At S4Labour, we are proud that our labour management system was created by operators for operators.
Our people have a wealth of experience gained from backgrounds in all sectors of hospitality, and we continue to manage three food-led destination pubs, two with bedrooms. These provide the perfect environment to ensure our products stay at the cutting edge of the industry.
We are ideally placed to understand our clients’ challenges and offer genuine insight and innovative solutions that help them achieve their business goals. We appreciate the numerous systems that contribute to running a successful modern hospitality business. Our specialism is enhanced by integrations with a network of trusted partners, allowing S4Labour to function as a central platform, streamlining numerous systems into a unified tool for superior business management.
EPoS terminals are a mainstay of modern hospitality sites
EPoS
Since the turn of the millennium, electronic till systems have become ubiquitous in hospitality sites. Users rely on their EPoS for smooth, accurate service, but their potential to promote efficiency savings goes beyond rapid price calculations and user-friendly interfaces. Analysis of EPoS data provides enormous insight both into the distribution of sales across the hours of a day and longer-term trading patterns and trends. This promotes optimised scheduling of staff to deliver desired service standards without overspending on labour.
S4Labour integrates with the UK’s biggest EPoS providers, as well as numerous smaller regional suppliers, to present sales data in an intuitive graphical format, encouraging effective labour deployment decisions to be made. We are also working on future system developments which will allow managers to consider labour in the context of sales in real time, delivering further cost and efficiency savings.
Time & Attendance
Often a sub-category of EPoS, time and attendance systems allow operators to electronically, and accurately, record employees’ shift start and end times. This data automatically populates in S4Labour, reducing the likelihood of errors or unearned overpayments. This removes the need for time-consuming manual updates to rotas, and boosts staff morale through increased confidence in correct and timely receipt of wages.
This data also feeds the Lateness Report in S4Labour’s HR Module, allowing managers and head office staff unrivalled insight into employee timekeeping.
Training
Effective training boosts staff morale and productivity
Although technological advancements are increasingly influencing hospitality, the industry still has people at its heart. Effective training of employees remains as important as ever, and money spent on staff development usually pays dividends in terms of increasing efficiency of service and customer spend per head, as well as reducing losses through errors and wastage and encouraging longevity of service.
Online training courses, typically provided by third parties, are a popular and convenient way for operators to ensure all team members are complicit with laws and regulations and equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to work effectively. S4Labour is integrated with leading providers of e-training, with course completion data automatically feeding into the system, allowing managers to quickly identify and rectify gaps in knowledge and compliance.
Property Management Systems
Increasingly, operators – including market leaders such as Loungers and JD Wetherspoon – are seeking to maximise profitability through adding overnight accommodation as an additional revenue stream. The potential returns on investment are high, especially when labour can be aligned to room occupancy rates and meal package purchases, optimising efficiency of housekeeping and food service teams.
S4Labour partners with leading property management systems to automatically populate with room reservation data, allowing managers to make effective decisions on staffing to meet the demand for overnight stays and boost profits.
S4Labour can take the hassle away from running payroll
Payroll
Accurate, timely payment of staff is critically important to the smooth operations of any business and particularly pertinent in hospitality, with hourly pay and variable shifts commonplace. Correctly running payroll can be a time-consuming burden to operators, either through hours spent managing wages in-house, or through preparing the information that needs to be sent to outsourced accountants.
S4Labour takes shift data from its rotas – often generated by a time and attendance link – and uses it to generate CSV format payroll exports at the click of a button. These conveniently provide payroll departments and services everything they need to ensure that all members of staff correctly receive the wages they have earned.
Data
For hospitality’s decision-makers, so-called “Big Data” is becoming an ever more useful resource. Cutting edge analytical techniques provide unparalleled insight to guide decisions on everything from which products to stock up before a busy weekend to the best location for a new site.
The scope for cross-platform pollination of data is massive, so we are working closely with the foremost firms specialising in data for hospitality. This integration will allow managers to make confident staffing details informed by high-level analysis. Stay tuned for more information soon.
The advantages of a fully-integrated labour management system are self-evident. We are dedicated to making S4Labour’s integrations comprehensive and their functionality intuitive in line with our mission to maximise efficiency and profits for our clients.
