AutoScheduler

Overview
AutoScheduler is an application for restaurant managers to create schedules for employees on a weekly basis. This fact sheet will give you an overview of what this application can do and its advantages over your current method.

The schedules, created with AutoScheduler, can be saved to disk.
AutoScheduler schedule files (.fsc) contain the following data:

Schedule Dates
Employee information

Name
Wage
Job group
Salary or wage worker
Telephone number
Shift times

Store Information

Store number
Projected sales for the current week
Sales for corresponding week the year prior
Tax rate applied to employee wages

Schedules created in AutoScheduler can be either printed directly to a printer, or they can be exported as Microsoft^® Excel^© Spreadsheets.

Advantages
This application allows restaurant managers to create and refine their employee schedule without having to use the scheduling system in the restaurant. The inherent problem with the scheduling system in the restaurant is that the current in-store system is in-the-store. Manually processing the restaurant’s schedule requests is tedious, time consuming and requires that the manager be in the restaurant and render one of the terminals unavailable until the final schedule is completed. It is distracting for the manager, being exposed to all of the many interferences of an operational restaurant, dragging out the time it takes to produce the schedule and decreasing productivity. Using AutoScheduler takes the manager out of this environment and into whatever environment they are most comfortable in.

This application also allows for higher quality sending and receiving of schedules. Rather than dealing with poor quality faxes of schedule printouts, they can now be e-mailed in Microsoft^® Excel^© format. If e-mailing is not available, AutoScheduler is still able to produce a text printout of the schedule for faxing.

Scheduling Grid

Figure 1 - Main Scheduling Grid

This is the scheduling grid, where the schedules are created. The employees’ information and shift times are entered here.

The weekly calculations are in the far right column labeled “Hours/Cost”. These include:

Weekly employee hours

Notification when wage workers are scheduled overtime

Weekly employee cost

Tax on employee wages
Overtime pay

The status bar at the far bottom of the window displays the number of employees in each group and Monday’s Date. Monday’s Date is the starting date of the week being scheduled.

Figure 2 - Daily Calculations Tooltip

The daily calculations run across the bottom, just under the white grid. These include:

Daily hours

Driver hours
Insider and Manager hours

Daily labor cost
The percentage of daily projected sales the labor cost takes up
Daily sales projection

The numbers in the daily calculations are rounded; this is done to save space. The exact numbers can be displayed at any time by moving the mouse over the daily calculations. A yellow tooltip box will popup and display the exact figures.

Store Data

Figure 3 – Store Data

This window is where the restaurant’s data is entered:

Monday’s date
Tax rate on employee wages
Restaurant’s identification number
Projected sales for the week to be scheduled
Last year’s sales for the week to be scheduled
Bar graph displaying sales amounts

Projected sales in red
Last year’s sales in purple
Click the chart to change the maximum sales amount displayed

All of the data entered here is saved in each individual schedule file so that AutoScheduler has the proper data to perform its calculations when a schedule is loaded. The tax rate on employee wages and restaurant number is stored within the program also because these are stable figures and should not have to be entered for every new schedule.

Reports
AutoScheduler can output schedules in two different ways:

Print a text report to a printer

Spreadsheet can print a graphical report to a printer
Spreadsheet can be e-mailed
Contains a bar graph displaying sales data

Figure 4 – Print Options

The print options are mostly for modifying how the text report is printed. The “Print shift-end times in Excel” option on the far right modifies how the Microsoft^® Excel^© spreadsheet is exported.

Example Reports
The following two pages are example AutoScheduler reports. The first one (A) is a text report and the second (B) is a graphical Microsoft^® Excel^© spreadsheet report.