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…
We took Daniel‘s version of the software, and added our own secret sauce. An AutoScheduler™. We worked with a team of professors from some of the best math schools on the planet – we learned about higher level math, artificial intelligence, and sophisticated statistics. We dug in and analyzed employee schedules from beta customers all over the US. We looked at labor costs, availability, time off, training, skills, overtime, and about fifteen other variables. We gave it learning capabilities and made it smart. Then we put TimeForge up for sale on the Internet.
TimeForge did exactly what we wanted it to. Simple employee scheduling. It kept employees in the loop. It gave managers back their lives. Customers started signing up from all over the United States, Canada, Germany, and many European countries. And then, they started calling our offices.
My brother started working in the restaurant industry as a dishwasher in high school before he could even drive. He would wash pots at a local independent Florida restaurant and Dad would pick him up late at night (after a day of hard work at the base) and drive him home, both stinking of old food and cleaning detergents. During college, he worked at several chain restaurants, including Joe’s Crab Shack, Abuelo’s, and On The Border. Over the years, he worked the front of house and the back of house. He was a bartender, a head waiter, and then a trainer. At every job he had, we discussed how the employee scheduling varied, what was different, and more importantly: how it could be improved. Erik and I discussed that any scheduling software needed to be able to be rapidly expanded – it needed to be developed in an agile manner – every restaurant does something different with scheduling. Staff members truly are the secret sauce of restaurants.
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!
