Staff scheduling… it’s easy, right? How hard can it possibly be to schedule a few staff members for your business? Well, it depends on the business. Staff scheduling is as unique as the person doing it, and blanket features rarely truly meet the needs of a business – and its people. Offering limited features to our customers was never an option, no matter what Erik and Anthony thought in the beginning…
The first version that Angus produced for us didn’t run very well in a web browser (it was “clunky” and slow), and we were pushing the very limits of what your web browser could do. It loaded the entire week into a big graphical chart, and then you moved things around. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It sent out email messages. Staff knew when to be at work! And, it didn’t crash very often, if you waited a few minutes for it load completely. Version 1 was done.
Daniel (one of our awesome Bolivian developers), took our “Version 1” software and started banging on it. He started doing things that programmers love to do… optimizing the program. He made the pages load faster, the buttons easier to click, and set it up so that it automatically saved changes. It didn’t crash as often. Version 2 was done.
Late one night at Zookini’s (Craig and I stuck around to eat some of the best salad bar in Lubbock), we were talking with the manager about his job. He hated it. When I asked him what he hated, he said that building the schedule sucked. It took hours. He was in some cramped back office and staff members were constantly bothering him. He showed me the paperwork to build the schedule: a spiral notebook, a half-dozen sticky notes (multi-colored!) and printed emails, along with his Excel spreadsheet. Yikes! On the drive home (after Craig filled up my truck with gas again), we discussed that employee scheduling shouldn’t be that hard for managers. It needed to keep them on the floor, not grinding paperwork. It needed to make their life easy.
TimeForge has evolved, and will continue to evolve to encompass the needs of our users. We live and breath our three tenants of software development for our labor management software package:
- Make sure staff members stay in the loop on everything the business does.
- Keep managers happy and on the floor – keep them out of the back office.
- Be flexible, so that the software can change as needed for our customers.
Have you tried TimeForge recently? Sign up for a free trial to see how our amazing software can help run your restaurant, retail, or hospitality business!
Read Part One. Part Three is coming…
