About Labor Management

The primary product of the hospitality, gaming, and theme park industries is service. Since service is often consumed by the customer as it is produced, it is often difficult to anticipate and respond to guest needs. Failure to provide timely and satisfactory service can lead to dissatisfied customers who may not return. Providing quality service and the cost of doing so are inextricably related. With this in mind, it is the ability to provide guests with the level of service they expect, at the time they expect it, for the optimum labor cost, that ensures an organization's success. LMS helps you accomplish this by helping you anticipate volume while ensuring the effective and efficient use of your available resources.

The schedule is a primary tool used in determining the best means of meeting guest demand. Moreover, a schedule is, essentially, a purchase order for labor. Once a manager begins to view the schedule from these perspectives, it becomes apparent that the conventional approach of developing a schedule based on pre-determined employee work days is neither cost nor service effective.  The manager must match the schedule to both the pattern of guest demand, maximizing the available work force during peak demand hours, and the organizational needs to control its labor costs and meet the needs of the staff. A good schedule requires careful thought and a degree of creativity. Cross shifts, short shifts, even split shifts, if allowable, are all means for more effectively utilizing labor resources.

Scheduler provides a schedule for all departments based on the Forecasted Hours from the  Weekly Planning Report. Schedules are based on the unique circumstances of the position and on employee preferences and requirements.  Scheduler provides the framework within which managers can quickly edit and complete schedules.

The Labor Management component of LMS is designed to help you:

• Provide the highest quality service possible when it is required.
• Provide the highest quality service possible at the optimum cost.
• Monitor service and costs on a daily basis.

LMS lets you establish labor standards for each labor category in your organization. These labor standards relate work requirements to guest demands. By evaluating these factors, the system helps you schedule resources based on the plan provided by a forecast.

You will generate Weekly Plans that help plan and schedule staff, and Daily Reports that help you assess actual departmental performance. Other reports provide daily summaries that contain both pay period and month-to-date status in terms of dollars and hours. Most importantly, LMS provides exception reports that inform you when a department is not operating within established standards, making it easier for management to follow-up, assess, and resolve problems. The system also generates other reports that helps you evaluate your operation from a number of different perspectives.

Directing/Monitoring

Once the schedule is complete, the manager must make every effort to ensure that guest needs are met, that standards are maintained, and that guests have a satisfactory experience. This is accomplished by ensuring that resources are put to proper use and that employees know exactly what is expected of them to accomplish the task. The manager must control the work flow and guest service in terms of quality and quantity.

What Does Scheduler do?

Scheduler takes all of the information that has been collected for the forecast week and simply produces a first draft schedule for the operation. This draft is not intended to be a final version, but gives the manager a suggested schedule to edit, based on a combination of the following:

• Forecast Volumes - These are produced by the system using the methodologies developed by the administrator and the manager.
• Standards - As discussed in the preceding section, standards are the agreed upon times to complete work at a satisfactory level.
• Operating Parameters - These include opening and closing times, shift times, minimum and maximum shifts as agreed to by managers or contracts.
• Employee Skills - Skills are the positions or jobs the employee is able to perform.  There can be multiple skills assigned to an employee.  These must be done through the proper Human Resource procedures at the property and with the 
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  Administrator.
• Employee Availability - Availability is controlled by the manager.  This refers to times of the day the employee is available to work as well as requests for time off.  

What are Jobs?

Employee jobs are the jobs an employee is qualified and trained to perform. For instance, a waiter in the fine dining room night have the job of "Waiter Fine Dining" and also the job of "Banquet Server." Each employee has a job that is designated as their Home job. The Home job is where the system will first attempt to schedule the employee based on need. The second, third and any additional jobs will be scheduled in the order they appear under the employee profile in the system. Changing the job rank will change the way in which 

What Does Job Rank Mean?

Job rank can be used to further assist the system in assigning the right employee to the right position. 

How Do I Use Availability?

The availability tabs in LMS (Regular Schedules, Availability and Time Off) are used to let the system know when employees are available to be scheduled. It is critical that the manager fills out these sections correctly. If the employee availability does not match any of the shift times that have been set up for the operation, then the system will not schedule the employee.

Flows and Flow Plans

One of the most effective ways to use the system effectively for scheduling is to incorporate the concept of flows and flow plans into the scheduling process.

What are Flows?

Flows are basically the times that customers demand service, whether it is in a restaurant or at the front desk. In order to develop flows, it is necessary to track customer demand for a period of time (usually 6 to 8 weeks minimum) to determine, by half hour, when the customer requirement for service begins. Many electronic POS systems and front desk systems provide this information, however it is important to be aware that often times servers do not open tickets until after the guest has been seated for a period of time.  The flow must record when the need for service first appears.

It is possible to have flows for each day of the week, as well as for particular periods of the day. The  Administrator can guide you thru the process of deciding which method, if any, would be helpful to the operation. If you only have 1 to 4 employees in the operation, it is not beneficial to use flows for staffing purposes.

What do Flows Do?

Flows enable the system to dynamically schedule staff according to the customer demand for service, rather than a fixed shift basis. In other words, the start and end times of shifts could potentially vary by day if the customer demand for business varies. LMS fills this need automatically when scheduling by looking at the peak service times and making sure there is sufficient staff for these peaks and then works to fill all other requirements, while sill adhering to the established work rules for the position. It is important to remember that flows need to be periodically reassessed for accuracy, as business needs change.

For more information, contact the Administrator at the property.

What is a Flow Plan?

Flow plans take the individual daily patterns you have established and allow the system to account for an entire week. These can be in any number of combinations as long as the entire day and week has been accounted for in the flow plan. The flow plan is then attached to the KBI or KBIs for that operation.