Success Story: CenterTwist Inc.

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1 Customer Success Story: CenterTwist Inc. Page 1 Success Story: CenterTwist Inc. HotSchedules Helps Quick Service Franchisee Group Save X3 in Labor Costs

2 Customer Success Story: CenterTwist Inc. Page 2 Founded in 2001, CenterTwist, Inc. is a franchise group located in Washington and Alaska. They have several different concepts under their umbrella, including 13 Auntie Anne s locations, one Schlotzsky s and most recently, a Cinnabon. They average about 15 employees per location, although that number can vary throughout the year from 10 at the lowest to as many as 20 or 25 during the holiday shopping season. In the quick service restaurant business, success is all about volume, speed and quality of the food. The guest experience is crucial too however short-lived it may be. Steve Bradshaw, District Manager at CenterTwist, Inc. understands how all these pieces come together to create the best quick service experience. He s been with the company for over 20 years and has seen a lot of different methods for managing labor and operations some good, some not so good. What he knows for sure, is that the quick-service restaurant industry has a unique set of needs that other restaurant segments don t necessarily have to deal with. Which is why the company turned to HotSchedules and the HotSchedules Logbook in the summer of 2011, after discovering the products at The National Restaurant Association trade show in Chicago, Ill. Before HotSchedules, we used to have this envelope by our desks and people would request time off that way, Bradshaw explains. Naturally, things would get lost or forgotten, and we would have to make fixes at the last second. They decided to pilot the online employee scheduling tool in one store. They fell in love, rolled out the tool in the other stores and have been with HotSchedules ever since. Their Story In a Snapshot West coast quick service group found structure and savings with HotSchedules employee scheduling software and HotSchedules Logbook. Challenges Creating schedules for peak-seasons took up to six hours. Managers did not have a tool to easily replicate similar schedules. Time-off requests were logged on slips of paper and were lost or forgotten. Lack of visibility for records for regular store deposits. Products HotSchedules HotSchedules Logbook Results X3 savings in labor costs. Better scheduling made it possible to increase minimum wage. Managers now able to easily create more accurate schedules using templates. Labor volume report helps district manager spot and address problems faster. HotSchedules app makes it easy for employees to swap shifts. Logbook helped corporate spot discrepancy in store deposit and win lawsuit.

3 Customer Success Story: CenterTwist Inc. Page 3 If you want to give structure to the people writing the schedules, get HotSchedules, he adds. Anybody struggling with structure can take a template and use that. It has saved us three-fold in labor costs from 2011 to the present-day. Those savings go a long way. In fact, CenterTwist leadership was able to share some of those savings with its employees. X3 savings in labor costs. We made a pretty big decision to move everybody in the company to $11 an hour because we ve saved so much. We wanted to give some of that back to the employees to help with retention, he says. I often tell the managers that we want to run the perfect schedule, and the reason why is because I want to pay people as much as we possibly can. The more efficient we are and the better schedule we have, the more we can pay everybody. Time After Time Savings Better scheduling made it possible to increase minimum wage. As a company philosophy, CenterTwist strives to grant 100 percent of its time-off requests where possible, but shift swaps are still a semi-regular occurrence. Having HotSchedules has cleaned that up and made that real easy for us, says Bradshaw. He adds that the shift swaps are also easier to manage because managers are able to create more accurate schedules from the get-go - which reduces the need for people to need to request a swap in the first place. When employees do need to swap at the last minute because they re sick or have another type of emergency they know all they have to do is hop onto the HotSchedules app. Logbook helped corporate spot discrepancy in store deposit and win lawsuit. When they have to go on HotSchedules to swap, the requests have to be approved by a manager. That deters people from even asking when it s not urgent, which is a huge help. Communicating between employees, managers and across stores is also easier with HotSchedules' Broadcast Messaging function. It streamlines and compacts what you would ve done in a text, he says. It s always nice when people log in to see their schedules and they see some nice positive messages coming up from leadership and management.

4 Customer Success Story: CenterTwist Inc. Page 4 Hotschedules has saved us as much as three points since being implemented in some of our stores. -Steve Bradshaw, District Manager, CenterTwist Inc. Measuring Volume, Mastering Efficiency With multiple stores under his belt, Bradshaw needs to keep a close eye on a lot of moving parts. He s responsible for checking in on the overall operational practices of each store to ensure that they are running smoothly and effectively. He also works directly with corporate leadership to meet budget and sales goals things he believes are easier to manage with the robust reporting available in HotSchedules. Those advanced reports are especially helpful during peak times of the year, when a mall-based QSR can easily quadruple their business volume on a normal weekend day. Bradshaw uses Black Friday as an example. It tends to be the busiest day of the year and they can do as much as 4 times the sales of a regular Saturday. The volume on Black Friday is really unique. So you first want to make sure you ve got enough product and then there s the all important piece of being staffed correctly. Which is where HotSchedules comes in. When you re in the scheduling tool, you can click to bring up a volume graph for any day. It displays the number of people you have on staff throughout the day as a line graph. In the quick-service mall world, their busiest hour all year round is 3 p.m., which is right in the middle of the afternoon. When I look at that report, I should see a nice build-up in staff that goes up like a staircase, then hits a plateau around 3 p.m. Then we should come down. That s how a schedule should look every day. I can click on that little graph and see that sometimes we re making a mistake and we ll have spikes. HotSchedules allows me to easily show that to the managers so I can ask them if they re using the scheduling template. Indeed, a lot goes into trying making a schedule that s going to make sense for that business volume. In fact, this year, Bradshaw and his team spent a solid six hours preparing his Cinnabon franchise for their first Holiday season and Black Friday. But ultimately, Bradshaw and his managers know that the initial hours spent setting up their templates are going to cut the year-over-year schedule creation time into mere minutes. Our Auntie Anne s in Bellevue has been using HotSchedules since 2011 and it took that manager about 10 minutes to write the Black Friday schedule because they already had the template and didn t need to repeat all the initial work like we did at Cinnabon. Next year, we re going to reap benefits at Cinnabon by not having to repeat the same tedious task to schedule Black Friday. Some of the other reports Bradshaw finds particularly useful include the log-in report, the daily scheduling report and the extended scheduling report. All the stores need to have their schedules posted on Thursday, so I specifically like going in on Friday and looking at the schedules individually to make sure it matches our budget projections.

5 Customer Success Story: CenterTwist Inc. Page 5 Everything we use makes us more structured, more organized and more accountable. It would honestly be hard to put a number on how helpful HotSchedules has been, but it s huge. -Steve Bradshaw, District Manager, CenterTwist Inc. Safe Keeping The CenterTwist stores also use Logbook, which lives as a tab inside HotSchedules. The tool does a lot to help managers input shift notes and personnel issues, and track certain tasks like safe deposits. Instead of having a deposit sheet in the store where everyone can see it, now our accountants can log in and see when the manager went to the bank and what date was stamped on the deposit, Bradshaw says. If there s no entry, the accountants can ask the manager why this wasn t entered in. It allows us to control our cash a little bit better. The note-taking capabilities make it easier for managers to track personnel issues as well as general information to help them plan for the future. Managers can put notes in Logbook based on individual performance. We can go in and see that a verbal warning was given to this person about being late, Bradshaw says. Logbook can also be used for end of the night kind of stuff too, particularly during the Holiday season. So for Black Friday, the manager could put in a note that they ran out of lemonade at 8 a.m. so next year we will have those reminders. Trial and an Air-Tight Testimony In addition to all the time and money saved through the scheduling and reporting features, HotSchedules has supported the team in the resolution of several inefficiencies and communication challenges. In one store, we had a shift supervisor who was stealing the deposits and hadn t hit the bank in about a week, Bradshaw says. Because the deposits weren t going in on HotSchedules, that s what triggered our accountant to catch it. We didn t get the money back, but we were allowed to present our time-stamped Logbook entries for store deposits. Those entries helped us win the case. More recently, they won an unemployment case. We were documenting everything in Logbook. In the hearing, it was overwhelming evidence. Bradshaw believes they won that case because they had the proof. Being able to produce those pieces showed that we are a professional organization, a great place to work and that we know what we re doing. Everything we use makes us more structured, more organized and more accountable. It would honestly be hard to put a number on how helpful HotSchedules has been, but it s huge. Call us at Visit HotSchedules.com 2017 HotSchedules. All rights reserved. HotSchedules cannot be responsible for errors in typography or photography. HotSchedules and the HotSchedules logo are registered trademarks of HotSchedules. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks. This case study is for informational purposes only. HotSchedules makes no warranties, express or implied, in this case study.