A restaurant group

This Glasgow based restaurant group has grown rapidly since opening its first site, and now consists of 11 unique hospitality venues across the city.

Up until 2021, the business was using spreadsheets for almost everything; from building staff rotas, to tracking attendance and monitoring costs across the business. But this approach was resulting in a huge amount of wasted time and operational inefficiencies.

Visibility, usability and affordability

So, in December 2021 the well-known hospitality business turned to Restaurant Growth Consultants, to help them find a workforce management solution that could help them monitor labour costs more accurately, easily fulfil their HR responsibilities and generally save time for all employees and managers.

Visibility of labour and labour management was a key factor. A lot of businesses don’t factor in the obvious uplift when they’re measuring labour. Rotaready offers our client full visibility of contributions in the rota, so they can guarantee that weekly reporting will always give an accurate view of their costs.

The chosen solution also needed to be affordable and easy to use for all employees, regardless of their skill sets.

After carefully reviewing a number of options, the business chose Rotaready as its workforce management partner.

I came across Rotaready through a recommendation and was really impressed overall, it was the perfect fit for my client. It’s an affordable workforce management solution that ticks all the boxes functionally and is suitable for varying skill sets. For the end user it’s accessible on all levels, everyone was able to hit the ground running.

Implementation & integrations

From making the decision to go with Rotaready, all 11 sites were up and running with the rota software and staff fully trained in just over a month.

Implementation was easy and efficient. The Rotaready team were quick off the mark and offered great training and communication. Ultimately Rotaready is easy to roll out, with good after care.

Part of this process was implementing Rotaready with the restaurant group’s other business solutions, including its reservation & payroll systems.

There are so many different bits of software these days, and with that comes a number of considerations. But Rotaready are very willing and able to work with other businesses to meet their technology requirements. That made the integration process very easy. You guys are my steady eddie, a solution and support I can always rely on.

Integrating Rotaready with their reservation system, has given the team visibility of upcoming reservations and covers within Rotaready; enabling them to make more informed scheduling decisions as a result. And the integration between Rotaready and the restaurant group’s payroll solution, means time & attendance data is automatically fed from Rotaready into payroll, ensuring consistently accurate pay runs, without any manual input.

3 favourite features

Since implementing Rotaready, the restaurant business has been using the majority of its features; including rota scheduling, time & attendance, cost control & HR. But everyone has their favourites. Here are the restaurant groups’ favourite things about the rota software and why...

1. Staff profiles

With employment details, pay and holiday histories all captured and stored in one place, staff profiles make all employee information easy to find.

2. Time & attendance

Employees can clock in and out via the Rotaready mobile app. This attendance data is then used to create instantly accurate timesheets, rounded and ready for payroll. Saving time and improving payroll accuracy for the restaurant group.

The accuracy we gained from Rotaready’s time and attendance feature alone, justifies the investment in the rota software.

3. Reporting and cost control

With a combination of Rotaready’s strong reports and cost control, the business has full visibility and control over wage costs and the insight needed to make informed scheduling decisions.

My favourite report within Rotaready is aggregated totals, I look at it every day. You can see performance per site in real-time. I think that’s the best way in our industry to measure labour performance and manage it. It’s a great tool for operators.

Rotaready has provided substantial cost savings to the business, with the ability to monitor labour in real-time from afar. The inclusion of statutory payments on top of basic salary gives my client a true reflection on what gross paid out would be, so that helps them monitor the profitability of the business.

Continuous development

Going forward, Rotaready’s customer success team will continue to work closely with Chris and his restaurant client to ensure they’re leveraging all the benefits of the platform, while feeding back to the engineering team to ensure the product remains as customer-centric as possible.

The Rotaready team have done really well to find the perfect balance when it comes to product development. They take on crucial customer feedback, whilst keeping on a strict development path.