrate how, let’s expand on the onboarding process and initial setup.
First Steps
Onboarding Columbia Hospitality to the ORCA connectivity layer involved four steps:
Data model alignment: We mapped Toast and Dayforce data structures into ORCA’s canonical model, which let us translate fields between systems quickly without building a custom integration.
Event workflow configuration: We configured ORCA’s event pipeline to recognize key lifecycle events like employee creation, job assignments, and time clock punches, and defined the enrichment rules used to process those events.
Environment validation: We validated API connectivity, tested sample data between systems, and confirmed identifiers (employee IDs, job mappings, locations) lined up so events could reliably correlate across platforms.
Pilot readiness: Once those pieces were validated, ORCA was able to orchestrate the workflow that allows employees to clock in through Toast while automatically delivering payroll-ready data to Dayforce.
Following onboarding, we conducted initial testing, using the Toast web interface to create time entries and verify the end-to-end data transactions.
Next, we moved to a digital version of Toast POS and discovered an additional opportunity to further reduce reporting errors and unnecessary data.
Ultimately, while there is a time and resource commitment needed for startup on the ORCA platform, it is the first and last onboarding Columbia will have to undergo. With Columbia’s data model already aligned, future connections and orchestrations will move rapidly compared to the lengthy process of individual point-to-point integrations.
From Columbia Hospitality’s point of view, VP of Technology Nancy Wolff says:
"From kickoff through launch, the process was seamless and highly collaborative. The ORCA team brought both operational insight and genuine partnership, demonstrating transparency, attention to detail, and a strong customer-first mindset at every stage."
Next Steps
In our next post in the case study, we’ll dig into initial results and learnings—and how this initial pilot has shaped Columbia Hospitality’s perspective on the new possibilities available to them through ORCA.
Interested to see how ORCA’s neutral connectivity platform can synchronize and evolve your tech stack? Reach out to setup a demo here.
