Activity Based Forecasting

This article provides recommendations to managers on forecasting schedules and labor.

Overview

Activity-Based Scheduling allows managers to base their Labor % on projected sales for their specific department sales and allows for a per schedule analysis to cut labor expenses. For example, this would be useful if you were writing a Back-of-House (BOH) schedule and wanted to see the generated sales projections, which would only reflect the Food departments.

Activity-Based Scheduling helps managers have the right people on staff, calculate an accurate server-to-customer ratio, and analyze the anticipated sales down to each department. 

Schedule Forecasts

Consider the scenario where a manager wants the Kitchen and Server schedules to be based on other department sales.

• The table below lists three departments, the department sales, and an “X“ indicating if that department will be included in a schedule’s projection metrics.

• The sum of all department sales will equal the total sales for the entire store.

• Each schedule sales value will be less than or equal to the store-wide sales.

• Instead of using department sales directly, our system calculates averages over six weeks, ending with the last date of recorded sales.

• An average is calculated for each day of the week. For example, an average is calculated for six consecutive Mondays.

• For each day of the week grouping, we remove outliers that are more than one standard deviation away from our mean.

Labor Departments

The departments are configured using the Labor Setup page in Decision Logic:

• Once these departments are configured in Labor Setup, it’s time to create a schedule.

• When a new schedule is created, the projections panel at the bottom of the page will display the Schedule Sales.

• These are the sales sum determined by how the Labor schedule's departments have been set up. 

• Toggling the “All Schedules” switch will display the store-wide sales instead.

If you do not want to manually update the Sales Forecasts, you can select Generate sales, and all projected sales will be used. 

Labor Forecasting:

• Updating the Targeted Sales on the Sales Forecasting page will affect all schedules.

• When a Target Sales value is set for a day, a ‘department sales override’ value is created for each department.

• This generated amount is proportional to the percent that the department sales make of the store’s total sales.

When viewing the Projections section at the bottom of Labor Scheduler, the Schedule Sales values will update accordingly.