This form can be opened from the Staffing group or by selecting FORM | OTHER FORMS | POSITIONING GUIDE from the menu.
When the form opens you will notice that there is a tab across the top for each guide that has been defined.
ESP uses Positioning guides to determine how many people are required to cover any given hourly volume. The positioning guides are the heart of ESP's scheduling process and have a significant impact on your labor cost each week. Care must be taken to design guides that schedule your people exactly where and when you want them.
A Positioning guide specifies how many crew members you require for a given hourly volume amount. For example, a restaurant that is expecting a sales volume of $450 for an hour may need 3 Counter people, 2 Kitchen people, a Lot and Lobby person, and perhaps a Drive-thru person. For a $600 hour, a correspondingly higher number of crew would be required. Design your guides by specifying the volume levels and crew requirements for your location.
You must define a Positioning guide for all times of the day and week that you want ESP to generate shifts. Only one guide may be active at a time; your guides should not overlap each other or ESP will not know which guide to follow when generating shifts.
Set up as many or as few guides as needed to effectively schedule for your location but be careful not to define more guides than you actually need. Following are some common guides that a restaurant may setup to schedule effectively:
The above are examples only and may not all apply to your location. The number and types of guides you require will depend on your own requirements.
Each guide is divided into four sections:
This section is used to identify the guide. Enter the Name of the guide in the box at the top, which will also appear on the tab at the top of the form. Enter the amount expected in the Average check box and enter a more detailed description of the guide at the bottom of this section in the large box. For example, the name of the guide may be Promotion but the detailed description could say 99¢ burgers offered summer of 2010.
Each positioning guide applies to a particular portion of the day, with the applicable days and times specified in the Times section. Only one guide should be active at any given time. Depending on your screen size, the entries in the Times section may not all be visible; use the scroll bars on the right side of the Times box to view all your entries.
The staffing levels define the number of crew and their placement for any given volume rate. In the left column you enter the Volume amount, which will be in sales values or transaction counts, according to your preference as defined on the PREFERENCES form in the Settings group.
Beside the volume column is the Allowed reduction column, which tells ESP how closely to schedule your specified staff level during very short peak times. The number entered tells ESP the number of lines to look back on the guide not the number of people to under schedule by and will only be used if there is a very short volume peak. This feature is discussed in more detail below in the Fine tuning section.
In the middle of this section is a column for each Station that was defined as Variable hour labor on the STATIONS form. To add a station to the guides, open the STATIONS form and check the Variable hours' box for that station; to remove a station from the guides, uncheck the Variable hours' box for that station on the STATION form. For each row enter the number of people required at each station for that volume amount; leave the field blank where the station is not required at the volume level. To ensure consistent productivity, each row should add only one more person than the previous row.
The two columns on the right show the Total number of crew required at each volume level and the hourly productivity achieved at each volume level in SPMH (Sales Per Man Hour) if your volume is sales or, TPMH (Transactions Per Man Hour) if your volume is transactions. This number is based on the total volume divided by total people requested.
On a well-designed guide the SPMH
or TPMH will be equal to or higher than the previous row, indicating ever-increasing
productivity as you add more crew. It should never be lower because that means you
are less productive with higher volume.
Following are some things to remember when adding entries:
Selecting the Graph tab in the Staffing levels section will open a graphed view of your guide. This allows you to visually see your productivity levels.
If your guide has been well designed, the productivity (either SPMH or TPMH) will continually increase as you get busier. That is, as you add more employees the total SPMH/TPMH increases or remains stable. It should never drop down because that would mean that as your volume is going up your profit is going down.
The horizontal scale of the graph represents the number of employees and the vertical scale is the productivity in SPMH or TPMH. As you move to the right (add more employees) the line goes up indicating increasing productivity; you should see a gradual upward curve until you hit the maximum productivity that is possible, from that point on, the graph should remain flat.
The two differently-colored lines on the graph represent a comparison between your guide and the optimal guide. One line represents the productivity based on your current positioning guide; and the other line represents the ideal values that ESP has calculated by smoothing out any irregularities in your actual guide. Ideally the two lines should be very close; if not, it could mean that your guide has not been designed to effectively position your employees and could use some fine tuning using the Labor optimizer, which is described below under fine tuning.
The solution to changing a guide that will generate a schedule with erratic productivity to one that will generate optimal productivity is to recalculate the volume amount for each row so that they are closer to the optimal. To manually recalculate each row can be time consuming; the Labor optimizer tool can do this work for you. Simply click on the Labor optimizer button on the toolbar and the volume amounts for your guide will be replaced with the optimal ones.
The optimal line is calculated
by ESP using your existing entries and smoothing out the bumps. Even after using
the labor optimizer your guide may require further fine tuning.
Another toolbar option Adjust rates by __% makes updating your guides easy. Use this option to adjust all the volume entries on a guide at once, by a percentage, without adjusting the crew. This option saves you from having to manually adjust each line.
This is especially useful when there is a price change. For example, if you had an overall price increase of 3% you would enter 3 in the Adjust rates by ___% box and press the GO button; three percent would then be added to each volume entry.
This feature can also help if your overall labor is too high or too low. For example, if your labor costs are too high throughout the day, enter a positive number (e.g. 15) in the Adjust rates by __% box to increase all the volume amounts on the guide. This would help reduce your labor cost because the guide now allows higher volume with the same number of crew. If your labor costs were too low throughout the day, you can enter a negative number (e.g. -15) in the Adjust rates by __% box to decrease all the volume amounts on the guide. This would increase the labor cost because the guide would now allow lower volume with the same number of crew.
Keep in mind that this option
adjusts ALL the volume entries on the guide; if you have a problem with
only part of the day you would not use the Adjust rates by __% feature
because it would create problems at other times of the day. In this case you
would need to manually adjust individual entries on the guide or you could set
up a new guide to schedule your close shifts only.
Many operations have dramatic volume increases and decreases during particular times of the day. For example, a restaurant will usually experience a rapid volume increase over lunch and dinner for a short period. When volume increase is for a short period, say 1.0 or 1.5 hours in length, it can be difficult to schedule the optimal number of people for the 1.0 to 1.5 hour rush period when the shifts lengths are 3+ hours in length without wasting labor before and after the rush.
When this happens you may decide that it is acceptable to schedule slightly fewer people than needed during the rush period to avoid wasting labor before and after the rush. For example if you require 6 people to be working most of the time and then you have a brief volume increase that would normally require 12 people, you may choose to schedule 10 or 11 people instead to save some labor. Because you are slightly understaffed during the rush, the employees scheduled are expected to work a bit harder to maintain high levels of customer service.
The A.R. (Allowed Reduction) column on the guide is where you specify when and where you are willing to reduce the requested labor for a short rush period. The number you enter in this column represents the number of people you are willing to cut for that sales amount. For example if your guide asks for 12 people and the AR is set to 2 then ESP may choose to schedule 10 people if it cannot fit the full 12 people on the schedule without a significant waste of labor.
The AR feature is only used
when the volume peak is too short to schedule the full requirement of labor without
wasting too much labor. If you have high volume for long periods of time (three or
more hours) then the AR column will not have any effect since ESP will easily schedule
the full complement of employees without wasting labor.
There is no right or wrong setting for the AR field. It depends on your volume pattern, the experience of your employees, and the type and length of the rush. Following is a general guideline.
To add a guide, select the Add Guide option on the toolbar. A window will open that asks if you want to use one of your existing guides as a template for the new guide. If you choose an existing guide, the Entries section will be filled in with the values from the guide that you copied; however, the Name & description and Times sections will be blank because you cannot have two guides in effect at the same time. Fill in the Name & Description section, the Times sections, and then modify the Entries section as required manually or use the Adjust rates by __% option on the toolbar to adjust all the values at once.
To remove a guide, simply open the guide that you want to remove and select the Delete guide option on the toolbar. A confirmation box will open asking you to confirm that you want to delete the guide. If you choose YES the guide will be deleted, if you choose NO the box closes and the guide remains as an active file.
Return to original page: Online help, The Positioning Guides form
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