CASE STUDY: MARKETPLACE GRILL

Transcription

1 CASE STUDY: MARKETPLACE GRILL Challenges Too many logins for technology solutions. Scheduling solution that wasn t easy-to-use and didn t integrate with the POS. Hiring solution that wasn t intuitive and didn t include onboarding or E-Verify. No branded academy for complex curricula by job. Solutions & Benefits HOTSCHEDULES GOHIRE SCHOOX Hiring, onboarding, E-Verify, training, scheduling, and communications all in one place. Easier to make more accurate schedules, reduced overtime scheduling and reduced labor costs. Significantly easier, faster team communications, including those about shift swaps/changes minutes less time to onboard each employee. Academy includes training material, videos and exams with the ability for new hires to train from home.

2 Page 2 EARLY ADOPTER MARKETPLACE CONCEPTS CASHES IN WITH HOTSCHEDULES SOLUTIONS MarketPlace Concepts, parent of MarketPlace Grill and MarketPlace Express, got its start nearly 20 years ago with the intention of creating not just a place to have a good meal, but a place that people could come and enjoy a great experience. Voted Best of the Best in Overall Restaurants in Northwest Arkansas and featured in Paula Deen s Cooking with Paula, MarketPlace offers great food made with fresh ingredients that will please any craving. Customers agree, passing out high marks and raving on Yelp and Google, saying, Our family loved it. We will definitely be back and Excellent place for the family and delicious food. Simply great. Another remarkable feature of MarketPlace Concepts is the group s belief in technology as a means for enabling their managers and staff to be more efficient and better prepared. Leading the technology advocacy at MarketPlace is Vice President of Operations Dave Strong, who noted, Technology is simply a way to help save time for my managers and help point them in the direction of the things they need to be spending time and attention on. In response, MarketPlace has adopted some cool, forward-thinking technologies, including a customer waitlist system tied directly into the point of sale. Rather than having to hand out pagers to those on the wait list, the customer s name is listed on a screen and is highlighted at the top when their table is ready. Additional technology solutions were sought out several years ago to manage the cumbersome task of scheduling hourly team members. We moved away from paper-based scheduling to a software program some years back, Strong noted. That initial employee scheduling solution was better than spreadsheets, but still difficult to manage. Forecasting and analysis information was hard to access, so it was often not used at all. It also didn t provide us with the communications features we so desperately needed. Hello? Is It Me You re Looking For? About five and half years ago, Strong learned about HotSchedules, which offers employee scheduling, forecasting and communications, and decided to give it a try. Andy Wells, GM at MarketPlace Grill in Conway, AR had a lot to say about the transition, I really appreciate the move to HotSchedules because it s so much easier to create an accurate schedule. There are several reports you can run right there within the scheduler to compare your schedule versus your labor budget or your forecasted sales. It s very convenient. Not surprisingly, more accurate scheduling based on sales forecasts translates directly into labor cost savings. Strong confirmed, saying, In fact, over the last five years while we ve been using

3 Page 3 HotSchedules, our labor costs have definitely gone down. I m confident it s a result of the analytics that HotSchedules provides us. HotSchedules helps MarketPlace to further reduce the costs associated with overtime scheduling and early clock-ins. Wells confirmed, Since using HotSchedules we have drastically cut down on the amount of overtime each week. I really press the managers to make sure they don t schedule it, and it s a lot easier to track now that we use HotSchedules. Strong added, Because HotSchedules communicates with our Aloha POS system, Aloha can restrict early clock-ins without us having to enter the schedule data manually. It s extremely helpful and definitely keeps our labor costs from creeping up. When we transitioned to HotSchedules, it changed everything. HotSchedules messaging system is a quick and easy way to get the word out and get your shift covered fast. - Brittney Hicks Manager - Conway, AR Is Anybody Out There? Perhaps the greatest gains HotSchedules has provided the MarketPlace team is through mobile communication and access. Managers can use the tool to send broadcast messages to the entire team, as well as text or team members about the schedule or any other important information. In addition, team members can easily request shift swaps or releases and communicate their request with one click on the app. Strong agreed, HotSchedules as a communication tool really helped us. Before HotSchedules, we would write the schedule and post it in the restaurants, and the staff would have to come to the restaurant to get their schedule. If they wanted to change anything, it was all a manual process. These manual processes and inability to easily communicate affected not only managers negatively, but also team members. The transition to HotSchedules affected every level of the organization in a positive way. Brittney Hicks, long time veteran of MarketPlace who was originally hired as a server and was recently promoted to manager, commented, When I first started at MarketPlace as a server, we used what we called a Grat Book to manage shift changes. To get a shift covered you actually had to come to MarketPlace, sign your name in the book, find someone to work for you that was in the store and then they had to sign. Finally, a manager had to go in and be the third person to sign off on it. You can imagine the confusion, and it was often difficult to find somebody to cover for you, especially if you had a last-minute emergency. When we transitioned to HotSchedules, it changed everything. HotSchedules messaging system is a quick and easy way to get the word out and get your shift covered fast. Wells agreed that his team was thrilled with the move to HotSchedules, saying, The staff loves it. In my restaurant, 95% of my staff is in college because we operate in a college town. They re always on their mobile devices looking at their schedule, probably within minutes of it being posted. They really like the freedom and flexibility it provides. Expanding the Portfolio With such great success from using HotSchedules, Strong and his team decided to look into another product from HotSchedules, Inc. GoHire, the paperless hiring and onboarding solution. Although they had already been using hiring software, the program wasn t very intuitive and lacked the onboarding component that GoHire offered.

4 Page 4 get to the E-Verify portion another process that was previously handled by a separate system with a separate login that s integrated into GoHire as well. Seamlessly integrated within HotSchedules, GoHire is easily accessible inside the HotSchedules platform with one click. That made the decision to transition a snap. Strong confirmed, We had been using an online application system for a number of years and that was a vast improvement over our paper process that we had before; however, when we moved to the GoHire system from HotSchedules, Inc., we got several additional advantages right away. First, my managers are already in HotSchedules every day, so having the hiring system integrated right inside HotSchedules with the same login saves them time and frustration. Plus, GoHire has a really intuitive interface that just makes more sense to the team. The new system also had some features within the hiring module that helped the MarketPlace team identify the best candidates to interview for the open roles. Wells noted, The ranking questions in GoHire have really helped us to pre-screen applicants so the managers don t have to spend time on candidates that don t meet certain qualifications. Getting Onboard Once the decision has been made to hire a candidate, it s simple to begin the onboarding process with that new hire or multiple new hires. Strong said, Once we ve made the hiring decision, it literally takes only the press of a button to start the on-boarding process, again with no additional logins. When we In addition to making the hiring and onboarding process simple and efficient for managers at MarketPlace, the new hires also have an easier time with the on-boarding process. Hicks shared her experience, Whenever I hire somebody I will send them the link to do the on-boarding where they can complete all their paperwork online. I think it has been very convenient for our new hires to be able to fill out their online paperwork at home and it makes the whole process very professional. Over the last five years while we ve been using HotSchedules, our labor costs have definitely gone down. I m confident it s a result of the analytics that HotSchedules provides us. - Dave Strong VP of Operations, Marketplace Concepts Perhaps the most exciting change is the time savings that the online on-boarding process provides to managers at MarketPlace now that managers no longer have to personally walk each new hire through the process. Wells confirmed, In my restaurant alone, we re hiring 70 to 80 new employees a year. When you have to spend 20 to 30 minutes per new hire to manually fill out paperwork with them and make sure that forms like their W-4 are correct, that time adds up. Now we just send them an that provides the instructions and they can do it all themselves. It s phenomenal.

5 Page 5 Workforce Academy With two successful solutions in place from HotSchedules, Inc., Strong and team decided to keep the momentum going, and began taking a look at the social elearning solution from HotSchedules. Schoox allows customers to create their own social elearning academy, tailored to their specific brand and filled with their own or other expertly-produced coursework. Since MarketPlace has a very indepth and personalized training curriculum by job type, they needed an online and mobile-accessible training option that met all their needs. I would highly recommend HotSchedules to anyone who runs a restaurant. Whether they are small independents or corporate chains, anyone could benefit from the options that HotSchedules offers. We re excited about the future with HotSchedules. - Andy Wells General Manager - Conway, AR Strong said, We began using Schoox several months ago, and I was able to get it set up quickly, in spite of the fact that I have various content types that make up 38 courses and 9 curriculums. All of that content is set up in our own MarketPlace Academy. When our staff logs in, they only see our academy and only the content they need to see within that academy. Within the MarketPlace Academy, managers can view the progress of each new hire as they go through the training process. They can see which courses are complete, how much time was spent and how they performed on quizzes and tests. Strong said, Our managers track the progress of each of our trainees. They can see how much time they spent on each page of the material so if somebody is struggling, a manager can just go in and see exactly what the person is doing within the course and give them some real-time, relevant direction. For Strong, however, one of the best parts of adding another HotSchedules, Inc. solution to his portfolio was, again, the single-sign on access to multiple solutions from one platform. He said, One of the biggest challenges in the restaurant industry is that you ve got technology needs in a whole variety of areas. I can t even tell you how many different vendors we have had to deal with to meet those needs. As you can imagine, the more vendors you deal with the more complex things become. That s why we were thrilled when we heard that HotSchedules, Inc. was bringing all of these solutions under one roof. Now, with one username and password, my managers can take care of the schedule, they can take care of online applications, the on-boarding process, and the training system. It really does save my managers time. For Wells, the biggest benefit to Schoox was the mobile access. His primarily millennial age staff has come to expect to get most things easily and quickly from an app on their phone. With Schoox, they can train on the go. Wells said The number one benefit from Schoox has been the ability for my staff to take their training on their mobile device from home or wherever they are. They can build their knowledge about MarketPlace and what it means to be a team member here before they ve even been in the building. Schoox has also helped in creating a consistent training experience. Content can be updated in a snap, and, even though there is a lot to learn, team members can go back and access their coursework again and again should they need to brush up on anything. Strong added, What Schoox has done is make sure that all of our staff are seeing and hearing the same things as they go through their training process. That helps me improve service consistency and provide a better experience for our guests.

6 Page 6 Caring for Customers Aside from having multiple solutions on one singlesign-on platform, an additional advantage to having a single provider for all your technology needs is the ability to call one place to get help or answers to questions. At HotSchedules, Inc., not only do you get great support via the Customer Care team, but real people are available to answer phone calls from anyone in a customer s organization, from corporate to kitchen, seven days a week in English or Spanish. Strong commented, When I ve had to call Customer Care, it really is amazing how quickly I get a human on the phone and quick resolution. Wells added, I ve had several occasions where I ve called Customer Care or reached out via . Especially early on, when we were still learning and I was looking for a setting or using the Proforma and had a question. I m always amazed at the response time. I work restaurant hours, which means late hours and weekends, but the Customer Care team responded quickly even then. One Source for Any Restaurant The MarketPlace team is clearly proud of the dining experience they offer their guests, and they have every right to be. Their locations are warm and inviting, the food is delicious and the service is outstanding. Further, their smart approach to technology is helping support their success. Specifically, the solutions from HotSchedules, Inc. ensure their staff is properly trained, efficiently hired and on-boarded and accurately scheduled. It makes the lives of staff and management easier by aiding communications, providing shift-swap flexibility, reducing labor costs and providing many solutions via one, single-sign-on platform. Wells confirmed, I would highly recommend HotSchedules to anyone who runs a restaurant. Whether they are small independents or corporate chains, anyone could benefit from the options that they offer. We re excited about the future with HotSchedules, Inc.. Questions? Call us at or visit HotSchedules.com JOBSABI SCHOOX HOTSCHEDULES DIGITAL LOGBOOK MANAGER S RED BOOK MACROMATIX This case study is for informational purposes only. HotSchedules makes no warranties, express or implied, in this case study. Reproduction in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of HotSchedules is strictly forbidden HotSchedules. All rights reserved.