Print viewTake the labor out of scheduling
If you’re spending more than two hours producing your weekly crew schedule, it’s time for a change: Put ESP to work for you and you’ll have your manager back on the floor in record time, all while saving up to one percent in labor cost. ThoughtWorks has been providing labor scheduling solutions for over twenty years, and ESP is used in over 3,000 locations, in thirty countries and six languages.
ESP isn't a band-aid solution. The system learns about your operation, your volume patterns and your crew abilities. Then precisely and accurately places your crew when and where you need them. ESP is ideal for companies whose work force is composed predominantly of part-time, wage-paid employees.
How to create a perfect schedule in record time
Producing your weekly schedule is as simple as following a checklist; working from a Schedule of tasks ensuring that you:
- Stay organized: by simply following the tasks in order
- Never miss a task: by simply following the tasks in order
- Remain focused: if interrupted you know exactly where you left off
Producing each week’s schedule is a snap: First, project your sales (or transactions) and labor requirements and then, at the touch of a key, ESP calculates projections based on the last few weeks, last month, last year, or any combination thereof. Volume can be projected by the hour, half-hour or quarter-hour. Then, make your employees' time-off requests. Once you’ve completed these two simple steps, ESP takes care of the rest.
ESP calculates a full weekly schedule, complete with employee names and work assignments, in less than five minutes. After that, your manager can review and adjust the schedule on-screen. Then the schedule goes on the wall, and your manager goes back on the floor. Total time from start to finish: Less than ninety minutes. And you can stop worrying about costly labor law violations. ESP ensures your schedules meet all local labor regulations, so that you never break a labor law again.
Detailed reports mean better control
ESP’s management reports give you the detailed information you need to operate at peak efficiency. A graphical line-bar report, as shown below, provides an excellent overview of shift coverage, while a separate schedule listed by employee name completely eliminates the chance of a missed shift. An on-call report helps you quickly find replacements for sick or no-show employees. Other reports include a break report to help ensure each employee takes the break(s) they are entitled to, a summary report that details your volume, labor cost, labor percent and more, and many more reports to help you manage your employees. Once the schedule is complete you can even use the e-mail report form to send all your employees their work schedule by e-mail.
You may print the reports as often as you like and you can preview all reports on-screen and then print them only when the schedule is complete.
Computers don’t take coffee breaks
ESP considers hundreds of variables when producing a schedule: Shift lengths, staffing requirements, employee availabilities and job qualifications, minimum and maximum hours, labor laws, job and shift rotation, just to name a few. ESP handles the task better and faster than even the most organized manager: Just a few minutes a week is all that it takes to keep ESP’s information files updated. And it never misses a trick or forgets that Julie wants the third Thursday in May off. You can even tell ESP to give preference to lower-cost crew: This feature alone can save you thousands of dollars a year.
Crew actually prefer a computer schedule: Site surveys reveal that employees find that the computer schedule is fairer and less likely to be influenced by favoritism.
We schedule the way you do
ESP is based on the same procedures you follow by hand. Even if your managers aren’t familiar with using a computer, they’ll quickly be up and running. An easy-to-follow, thorough training guide makes ESP simple to learn, and detailed program and on-line help are available at the touch of a key.
Put us to work for you…for free!
We’re so confident that ESP will save you thousands of dollars and hundreds of management hours that you can test a fully-functioning copy of the program for free for up to sixty days in your location. If you’re not convinced at the end of the trial period, you have no obligation. But we think you’ll want to keep it.
Put us to the test: Try our software free for sixty days at your location. You have nothing to lose, and a more efficient operation to gain.
List of benefits and features
Ease of use features
- Checklist-based scheduling ensures tasks completed in an organized manner.
- Familiar office interface means ESP 5 is easy to learn, use and customize to user preference.
- Access to the full reference manual is easy because it is stored on your computer when you install the program.
- Access to the program’s help files is from an option on the menu; keep the help screen open for easy reference as you work.
- Additional comprehensive on-line help can be accessed from the same menu option.
- Adding secondary departments (satellite locations) is a quick and easy process with ESP 5. When you add a secondary department the main department’s data is automatically duplicated, excluding volume entries, eliminating the need to copy/replicate data.
- Changing the language the program is displayed is a simple menu choice because all languages are built into ESP 5.
New and improved features
- Live data entry means that all changes take effect immediately; no longer will you have to regenerate the schedule if you make a mistake in sales or on another form or forget to add a new employee.
- Home page summary form displays statistics about how long the schedule process took, which can help supervisors/consultants evaluate a manager’s understanding of scheduling.
- Home page summary form also displays warnings about problems with the current schedule with hyperlinks, which helps the manager easily find and fix problems.
- When generating a volume projection by selecting from weeks of actual history on file, comments about those weeks are now displayed, making it easier to identify the best weeks to include in your projection.
- All time-off requests are entered on one form; eliminates the need to open and close each employee’s form to enter their requests separately. This one stop time-off entry method can reduce the time spent entering time off requests by 75%.
- Menu options allow you to view the entries on the Time-off requests form by each day or for each employee. Menu options also allow you to view the entries for the current schedule only or for future dates as well.
- Editing the schedule on screen has been improved with easier access to information needed for editing shifts.
- The visual appearance of the Schedule on screen has been improved making it significantly easier to navigate.
- Improved Statistics (labor +/-) are always displayed on screen while you are editing the schedule and are expandable so you can see the projected and actual for daily totals, or the currently selected station.
- More detailed labor +/- statistics shows the information for both totals and selected station at the same time.
- Statistics on screen includes the crew to management ratio. This is displayed on screen all the time; providing better labor control through efficient use of management hours.
- New, able to review and print unlimited past schedules. With the appropriate login, the user may also edit the past schedule to allow for editing the current schedule when sudden events meant drastic changes to sales.
- On-call list can be left on-screen as you work and will be updated automatically to reflect your edited changes thanks to the program’s live data entry.
- On call list contains more detail, including a scoring system to help the manager find the perfect person to fill a shift.
- A toolbar option will expand or contract all the shifts on the screen, which makes it easier to quickly find a shift or employee.
Schedule editing screen has 3 views:
- By day will display the traditional daily line bar for viewing shifts by day
- By employee will display the shifts by employee names for viewing individual employee’s shifts
- By errors will display a list of only the shifts that have errors associated with them, which makes it easy for managers to identify and correct errors for the whole week on one screen
- Looking at the graphed view of a Positioning guide will help you quickly and easily identify labor saving areas and problems with that guide.
- Positioning guides have a volume by hour column, either SPMH or TCPH depending on your volume projecting preference, which helps to ensure accurate and efficient entries and improve labor positioning.
- All fixed shifts can be entered on the Fixed shifts form, whether assigned to a person or left unassigned for the program to find the best person to fill the shift. This one-step fixed shift entry reduces the time required to enter fixed shifts.
- The Fixed shifts form displays daily and weekly fixed shift counts; provides better control of fixed shifts.
- Entries on the Fixed shifts form are not limited to the current schedule. This allows you to make entries for unlimited dates in the future; enter a manager’s entire schedule for the month (or longer) at one time.
- Live data entry means you can edit an employee that was added after you generated the schedule into the current schedule. Eliminates the need to re-generate in the middle of editing your schedule.
- Better control of employee’s availability with our new date based system; means that temporary changes never have to be removed.
- The new, Availability options screen allows the manager to easily switch from regular to alternate availabilities on an individual labor category basis, which allows for better control of dual (regular & alternate) availabilities. One category can use their regular availabilities while another switches to alternate availabilities. Implementing summer/alternate availabilities for students is easier and faster with better control.
- The employee’s active availability is easily identified because it is presented first and marked active in the employee’s information; inactive availability appears grey with a strike through it.
- Restrictions can now apply to individual stations; giving the manager better control over who is scheduled at each station.
- Improved break control. In ESP 5, breaks are assigned by labor category not shift length. This change allows you to setup paid breaks for one category and unpaid breaks for another category.
- New, able to track the crew to management ratio scheduled. The addition of a Type column on the Stations form allows you to tell ESP whether the station is a management or crew position.
- Improved control over shifts lengths. Busy periods that disallowed both start and stop times has been replaced with an advanced shift length option where the user can disallow start or stop times or both.
- More control with labor categories. Shift and hour limits are now also defined in the Labor categories form. Employees inherit these from the labor category that they are assigned to but this information can be modified in the individual employee’s information.
- Easier customization of your data. The Schedule preferences form now uses a sliding scale from 0 to 100 for rating the importance of specific conditions that ESP should consider when generating the schedule.
- New, ESP score card used in conjunction with the Summary screen on the Home form gives managers and supervisors a tool to measure scheduling performance and set goals for improvement.
- New, E-mail report allows managers to e-mail weekly shift assignments to employees. This saves management time and paper and improves employee morale as they don’t have to “stop” into the restaurant to find out when they are working.
- Reports offer more detail. Transaction counts (TC) per hour are now reported along with the sales per man hour (SPMH) if both are imported. No longer are you restricted to reporting only one.
Time and labor saving improvements
- Improved accuracy because schedule detail is presented by half or quarter hour.
- More accurate and easier to complete schedules; date-based schedule paradigm means less errors due to mixed up dates.
- Reduced labor cost through better reporting and use of management hours.
- Reduced labor cost through more efficient scheduling engine.
- Reduced training costs due to the shorter learning curve.
- Reduced labor cost and management time producing schedules.
- Fewer no-shows because shift assignments are e-mailed to employees.
New and improved report features
- Preview all reports before printing.
- Redesigned line bar report gives more detail including start/finish time and shift length.
- Detailed daily labor summary allows managers track labor live throughout their shift.
- New e-mail report allows managers to send weekly shift assignments to employees by e-mail.
- Full support for any Windows-based printer; no special setup required.
- Training summary includes the percent of crew qualified at each station.
- New birthday report.
- New service award report.
Connectivity features
- New industry standard XML-based interface makes exchanging information with third party software simple.
- Ability to export and import charts via XML so they can be easily maintained and standardized by the central office.
- Imports both sales and transactions, when both available.
- E-mail schedules using SMTP or mail client such as Microsoft Outlook, or Lotus notes.
- ESP 5 has maintained compatibility with all previous interface software.
Security features
- Multiple user account levels to allow various permission levels and block access to key features.
