Lessons learned

the “old way”

AI & Analytics

The world has changed so quickly over the last few years. Our lives are so vastly different from what we experienced when we grew up. I’m 43, so I CAN speak to the time before cell phones, internet, Facebook and self parking cars. What’s hard to fathom is that this systemic rate of change to our lives went into overdrive in the late 90’s. It’s hard to remember that business hasn’t been done in the way in which we used to do things for over 20 years now.

About 6 years ago, I found myself in the business of restaurant management. Now, if you’ve never worked in the restaurant business, count yourself somewhat fortunate. This is a business of busy work, simply put. As a manager, I could count on working 6 days a week (at least), 12 to 14 hours a day, just so I could keep up with my share of the responsibilities our management team held. This was – and is – a business inextricably tangled with the “old way” of doing things. It’s not uncommon for owners and operators to do all the administrative work manually. Imagine counting inventory, ordering it, logging this information into a notebook (which will hopefully get to the book keeper), writing the work schedule for 60 plus employees for a two week period, doling out employee reviews, reconciling cash, taking orders from customers. There is a reason why restaurant managers work these long hours.

I was able to experience a game changer, however. My restaurant made the decision to invest in a sophisticated piece of scheduling software, that claimed to reduce the time it took to write a schedule by 95% AND that it would significantly reduce labor costs. The demo was very exciting, and we knew all our problems would be solved with this tool, and that our staff would gaze at us with abject adoration because scheduling was so simple and easy now.

So, after going through the implementation and training protocol with this company, we were given the keys to the system and wished a happy life. It was very apparent to us that this system could make schedule writing easier, but that this was a very complex system. It was deeply designed to not only communicate work schedules to our staff, but it was designed to very intelligently manage labor costs, by accounting for a multitude of variables that impacted labor costs in real time. There was one slight problem…who had the time to learn this system? Not I. I had to count the bar inventory and make sure our numbers were getting submitted in time – and then it was dinner service and clean up after. And marketing…what are we going to do, to drive sales up on Tuesdays? The task fell on the manager who was writing the schedules at the time. He would come in on his day off, every other week to do it. It would only take 12-14 hours, just to publish it out on time. By force of having to learn it, he did – but only to a point. He was able to reduce the writing time down to 3-4 hours, and in our eyes, that was a win. We did NOT, however, see a reduction in our labor costs.

Over a period of years, this is how things stayed. We had a very expensive program to write and communicate schedules. Sure, the app feature made shift swapping much less traumatic, but on the whole, it felt like we had rolled out a solution that just wasn’t what he had hoped. One fine day, I ended having a conversation with a counterpart at a bar down the street, which used this same piece of software. He communicated that not only had they reduced the schedule writing task down to less than 2 hours every week, they saw their labor costs drop by close to 2.5% - which was staggering to me. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. He took the time to learn how to use the tool, as it was meant to be used. The platform, it turned out, was able to account for things like the weather, daily sales volumes, employee competence and efficiency, rates of pay and work load capacity, and utilize that information to publish out very efficient, cost optimized schedules. Of course, now we had the deal with the recriminations with ourselves. Had we committed to this platform in the manner that it was intended, we would’ve seen those results. We calculated that we let go of over $200,000 in cost reductions over the 3 plus years we were using this system incorrectly.

The point – and there is a point to all this – is that I would like you to avoid that expensive lesson. And it’s even more poignant now, more than ever, because business and industry is adopting  AI and data analytic programs, platforms and strategies to help them evolve competitively. It takes a commitment to learn how these things work and why. It’s extremely important that company leaders ensure their teams are training, learning and owning the technology and thought processes that will bring success.

One final note about that scheduling software…when I finally DID learn how to use it, it was immensely satisfying. We also found that as our fluency grew in operating this tool, we were able to innovate many of our daily tasks, and kick some old school ways of doing business out the door.