Category: Case Studies

Operating in the Gulf of Paria between the shores of Venezuela and the island of Trinidad and Tobago, Bridge Control Services (BCS) has remained a cornerstone of the local shipping industry for 17 years. With a fleet consisting of 10 ships and 37 crew members, the marine transportation company specializes in taxiing people to and from major shipping vessels that arrive in Trinidad and Tobago ports. 

For general manager Troy Persad, the role of BCS encompasses much more than just transportation. “When you live on an island that is surrounded by water, [shipping] is an important industry because that’s how we get things like food,” he says. “I know I’m playing a role and supporting those important things, you know?”

CHALLENGE

With rigid pandemic health and safety protocols limiting nearly all stages of operations, BCS management found it difficult to accomplish previously simple tasks such as scheduling and replacing shifts.

“The pandemic is having a negative impact on our manpower planning,” says Persad. “When staff members contract the virus we lose them for 14 days at least and we have to find a replacement for them.”

Dealing with manpower planning limitations like this was even more of a headache considering BCS’ complex scheduling process. Persad schedules two different shift patterns, one a 12-hour pattern and the other a regular 8-hour pattern.

Crafting consistent schedules for both 12-hour and 8-hour groups and managing last-minute changes proved very cumbersome. To make matters even more difficult, Persad and all his coordinators were operating with a completely manual system for both scheduling and attendance. It was up to these on-site coordinators to know who was working when, confirm over the phone between bases, and manually plug the information into spreadsheets.

BCS needed a workforce management platform that automated the whole process. “We need that to ensure that we manage our manpower stringently and monitor it very precisely,” says Persad. “Utilizing the manual system, you have the risk of errors,” says Persad. “In order to circumvent those errors, you have to have various layers of contingency which basically increase the administrative time.”

SOLUTION

BCS knew immediately that Workforce.com would be a perfect fit. “The Workforce.com system was so easy to use and easy to develop. It really was not an imposition,” says Persad regarding the implementation process. 

The new workforce management platform overhauled BCS’ outdated scheduling and attendance processes, making daily life easier for Persad, the coordinators, and all crew members. “I now have a greater understanding of the operations of the company simply by logging onto the [Workforce.com] dashboard,” says Persad.

With staff attendance and scheduling now all streamlined through a single, live platform, coordinators have enhanced abilities to manage formerly complex tasks like last-minute shift replacements, maritime certification tracking, and 12-hour shift planning. 

RESULTS

Together, BCS and Workforce.com are reinventing the logistics of maritime transportation in the Gulf of Paria. Since deploying its new workforce management system, BCS has successfully resolved all its inefficiency issues revolving around pandemic restrictions, shift planning, and attendance tracking. Here are only a few specific ways in which BCS has experienced success with Workforce.com:

Increased staff attendance visibility

On-site coordinators at each of BCS’ three bases now have the capability to see in real-time when and where crew members are working.

“At my fingertips, I actually know who is present and if someone is not present, what’s the reason for their absence,” says Persad. “It takes no time for me to actually get a full view of my whole operation.”

Coordinators also no longer need to manually report attendance, with Workforce.com allowing staff to clock in and out themselves. All attendance data is then automatically compiled into accurate timesheets and reports. 

Greater insight into labor costs

BCS can now actively track their labor costs while scheduling, helping them mitigate issues in overspending. “We know for each shift, what its cost is without having to crunch any numbers on a spreadsheet,” says Persad. 

While building schedules, every shift tile displays wage costs. Persad can use this information to optimally design shifts that suit crew member needs as well as the organization’s budget. “It allows me to make more effective decisions on a timely basis,” he says. 

Simple 12-hour shift building

BCS operates on a 24-hour basis, with three separate teams cycling through six-day rotations. The rotations consist of 24 crew members working four days on and then two days off.

“I go in and build the teams, identify the persons for each team and for each of the shifts, build one shift pattern, choose how long to replicate it, and just click ‘build shifts,’” says Persad. 

With Workforce.com’s intuitive scheduling system, Persad can easily craft the perfect 12-hour shift patterns for every team and save them as templates for continued use.

Analytics on equipment uptime

BCS now has the ability to understand the usage and availability of every vessel in its fleet. Coordinators can update shift tiles on the schedules to indicate which vessels are being used and who the operators are for each shift.

“We can pull a report at the end of the month, showing person X worked on boat one, boat two, or boat three,” says Persad. “This is very important to us in understanding the availability and the uptime of all boats.” 

Tracking of certifications and licenses 

Using Workforce.com’s Qualifications feature, BCS can organize and track vital employee credentials. “[Workforce.com] allows us on a real-time basis to know that all of our crew members have things like their captain’s licenses,” says Persad. 

In the maritime transportation and shipping industry, complying with laws regarding qualifications is essential for safe operating conditions. BCS can automatically schedule according to these qualifications, with Workforce.com flagging any non-compliant shifts that are accidentally scheduled. 

At the end of the day, it’s about the clients and the island community at large for Bridge Control Services. Without their vital transportation services, the shipping industry in Trinidad and Tobago would not be the same. 

“We have a very close relationship with our customers in the industry,” Persad reflects. “Ensuring that they are happy, that’s very important … that’s what keeps me coming to work every day.”

BCS understands its importance to the local economy; this fuels its continued drive for perfection. A major part of this perfection is the curation of proper workforce management practices. With Workforce.com, BCS realizes its workforce management potential, resulting in optimal outcomes for all its stakeholders. 

A minor league baseball affiliate of the San Diego Padres, the Lake Elsinore Storm host nearly 6,000 fans per game and employ roughly 250 people to manage their stadium. 

At the heart of their operation is the fan experience. “We make sure that people are happy at a ballpark. They got to have a hot hotdog, they got to have a cold beer. They got to be able to get in and enjoy the game. It’s relatively simple, but we just have to do it at scale,’ says Shaun Brock, the team’s CEO and general manager. 

But with fan interests undergoing rapid change as of late, the team needed to adapt its workforce management accordingly. 

CHALLENGE

Multiple entities operate under the umbrella that is the Lake Elsinore Storm. Together, fan favorites like the in-stadium taproom, concessions, and retail shops all work together to orchestrate a spectacular fan experience. 

Adapting these different businesses to changing fan preferences and expectations is a big challenge, albeit a necessary one. Management understands the team exists not to only win baseball games, but to entertain and build relationships with the community as well. Because of this, hospitality is becoming an increasingly significant part of the Storm’s business model. 

Unfortunately, management lacked the visibility it needed to fine-tune its workforce according to these changes. As a result, they had little control over tracking and reducing labor costs and they could not predict cash flow accurately. Moreover, they had difficulty in handling shift changes and staff distribution across all five of their stadium businesses.

To successfully overhaul their workforce management system, the Storm needed to be able to staff based on demand, track labor costs, efficiently handle shift replacements, and most importantly, have everything take place in real-time on a single platform.

SOLUTION

The Lake Elsinore Storm partnered with Workforce.com to fulfill all of these needs. Intelligent time and attendance and scheduling capabilities provide the transparency Storm management needs to control labor costs in real time; this helps them avoid unnecessary overtime and pay differentials. Additionally, the introduction of shift replacement and feedback tools empower both managers and employees with the resources they need to automatically backfill vacant shifts more efficiently. Via integration with both the Storm’s payroll and POS systems, Workforce.com gives valuable insight into all aspects of staffing data across the team’s five entities. 

RESULTS

The Lake Elsinore Storm are delivering a positive fan experience like never before. Since optimizing their workforce management systems, they now have improved capability to track day-to-day scheduling and attendance metrics; this allows them to maximize both employee value and fan engagement. Here are some of the specific ways in which Workforce.com has helped the Lake Elsinore Storm:

Reducing labor costs

With live reporting features, management can now actively view costs for various shifts on the schedule. This lets management gauge sales versus labor costs in real time, helping them better understand how to reduce overspending in the moment before it becomes a problem. They can also quickly generate custom BI reports for insight into things like how efficiently labor dollars are being spent. 

“We’re able to go as deep as looking at how much revenue our four top servers are bringing in and how much the labor costs are specific to those four top servers,” says CFO Christine Kavic. “[Workforce.com] really gives us the ability to dive deep into individual revenue and labor costs.”

By setting up specific teams within their system, the Storm can break down labor costs and revenue per week, per team, and per individual. 

“One KPI that we do is the cashier’s turns,” says Brock. “If I have a cashier that’s pushing $1,800 an hour versus another cashier that’s only doing $600 an hour, we can identify that better at the end of their shift. Then we can take that back to Workforce.com and identify, ‘this person needs to be lead.’”

Automatically backfill vacant shifts

Efficient shift swap and replacement tools via the mobile app are streamlining how HR handles backfilling call outs. 

“One of my favorite features is the shift replacement feature where I can see who’s not available for a shift and who is available to pick it up,” says Katie, an HR generalist for the team. “I don’t have to worry about reaching out to people.” 

The shift swap feature allows for employees to trade shifts between themselves; all the manager needs to do is approve the swap with one click. Beyond this, managers can also offer up vacant shifts for employees to claim through a bidding process, all while being able to see the cost variance between the shifts.

Seamless payroll integration

“One of the reasons that Workforce.com definitely stood out to me was the ease of payroll export … I wanted to press a button and it was miraculous,” says a beaming Kavic. 

It is certainly hard not to smile when open API makes integration with payroll software incredibly easy. The Lake Elsinore Storm enjoy a seamless process when exporting approved timesheets into their existing payroll platform, ensuring they compensate staff correctly and on time, every time.

Increased customer engagement

Perhaps most importantly, the Lake Elsinore Storm are experiencing a major boost in sales following their partnership with Workforce.com. 

“Most of our KPIs are up almost double,” says Brock. “In 2019 … every person that was in [the stadium], between parking, ticketing, retail, and food and beverage spent $24 – $25 per person. We’re at $47-$48 per person this year.”

The teamwork between Workforce.com and the Lake Elsinore Storm makes for not only a great atmosphere in the workplace, but in the local community at large. “I really feel like we make a difference, not only to our employees but in our community,” Kavic reflects fervently. “It’s what gets me up in the morning. We put smiles on hundreds of faces and that’s important.”

Many more smiles are sure to come over the years as the Storm continue their journey with Workforce.com.

With 55 testing sites and over 2,000 frontline workers across their entire state, the role COVIDCheck Colorado had in returning local communities back to the workforce cannot be overstated. 

“We started COVIDCheck Colorado as a response to what we saw across the state of Colorado … half a million people out of work, a million kids who could no longer be in school in person,” shared Eric Parrie, CEO of COVIDCheck Colorado.

CHALLENGE

The sheer scope of COVIDCheck Colorado’s operation presented all kinds of logistical hurdles. Administering vaccines and tests to thousands of people takes an enormous amount of backend planning that often gets overlooked. “Solving workforce management was a priority because our workforce was the heart of our entire operation,” said Parrie.

It is critical that emergency response teams are able to perform tasks quickly and respond to changes immediately. COVIDCheck Colorado wanted to ensure its frontline workers had the ability to fully focus on optimizing patient outcomes even in the face of crisis. To do this, management needed to limit the headaches that come from inefficient scheduling and attendance tracking. 

“[Our clinical professionals] couldn’t be worrying about who was going to be showing up on-site and when. They needed a set of tools that would solve that problem before they came into contact with the first of thousands of patients, in a given day,” Parrie explained.

SOLUTION

COVIDCheck Colorado partnered with Workforce.com to streamline different areas of their workforce management to become more agile and productive. By consolidating scheduling, time and attendance, and healthcare compliance into a single cloud-based platform, both managers and employees alike were better able to provide care for thousands of people across Colorado. 

RESULTS

COVIDCheck Colorado administered over 800,000 tests and 300,000 vaccines to local communities, helping them return to regular life. “Without Workforce.com, we wouldn’t have been able to run our vaccine sites,” said Emily Baron, Chief Public Health Officer at COVIDCheck Colorado. “It is an integral part of being able to understand what staffing levels we needed across all of our vaccines sites and how those staffing levels needed to be adjusted over time based on metrics and number of doses we were allocating.” 

Here are some of the processes that Workforce.com made more efficient for COVIDCheck Colorado:

Improving patient outcomes

With improved insight into time and attendance data, COVIDCheck Colorado could optimize their labor costs; this, in turn, allowed them to increase investment into improving patient outcomes. 

“When we optimize our labor costs, we’re able to provide more resources to our sites to run them right from an operational perspective, and test or vaccinate as many people as we can in the community,” says site optimization director Carrasquillo.

These higher testing and vaccination rates are critical for the success of some of COVIDCheck Colorado’s underlying performance indicators like reduced vaccine hesitancy and increased positive word of mouth about vaccination throughout the state.  

Optimizing staff levels across multiple vaccination sites

COVIDCheck Colorado vaccination sites had varying needs in terms of medical staff; deploying the required number of health workers quickly to the locations that needed them was essential.

With a live time clock feed and push notifications, managers could easily see on one platform gaps in staffing across all their sites, allowing them to dispatch qualified workers wherever and whenever they were needed.

Complying with medical requirements

Managers can now apply qualification tags to specific employees, making it easier to assess which employees are medically certified to work in certain roles. 

“Vaccination sites are very particular about the credentials that someone has to have in order to vaccinate,” says Carrasquillo. “If we didn’t have that in Workforce.com, that would put us in a big compliance risk if someone were performing duties that they weren’t actually medically certified to be able to do.” 

The PREP Act grants licensed healthcare professionals, healthcare students and recent medical retirees immunity from liability when administering vaccines. However, the CDC still recommends licensed workers complete comprehensive training. With qualification tags in place, Workforce.com automatically prevents managers from scheduling unqualified workers for shifts that require proper certification. Workforce.com also helps managers keep track of when their employees need to complete important training regiments. 

Faster and paperless timesheet approval

With improved attendance tracking and seamless payroll software integration, timesheet approval became quite simple. This translated to a decrease in time spent on administrative tasks and an increase in employee satisfaction and productivity. 

“Our staff members, our site staff, and our site leadership are all able to actually approve timesheets online. I don’t have to wait for somebody to respond to me in Slack or in an email, they can just go into Workforce.com and approve somebody’s time,” shared Elizabeth Watts, COVIDCheck Colorado’s payroll administrator. 

Centralized data and reporting 

Data-based decision-making is a must for healthcare and emergency response organizations, and it’s vital for them to have access to data and generate reports fast.  With Workforce.com, COVIDCheck Colorado is able to retrieve actionable insights from their own data. Moreover, since all the data is in one place, they are able to avoid doubling up how it is recorded.

“We’re avoiding redundancy … It’s more accessible and efficient for us,” shared Watts. “We don’t have to rely on a paper system. We have everything automated, allowing us to pull a report whenever we want … I’m clicking a button and I can analyze the data right away.” 

The partnership between COVIDCheck Colorado and Workforce.com helped give people their daily lives back. Running an emergency healthcare response operation with many locations required innovative solutions. There needed to be a system in place that enabled teams to efficiently respond to any and all needs. 

Parrie sees a parallel between Workforce.com and emergency healthcare response programs. “The system actually is merciful,” he states. “It’s delivering care and service in a way you may never see and never know or acknowledge. But it’s there doing that work. And that is incredibly powerful.”

1,200 – this is the number of full-time jobs people have found with the help of Streets Team Enterprises. 

“We work with people who are in homeless shelters, we work with people who are actually living in their cars. And so one of our goals is to get them housed,” says Tawny Williams, an HR generalist for Streets Team Enterprises.

Operating in 13 different cities throughout California’s Bay Area, the non-profit’s mission is to help the homeless learn valuable life skills, become employed full-time, and eventually, find housing. To accomplish this, Streets Team Enterprises executes its secondary goal: cleaning polluted Californian city streets. 

Typically operating with around 40 part-time employees, Streets Team Enterprises leads teams of homeless in community cleaning and public works efforts. Employees work between 15-25 hours a week, receiving hard-earned living wages that help them on the path to getting homes of their own. 

For Streets Team Enterprises, their mission is about much more than providing jobs and cleaning local communities. What their program offers is hope – hope for new beginnings and hope for achieving dreams. 

CHALLENGE

To prepare their team members for the job market, Streets Team Enterprises focuses on developing professionalism and technological savvy. To succeed in the modern workforce, learning to use mobile applications is essential. However, doing so does not always come easy for some employees at Streets Team Enterprises.

“One of the biggest things I wanted to work on when I got there was to start holding them accountable,” says Williams. “If we truly want to get them work-ready, they need to learn how to use apps on the phone.”

Honing these skills required an overhaul of Streets Team Enterprises’ time and attendance system. New software like this would not only optimize administrative tasks but it would also serve as a valuable training tool for their employees. 

Streets Team Enterprises recognized that above all else, their new software system needed to be intuitive as they often work with elderly and technologically challenged people. Moreover, high turnover exists due to employees consistently graduating into full-time work. To ensure fast and successful employee onboarding, a simple interface was a must-have. 

On the administrative side of things, Streets Team Enterprises required accurate timesheet recording and exporting capabilities. They also needed a system that made it easy to stay in compliance with strict California break laws. 

SOLUTION

Streets Team Enterprises joined forces with Workforce.com to deliver an effective and  user-friendly mobile app for employees to track their time on. Workforce.com also provides an in depth desktop experience via a dashboard where managers can accurately handle timesheets and compliance across the organization. With their new workforce management system, everything is centrally located on a single cloud-based platform, allowing management to make changes and monitor situations in real-time.

RESULTS

Streets Team Enterprises are making a difference in communities everywhere. Cities are and lives are being changed every day, and it all starts with intuitive and effective workforce management. Here are some of the many areas in which Streets Team Enterprises have experienced success since partnering with Workforce.com:

Quick adoption of the mobile app

Upon rolling out the software, workers were understandably apprehensive. Many of them had never used smartphones before, let alone an app for clocking in and out of work. However, the interface proved easy to navigate, with all employees learning essential functions very quickly. 

“So the app itself, the once you get in, it’s easy. I mean, it literally blows your mind,” says Williams regarding the ease at which employees adopted Workforce.com’s mobile app.  

Efficient and accurate exporting of timesheets

Whenever needed, Streets Team Enterprises can easily export accurate and digestible timesheets. This capability is essential as it provides important information for employees, county governments, and independent auditors. 

“The counties get credit for working with workforce development programs like ours. They need exact time sheets … with Workforce.com, I can print out [employee] timesheets and I can use that information.”

Improved employee engagement and accountability 

“Workforce.com has helped our older fellows build autonomy,” says Williams, reflecting upon the impact the software has on developing employee job readiness and technological skill.

Since adopting the new system, nearly all employees approve their own timesheets accurately and on time, with it all taking place on a single platform that Williams can actively monitor. 

“By the time I log in on Monday, for the most part, all [timesheets] are done,” says a relieved Williams. “I maybe only have one or two that aren’t.”

Better break law compliance

To stay compliant with California break laws, Streets Team Enterprises needs to make sure its workers clock out of their shifts on time. If someone works past five hours in a day, Streets Team Enterprises must pay them a break penalty. The software provides tools like the Notes feature to make compliance even easier. 

“In the state of California, you can do a lunch waiver if you work less than six hours,” says Williams. “So for those employees that I really have to make sure I stay in compliance with, we’ve just had them fill a waiver.”

Williams denotes under certain timesheets when an employee has voluntarily waived their lunch break, democratizing compliance with meticulous California break laws.

With Workforce.com, time-consuming administrative tasks are now automated, allowing Streets Team Enterprises to dedicate more time to the betterment of the Bay Area. Not only are they cleaning the streets, but they are enabling people to pursue their dreams through the development of accountability and autonomy – essential stepping stones on the road to housing and full-time employment.

Ethos Orthodontics has been practicing high-quality orthodontic treatment for over 40 years. With 100 staff and nine locations, they’ve grown to become one of the most reliable practices in their community. While finding a registered specialist can be straightforward, it’s the attention given to the whole experience and commitment to their customers that sets Ethos apart.

CHALLENGE

Like many growing businesses, Ethos Orthodontics is constantly looking for ways to improve and provide better service. For business manager Lisa Hanna, employee scheduling and payroll processing were two of the most labor-intensive and burdensome processes for Ethos and were quickly identified as problems once the organization began to grow.

“From start to finish, wages would take me about three days,” Hanna recalls, “Generally I’d spend a few hours each Sunday printing out and processing timesheets to get them ready for payroll that week.” 

This manual method of managing staff and processing pay was both time-consuming and risky. Prone to consistent error, the potential for timesheets to be recorded inaccurately was extremely high. With Ethos’ outdated system, it was extremely difficult to update schedules once they were made, and even more tedious to communicate any changes made to staff members. 

Ethos Orthodontics needed a single, cloud-based workforce management solution to reduce administrative time spent on scheduling and timesheet recording. Moreover, managers required capabilities to prevent and correct errors in payroll easily, as well as effective tools to manage rosters across multiple locations.

SOLUTION

Workforce.com and Ethos Orthodontics teamed up to eliminate attendance inefficiencies and streamline the scheduling process. In less than a month, Ethos managed to onboard all staff into Workforce.com and run error-free payroll. “We had time clocks, we had payroll, we had scheduling – it was just seamless,” says a beaming Hanna. 

Workforce.com’s scheduling and attendance system generates the timesheets needed for each pay run, including all the correct rates, penalties, and allowances. Management no longer wrestles an outdated scheduling system, now having the ability to quickly and easily create and edit shifts and automatically publish them for all staff to see. Comments on each shift clarify any ambiguity about the work completed, meaning Hanna and other managers don’t need to follow up with employees about wrong or missing information on timesheets. 

RESULTS

Ethos Orthodontics provides care and service to the community now more efficiently than ever before. Here are some of the ways in which Workforce.com has made a major impact on Ethos’ ability to achieve this kind of exceptional care:

Reduced manual data entry

Workforce.com automatically generates accurate timesheets for managers to approve as staff work their schedules. Hanna no longer spends countless hours on Sundays preparing timesheets for payroll – the new system does the work for her. Now, it only takes a few clicks to approve and export timesheets in time for payroll processing, improving administrative productivity and reducing the risk 

Seamless payroll integration

With its open API, Workforce.com integrates directly with Ethos’ payroll and HRIS systems, ensuring quick and accurate pay runs with one click. Timesheets are automatically generated as staff members report their time daily; once the pay period ends, Hanna simply approves and exports the timesheets into the payroll system.

“I don’t chase timesheets anymore,” Hanna remarks. “When it comes to payroll I just do it when I do it, there is no comparison to the old system.”of human error. 

Empowerment via the mobile app

Ethos staff members can view their schedules, clock in, and request shift swaps on the Workforce.com app, keeping everyone on the same page, all day, every day. Employees are also able to rate and review shifts whenever they clock out directly from their phones, helping management better understand what kinds of schedules work and which don’t.  

Improved frontline visibility

With Workforce.com’s platform providing live insights on things like labor costs, attendance, and breaks, Ethos management now has more control over issues impacting frontline staff across all nine of their locations. Moreover, all of the data is centrally located in a cloud-based system, helping Ethos align better as an organization. 

Ethos Orthodontics is committed to delivering the best possible customer experience, and the only way to do this is to have the right people working at the right time. The team at Ethos uses Workforce.com to keep things simple, now never having to worry about inaccurate payroll or overly-complicated scheduling.

“[Workforce.com] understood what we wanted and that made things very easy,” says Hanna. “To them, it seemed really logical what we were looking for, and it happened really quickly. We couldn’t be happier.”

Known for their luxurious recliner seating, in-theatre dining service, and friendly staff, United Cinemas is committed to delivering the quintessential movie-going experience. Originally beginning in 1987, the theater chain has since grown to 10 locations with 300+ staff, all while staying true to their familial roots. “We’re a family-owned business,” says CFO and COO Ivan Maras. “We have that close contact with our customers.”

In spite of their unique connection with customers, there remains rising competition in the entertainment industry that threatens the historic success of traditional cinema. In the wake of the pandemic, the demand for at-home digital entertainment has skyrocketed – and competitors have been delivering. For United Cinemas, prioritizing customer experience is how they stay one step ahead of this competition. 

According to Maras, it is ingrained within human nature to want to interact and share experiences with other people. “We want to get out there, you know? We want to sit in a dark room with other people and laugh with them, cry with them.” It is in the curation of experiences like these where United Cinemas particularly shines.

CHALLENGE

United Cinemas was finding it increasingly difficult to properly deliver on customer experience in the face of fierce digital competition following the pandemic. Location managers and the head office struggled with an information chain plagued with inconsistencies, data re-entry, and labor compliance issues. Each location wrote their schedules down and sent them to the front office where the information was then re-entered into a spreadsheet which was then re-entered once more into the company’s payroll platform. 

“There were just a few too many levels of manual input causing errors… it’s not efficient,” says Maras. “You’d rather spend that extra time reviewing and analyzing payroll trends.” 

To stay ahead of the competition, United Cinemas needed to equip its workforce with the right software to optimize its workflow and productivity, and in turn, improve customer experience. Their chief concerns were compliance with minor labor laws, reduction of manual data entry, and improvement of workforce visibility across all locations. 

SOLUTION

United cinemas chose to adopt and roll out Workforce.com across all 10 of their locations. The cloud-based workforce management platform handled all scheduling and timekeeping, while also accounting for critical aspects of labor compliance. 

“It’s just made everyone’s life a lot easier and it’s made our life at the back end more efficient and more accurate from an accounting point of view,” says Maras. 

The Workforce.com app empowers employees to easily navigate their schedules, time off requests, and clock-ins, helping them focus on their jobs and the customers. Managers have real-time insight and control over scheduling, shift replacements, and attendance, while the back office now has better visibility into both labor costs and the payroll process. 

“[Workforce.com] had features other systems just didn’t have,” says Maras. “The integration features, the robust scheduling, the customized reports. I mean it really pushed us to the next level.”

RESULTS

After partnering with Workforce.com, United Cinemas has experienced a vast improvement in workplace productivity from the head office all the way down to the individual employee level. As a result, their customer experience now far surpasses the rest of the competition. Here are some of the key areas where United Cinemas saw success:

Increased visibility across locations

United Cinema’s head office can easily track how effectively each location manages its workforce via location-specific insights on attendance, labor costs, and schedules. Moreover, Workforce.com’s direct integration with United Cinema’s POS system lets management compare labor costs to average customer transaction value at every location, helping them stay within budget. 

Compliant with labor laws

All the labor compliance issues United Cinemas used to handle manually are now built into their scheduling and attendance systems. Complicated variables like pay differentials and overtime are reflected on the timesheets that Workforce.com automatically generates, allowing United Cinemas to run error-free payroll. 

With many of their staff being minors, United Cinemas can now trust their new system to automatically recognize things like birthdays and overtime and account for them in the scheduling process to stay compliant with specific minor laws. The system alerts management whenever there is a compliance issue made during the scheduling and timesheet approval processes. 

Increased attendees per labor hour

United Cinemas can now use historical sales data to predict box office demand according to factors like time of year, genre of movie, weather, and day of the week. They can then automatically match their staffing levels to the predicted demand.

Smarter scheduling based on demand data like this has eliminated overstaffing, reduced labor costs, and raised productivity. In turn, United Cinemas has seen an increase in their attendees per labor hour. 

Significantly reduced manual data entry

The new system has eliminated data re-entry between systems, saving hours of administrative work a week. Timesheets are automatically generated weekly as employees work their scheduled shifts. Upon managerial approval, timesheets from every location become immediately available for the head office to review. From there, it is a quick and easy process to export all timesheets out of Workforce.com directly into payroll. 

Improved employee engagement

The intuitive nature of the new system has boosted both staff engagement in the workplace. There are now fewer abandoned shifts due to an easy shift replacement tool that allows employees and managers to offer up and claim open shifts, all on a single platform. 

Unavailability and PTO data are synced with the scheduling system, providing managers the information they need to schedule smarter. With both unavailability and leave displayed during the scheduling process, managers no longer accidentally select employees for shifts they cannot show up for.  

Together, United Cinemas and Workforce.com are working together to bring people back to the big screen. An experience unbeatable by even the fastest of network connections or the brightest retina displays, the cinema offers timeless entertainment – and it’s only getting better. United Cinemas has an especially strong affinity for creating a best-in-class experience; doing so is only possible with the right workforce management practices in place.

In a rapidly evolving world-ecosystem, the power of proximity is becoming increasingly relevant. For REEF Parking, the key to achieving this power lies in parking lots. 

“REEF brings the world to your block,” says HRIS manager John Serignese. “Our model is based on proximity. So what used to be a parking lot in an urban area, now contains our ghost kitchens, our healthcare or delivery sites. [Consumers] can then access our services in close proximity to where they are.”

Beginning in Miami as a mobile technology service helping people find parking spaces, the start-up eventually gathered a small portfolio of real estate which they used to launch a variety of ghost kitchens. REEF has since grown to 10,000 locations with 18,000 employees primarily in the US and Canada. Outside of ghost kitchens, they also offer parking, healthcare, last-minute delivery, and energy services.

CHALLENGE

With a high-speed and dynamic business model, REEF prides itself on expanding efficiently and without error. In the past year, the company has rapidly launched numerous ghost kitchens across North America, all the while having to keep up with countless operational, legal, and managerial challenges. 

“Depending on the day of the week, we might be triaging a payroll item where we have to quickly act on the configuration of a new time-off policy,” says Serignese. “As we start up in new markets, we are constantly faced with feedback from our business.”

All of REEF’s locations were conducting scheduling and compliance manually through a complex combination of spreadsheets, texts, and bulletin boards. And with a support team solely based in the U.S., it was difficult to answer user questions and deploy critical configurations in a timely manner.

REEF needed an agile workforce management system that could match the speed at which they were expanding. “We have to act quickly, and the systems that we use, they have to be able to receive a change quickly, and then have it implemented across a large population,” says Serignese. 

To satisfy a wide range of labor compliance laws they faced across all their regions, REEF required a system capable of in-depth configuration and adaptability. Moreover, the solution had to be easy to implement and simple for users to learn. 

SOLUTION

REEF found in Workforce.com a similar drive for creating dynamic solutions. “We’re looking to take over the globe with our business model – Workforce.com allows us to do that,” says Serignese. 

The platform matches the agility of REEF’s rapidly scaling operations, quickly and confidently automating all scheduling, timekeeping, and compliance matters across a wide range of regions and markets. Via an intuitive cloud-based system, employees and executives alike have the visibility and functionality they need to quickly deliver services to consumers in metropolitan areas everywhere.  

“We partnered with Workforce.com because it could be implemented faster than anyone else,” says Serignese. “The tool is scalable in an agile way where we could meet the demands of the business’ growth very quickly.”

RESULTS

With Workforce.com, REEF realized its potential to interconnect its thousands of different business locations in a streamlined fashion. Here are some of the results REEF has experienced since implementing the new platform:

Sped up company expansion and growth

REEF’s success hinges on quickly setting up flexible locations in close proximity to consumers. Doing this properly requires the presence of agile workforce management infrastructure. Workforce.com’s scheduling and timekeeping tools ensure REEF workers are ready and able to work anywhere at any time, fueling the growth of the company from the bottom up. 

Compliance with region-specific labor laws

Workforce.com offers a highly detailed compliance engine capable of handling all kinds of specific labor requirements. It helps REEF account for fair work week legislation in Chicago, while also properly managing complex meal break laws in California. “So far, we haven’t come across a rule we haven’t been able to configure,” says Serignese. 

Increased organizational visibility

REEF now has more oversight and control over variables impacting their highly decentralized business model, “It’s really helped us to align as an organization,” reflects Serignese. 

The company uses Workforce.com’s reporting functionality to see if business is growing from a labor and scheduling standpoint. They can easily track overtime, nonproductive hours worked, and scheduled versus actual hours. All of this information is then summarized into dashboards for the executive team to view.

“Workforce.com solved our disjointed use of systems and manual processes across different business applications,” says Serignese. “By bringing the business into one platform we became more efficient from a data quality standpoint, from a system governance standpoint, and security standpoint.”

Prompt adoption of technology

Via the system’s intuitive user experience, all REEF locations, employees, and executives were able to quickly learn the new technological tools at their disposal. This ease of use is critical in assisting REEF’s continued high-speed growth worldwide. 

“The user has a very clean and concise front-end experience,” mentions Serignese. “The simplicity is elegant because the user does not need to read a 50-page manual in order to build a schedule.”

Enhanced configuration

With access to in-depth permission levels, languages, and pay differentials, REEF is able to tailor the software to the specific needs of any of their locations. Deploying these system configurations in a timely fashion is key to the success of REEF’s support team as well as the operations of every ghost kitchen and parking service. 

Fast implementation

At the time of implementation, REEF had just acquired a company with 8,000 staff that needed to be paid on time. They immediately got to work with Workforce.com to rapidly implement an efficient timekeeping system that would integrate flawlessly with payroll. 

“Workforce.com was able to deliver a system in a matter of days for the HRIS team to then configure by region,” reflects Serignese. “Items like overtime and sick leave and scheduling were set up all in a matter of weeks, which I have not ever come across in my experience.”

Together, REEF and Workforce.com are reinventing how, when, and where people consume. 

“Without Workforce.com we wouldn’t be able to enter new markets as fast as we do,” reflects Serignese. “Traditionally, entering a new market would take months and our business ultimately doesn’t operate that way. Because Workforce.com allows for an agile deployment, we can start the work within days.”

From ghost kitchens to emergency care services, parking lots hold unlimited potential; this potential is only realized through optimized workforce management.

For 12 years, Care Agency Services (CAS) has provided temporary staffing solutions for healthcare organizations serving some of the most vulnerable members of the community. Focused on elderly, mental, and disability care, CAS has steadily grown since its inception, now supplying 120 highly-trained temporary employees to a variety of healthcare facilities.

CHALLENGE

As a healthcare staffing agency, CAS juggled employee schedules and timesheets across a wide range of client locations, each one having specific labor requirements; this posed some serious challenges for CAS administrators. 

For one, scheduling was overly complicated and highly decentralized. Managing hundreds of schedules across their client locations was cumbersome and unforgiving whenever changes needed to be made. 

Their previous workforce management system also required constant data re-entry between onboarding, timekeeping, and payroll systems; this increased operational overhead and raised concerns regarding the privacy of employee data.

CAS needed a single cloud-based system that could handle all scheduling across multiple locations. The new system needed to be intuitive for both managers and employees, and it needed to be comprehensive enough to safely automate medical certification and pay compliance. CAS also needed a system that would ensure the security of all their sensitive employee information. 

SOLUTION

Care Agency Services recognized Workforce.com as the perfect fit for its array of complex needs. The platform packs powerful automation, privacy, and compliance into a user-friendly experience for all staff to use. 

“Workforce.com has the same capabilities regardless of scale,” says Chris Gleadhill, the HR and recruitment manager for CAS. “It’s simple, streamlined, and all in the cloud. We don’t need to handle too many components to get the job done.”

Care Agency Services responds to client requests faster than ever now, confidently scheduling its staff across a wide range of locations, all the while staying compliant with medical certifications and data privacy. 

RESULTS

Utilizing Workforce.com’s scheduling, timekeeping, onboarding, and labor compliance features, Care Agency Services is better equipped to do its part in caring for the elderly and disabled. Here are some of the highlights that came from their partnership with Workforce.com:

Greater visibility across multiple locations

To keep staff information organized properly between all client care facilities, CAS assigns each employee to a location in Workforce.com. Doing this enables CAS to automatically apply different hourly rates, pay differentials, and medical certification requirements based on these locations. 

Organizing staff in this way provides CAS with greater visibility into frontline issues like engagement, burnout, labor costs, and no shows. 

Easily maintainable schedules

CAS can now quickly create and publish a variety of schedules across multiple locations all through Workforce.com’s single platform. They can make changes to these schedules in real-time, accounting for no-shows and shift replacement requests. When making these changes, managers can even view variances in labor costs directly on the schedules. 

Through the app, employees can check their schedules, submit time off, and request shift replacements. Managers can view schedules by client location, making it easy to understand where and when staff is on duty. 

Enhanced configuration

Workforce.com allows CAS to create as many permission levels as it would like with varying access to confidential employee information. While the head office has access to all records for employee onboarding and payroll, each client only has access to basic information like staff schedules and medical certifications. 

Elimination of data re-entry

With fluid transferring of data between onboarding, time and attendance, and payroll, CAS no longer spends administrative hours on needless data re-entry. Workforce.com’s open API integrates the software perfectly with other systems, automating the secure exchange of data and reducing monotonous manual labor to a thing of the past. 

Automated wage & hour compliance

To accommodate specific client labor requirements, CAS managers can use qualification tags in Workforce.com to ensure employees are scheduled in roles for which they have proper certification. Anytime an employee is assigned to a shift they are not qualified for, the action is flagged for a manager to review. Staying medically compliant across a variety of locations has never been so easy. 

Workforce.com also automatically applies complex HR policies and pay calculations such as overtime, shift differentials, and other premiums to timesheets, making the payroll process quick and compliant. 

Through their partnership with Workforce.com, Care Agency Services connects high-quality care providers with the elderly and disabled more effectively than ever before. No longer plagued with workforce inefficiencies, staff and management alike can be confident in their ability to go the extra mile for clients, patients, and the community at large.