Applying the labor matrix to your forecast and scheduling will allow you to schedule appropriately based on your forecasted sales. The terms you will see with CrunchTime and TeamworX are “ideal” which is the term they use to describe what you should schedule based on your forecast, and “earned” which is the term they use to describe the optimal hours used based on the actual sales from that day (similar to “optimal” with the Hotschedules system).
**There is one key difference: if you have hours in a specific position that you do not schedule, you will not see them in the earned hours. For example, if you are allowed to schedule dish hours but instead you schedule extra cook hours and no dish, you will lose those dish hours, they will not be allocated to the cook hours.**
In order to create, apply and use the labor matrix properly to aide in scheduling correctly to fit your forecast, there are a few parts to the process:
- Forecasting Both Sales and Covers
- Apply the Matrix and Populating the Ideal Hours
- Using Ideal Scheduling in TeamworX
- Variance Hours by Position Report
- Labor Productivity Report
- Labor Matrix Rules
Forecasting Both Sales and Covers
As a company we have always done forecasting as a sales forecast. With the CrunchTime system we need to be able to look at these forecasts from the perspective of covers as well, because ideal and earned labor hours are generated based on covers rather than sales. When you begin to forecast your sales, the covers will also auto-populate based on the average of the previous 3 weeks. However, if you adjust your sales forecast at all (See Instructions for Adjusting Sales Forecast) then you will also need to manually adjust the cover count forecast.
In the example below, you need to change both numbers outlined in red. You will notice that as you change the sales number, the guest count number does not change. Remember, that when you click on the “…” button, you can adjust the sales and cover forecasts by percentages (shown by the blue arrow). This will make it easier when forecasting both sales and covers if you increase or decrease by a certain percentage.
Populating Ideal Hours into TeamworX
In order to do this, there are a few steps that must be taken in the correct order to apply the data.
- In order to get the correct data into Teamworx, you will need to take a few extra steps in the Sales Forecasting step first, and be completed BEFORE creating the schedule for the corresponding week. Start by setting your sales forecast. Then you will need to click the follow buttons in the correct order:
- Click the Redistribute Forecasted Totals by Daypart button, you will get this notification:
- Click the Apply Daypart/Revenue Center Forecast Values button
- And finally, click the Save icon in the top right corner.
- You will notice that when you return to the forecast page, you will red numbers in the section below, and therefore the Forecasted Sales by Daypart and the Total Forecasted Sales don’t match. You can adjust the top manually to match what is shown below, however, you can leave the two mismatched with no negative effects, as the number will only be off $1-2 due to rounding.
