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Positioning guides
This form can be opened from the Staffing task 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.
Purpose of the Positioning guides
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 $500 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 these volume levels and crew requirements.
Defining your Positioning guides
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. Following are some commonly defined guides that a restaurant may setup to schedule effectively:
- Breakfast: during the breakfast menu hours the labor requirements are usually more intensive than other times of the day so a separate guide is required to schedule these hours correctly.
- Regular menu: during the regular menu hours, the labor requirements are usually less intensive and the productivity and average check are also quite different from the breakfast menu hours so a separate guide is required to accommodate these differences.
- Day time versus after school: some restaurant locations use full time employees to work during school hours. These employees are often more experienced and have higher productivity than the part-time, student, employees who work after school and on weekends. A separate positioning guide may be required for school hours with reduced labor requirements
- Weekends: there may be a significantly different average check and different type of customer on weekends than on weekdays that requires a separate guide to schedule correctly.
- Discount promotions: special price discount promotions may change your labor requirements requiring a unique positioning guide that is active only during promotions.
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.
Form fields
Each guide is divided into four sections:
Name and Description
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.
Times
Each positioning guide applies to a particular portion of the day, with the applicable days and times specified in the Times section. You should only have one guide active at any given time. For example, the Regular menu guide we have designed above applies from 10:30 AM to 4:00 PM every day. Depending on your screen size, the times may not all be visible; use the scroll bars on the right side of the Times box to view all your entries.
Staffing levels: 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 hour box for that station; to remove a station from the guides, uncheck the Variable hour 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. 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 you are using sales or, TPMH (Transactions Per Man Hour) if you are using 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:
- Each new row should add just one more person than the previous row. If you add two or more you will be reducing your productivity and wasting labor.
- The volume (sales or transactions) amount should increase consistently in each row. For example if you have an entry for $100 then $200, it stands to reason the next entry should be $300 or more. If the next entry was only $250 it would mean that the SPMH for this person was half the previous person.
- You should never have two rows with the same total number of people because there is no reason for this. If you have two rows with the same number of people on your guide, the row with the lower volume should be deleted.
Staffing levels: the Productivity graph
Selecting the Graph tab in the Staffing levels section will open a graphed view of your staffing entries. This allows you to visually see your productivity levels and will look similar to the example below.
If
your guide has been well designed, the productivity (either SPMH or TPMH) will continually increase
as you get busier. This is indicated by a line gently sloping upwards to the
right was your total number of crew increases. The line 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.
The two differently-colored lines on the graph represent a comparison between your chart and an optimal chart. The 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.
Fine tuning Positioning guides
The Labor optimizer tool 
Suppose your productivity graph looked like the one below.
The
line representing the positioning of your employees from your actual guide starts by increasing steadily
but then becomes erratic and fluctuates above and below the optimal line. This indicates that productivity
is not consistent and the positioning of employees could be improved. The solution is to recalculate the
volume amount for each row so that you schedule each succeeding employee at
a volume level that maintains your productivity. 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 ESP will
immediately replace your entered volume rates with the optimal ones on the
blue curve.
The optimal line is calculated by ESP using your
existing entries and smoothing out the bumps. Even after using the labor optimizer your positioning guide may
require further fine tuning.
Adjust rates by __%
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 it is best to manually adjust individual entries on the guide or
set up a new guide for the affected time.
The Allowed reduction (AR) feature
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 the period of increased volume is short, for example, 1 to 1.5 hours in length, it can be difficult to schedule the optimal number of crew. If you typically use shifts of 4 to 8 hours in length, it is difficult, or impossible, to cover a short, sharp 1.5 hour rush period, without wasting labor before and after the rush.
When this happens you may decide that it is acceptable to schedule slightly fewer crew than needed during the rush period to avoid wasting a large amount of labor before and after the rush. For example if you typically 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 volume 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 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.
- For entries of 0 to 5 employees set the AR to 0: for very small rushes, when you only require five or fewer employees, you most likely do not wish to give up any employees to save labor cost.
- For entries of 6 to 11 employees set the AR to 1: for moderate volume peaks, it may be acceptable to be short one employee.
- For entries of 12 to 18 employees set the AR to 2: for these higher volume peaks where you have a large number of crew, you can easily run short by two or more employees for a short period of time.
- For all entries higher than 18 employees set the AR to 3: similar to above, with correspondingly higher crew levels, you may be able to have three fewer employees than requested to cover a short rush.
Add/Remove guides
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 should not 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.
