Overview
Running a restaurant often gets a bad rep for being unpredictable and chaotic. Shouting orders, lines out the door, and running out of ingredients mid-lunch rush are common perceptions of busy restaurants. Lineup.ai takes a different stance: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Not when you have restaurant sales and labor forecasting software. Accurate restaurant forecasting is proven to positively affect business outcomes and planning by:
- Allowing managers and owners to see anticipated sales and staff their businesses effectively
- Reducing the time restaurant managers spend on weekly scheduling
- Increasing efficiency in employee scheduling and reducing shift swapping
- Creating consistency in forecasting operations across the restaurant chain when multiple locations are involved
While forecasting restaurant sales is nothing new, the ability to automate the process and get hyper-accurate with AI-powered forecasting is.
Forecasting software with machine learning allows you to include future-looking external factors, learn from your own data, and implement smarter shift scheduling. You can take forecasting even further to avoid over- and understaffing and much more. That’s what we’ll show you how to do in this guide.
Lineup.ai’s AI-powered forecasting platform combines historical sales data with future-looking external factors like weather, local events, and other location-specific data to generate incredibly accurate sales forecasts. Reports and a detailed dashboard show hourly and daily sales forecasts, giving you accurate insights for the entire week, plus the ability to drill down into specific days. Local managers and executive teams can see how specific locations are tracking in real-time.
Let’s take a closer look at what you can expect to get from AI-powered forecasting.
The benefits of optimized forecasting and scheduling
The benefits of optimized forecasting and scheduling
Rather than leaving each location to solve labor challenges on their own or based on assumptions, franchisors can serve up helpful insights that franchisees can use to their advantage. Franchisees gain access to data that helps them run their businesses better, and franchisors can stay on track with their organizational goals. Ultimately helping to improve staffing and labor practices across the board.
Adding more locations? Going public? Forecasting supports whatever is on the horizon for your restaurant because it’s based on your data and the factors that can influence your future.
The benefits of optimized forecasting and scheduling
With the Lineup.ai platform, employees can easily submit their availability using a mobile app. Once submitted, managers can create schedules with availability in mind and approve requests from the easy-to-use web application.
Retention is only one of many benefits owners can see with forecasting and scheduling software. Optimal staffing allows your team to meet expectations and protocols while delighting customers rather than choosing between compliance and customer service.
Forecasting not only supports short-term returns on labor expenditures by avoiding overstaffing shifts. It also improves customer satisfaction and retention across the chain. Order fulfillment and the quality of service are improved because employees are more satisfied in their position and adequately supported.
With the Lineup.ai platform, employees can easily submit their availability using a mobile app. Once submitted, managers can create schedules with availability in mind and approve requests from the easy-to-use web application.
Retention is only one of many benefits owners can see with forecasting and scheduling software. Optimal staffing allows your team to meet expectations and protocols while delighting customers rather than choosing between compliance and customer service.
Forecasting not only supports short-term returns on labor expenditures by avoiding overstaffing shifts. It also improves customer satisfaction and retention across the chain. Order fulfillment and the quality of service are improved because employees are more satisfied in their position and adequately supported.The benefits of optimized forecasting and scheduling
Lineup.ai empowers managers to create employee schedules based on data and templates. You can create weekly schedules from scratch, a template or previous schedules. Templates are a helpful way to schedule teams who demonstrate an ability to work effectively together. This team-specific ap- proach to scheduling is shown to maximize the output of the collective business. It also saves manag- ers time because they can easily replicate what worked well in previous weeks in a matter of clicks.
AI-powered forecasting enables brands to accurately foresee the cost of labor as it stacks up against demand and as a percentage of total costs. It allows you to better assess different scheduling strate- gies by seeing exactly which ones provided the optimal labor for that day’s sales. This level of insight provides the knowledge necessary to evaluate scheduling techniques that work for the restaurant and its employees.
With many municipalities, including New York City and San Francisco, implementing fair work schedule laws, restaurants must provide adequate scheduling notices according to the city’s regulations. Once schedules are created with Lineup.ai’s employee-scheduling tools, employees receive a text and email notification showing them what their work week will look like. And because scheduling is faster than using a pen and paper, you can give employees enough notice about their upcoming shifts.
Having staff schedules accurately logged also helps to show compliance with federal, state, local and any brand-specific regulations if needed.With the Lineup.ai platform, employees can easily submit their availability using a mobile app. Once submitted, managers can create schedules with availability in mind and approve requests from the easy-to-use web application.
Retention is only one of many benefits owners can see with forecasting and scheduling software. Optimal staffing allows your team to meet expectations and protocols while delighting customers rather than choosing between compliance and customer service.
Forecasting not only supports short-term returns on labor expenditures by avoiding overstaffing shifts. It also improves customer satisfaction and retention across the chain. Order fulfillment and the quality of service are improved because employees are more satisfied in their position and adequately supported.The benefits of optimized forecasting and scheduling
With many municipalities, including New York City and San Francisco, implementing fair work schedule laws, restaurants must provide adequate scheduling notices according to the city’s regulations. Once schedules are created with Lineup.ai’s employee-scheduling tools, employees receive a text and email notification showing them what their work week will look like. And because scheduling is faster than using a pen and paper, you can give employees enough notice about their upcoming shifts.
Having staff schedules accurately logged also helps to show compliance with federal, state, local and any brand-specific regulations if needed.
Making implementation as easy as it can be
Restaurants collect sales data and build schedules based on different sources of information. Our software does the same, but with even more inputs. That’s why Lineup.ai offers a pilot program that’s fully customized to your business. We’ll ensure all of the correct data is feeding into our machine learning software so that your forecasts are as accurate and useful as possible.
To start, you’ll meet a dedicated expert from the Lineup.ai team who can get you up and running in a matter of weeks. An implementation partner from Lineup.ai will assess your current tools, situation and key considerations for implementation, including:
Getting setup
Step 1: Send your current and historical sales data to the Lineup.ai platform
We connect your sales data to our platform through a seamless POS or data system integration. Or, a manual data upload is possible.
Lineup.ai already has existing integrations with Toast, Square, Brink, Upserve, Omnivore, Snowflake, and Clover.
The Lineup.ai platform can integrate with many other point-of-sale, data, and accounting systems as well. Contact us to see how it works.
Step 2: Determine the most effective method for data transfers
Step 3: Add local data into our machine-learning platform to improve forecasting accuracy
Data sources outside of your own business data will then feed into the machine-learning algorithm.
These data sources may include:
- Hyperlocal data
- Weather
- Local sporting events
- Local concert insights
- Road closures
We’ll set up every restaurant location for you so that the external data is as relevant as it can be.
Depending on your forecasting, scheduling and oversight practices, we can provide specific team members with access to dashboards, reports and tools. These team members may include:
- Local managers
- Franchisees (single or multi-unit)
- Regional managers
- Franchisor-level team members
- Operations
- Human Resources
- Executive Management
- Accounting
And that’s the setup process. From there, you’ll be ready to forecast sales and labor regularly and easily. Here’s a closer look at how that works.We connect your sales data to our platform through a seamless POS or data system integration. Or, a manual data upload is possible.
Lineup.ai already has existing integrations with Toast, Square, Brink, Upserve, Omnivore, Snowflake, and Clover.
The Lineup.ai platform can integrate with many other point-of-sale, data, and accounting systems as well. Contact us to see how it works.
We can set up file transfers to pull nightly sales data from all locations. Or, data may be pushed through automatic or manual means, including continuously through the integration. Brands can also decide to upload or email sales data to Lineup.ai.Data sources outside of your own business data will then feed into the machine-learning algorithm.
These data sources may include:
- Hyperlocal data
- Weather
- Local sporting events
- Local concert insights
- Road closures
We’ll set up every restaurant location for you so that the external data is as relevant as it can be.
Depending on your forecasting, scheduling and oversight practices, we can provide specific team members with access to dashboards, reports and tools. These team members may include:
- Local managers
- Franchisees (single or multi-unit)
- Regional managers
- Franchisor-level team members
- Operations
- Human Resources
- Executive Management
- Accounting
And that’s the setup process. From there, you’ll be ready to forecast sales and labor regularly and easily. Here’s a closer look at how that works.We connect your sales data to our platform through a seamless POS or data system integration. Or, a manual data upload is possible.
Lineup.ai already has existing integrations with Toast, Square, Brink, Upserve, Omnivore, Snowflake, and Clover.
The Lineup.ai platform can integrate with many other point-of-sale, data, and accounting systems as well. Contact us to see how it works.
Step 4: Explore insights and reporting
Depending on your forecasting, scheduling and oversight practices, we can provide specific team members with access to dashboards, reports and tools. These team members may include:
- Local managers
- Franchisees (single or multi-unit)
- Regional managers
- Franchisor-level team members
- Operations
- Human Resources
- Executive Management
- Accounting
And that’s the setup process. From there, you’ll be ready to forecast sales and labor regularly and easily. Here’s a closer look at how that works.We connect your sales data to our platform through a seamless POS or data system integration. Or, a manual data upload is possible.
Lineup.ai already has existing integrations with Toast, Square, Brink, Upserve, Omnivore, Snowflake, and Clover.
The Lineup.ai platform can integrate with many other point-of-sale, data, and accounting systems as well. Contact us to see how it works.
Step 5: Grant varying levels of access to team members
Next, we’ll walk through the different reporting formats and ways for you to access Lineup.ai insights. You can dig into reporting data in the following ways:
- Web-based forecast dashboard (ability to export data into an Excel or CSV file)
- Delivery of a report through the integrated POS system Labor forecast reports integrated into scheduling and payroll tools
- Labor forecast reports delivered through Lineup.ai’s employee-scheduling tools
- Delivery to a brand’s existing data warehouse as Excel or CSV files (Existing data warehouses may include Omnivore, PowerBi, Snowflake, AWS, etc.)
Depending on your forecasting, scheduling and oversight practices, we can provide specific team members with access to dashboards, reports and tools. These team members may include:
- Local managers
- Franchisees (single or multi-unit)
- Regional managers
- Franchisor-level team members
- Operations
- Human Resources
- Executive Management
- Accounting
And that’s the setup process. From there, you’ll be ready to forecast sales and labor regularly and easily. Here’s a closer look at how that works.We connect your sales data to our platform through a seamless POS or data system integration. Or, a manual data upload is possible.
Lineup.ai already has existing integrations with Toast, Square, Brink, Upserve, Omnivore, Snowflake, and Clover.
The Lineup.ai platform can integrate with many other point-of-sale, data, and accounting systems as well. Contact us to see how it works.
Turning forecasts and labor insights into meaningful action
The team at Lineup.ai is composed of seasoned professionals who hold deep insights into the unique challenges and pain points of the restaurant industry, and are equally skilled in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics. This fusion of expertise enables Lineup.ai to create cutting-edge AI solutions specifically tailored for the restaurant sector. The technical and analytical prowess of the team, combined with a deep understanding of the unique challenges faced by restaurants, forms the cornerstone of the company's innovation. The team at Lineup.ai also excels in communicating the benefits and applications of AI and machine learning to businesses, ensuring clients fully leverage the capabilities of these solutions.
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