On Friday, Jeray Lewinsky was looking forward to spending his birthday with his boyfriend instead of working at his part-time job.
There was no guarantee it would happen, though.
Lewinsky supplements his income as a dance instructor by working in a restaurant, where requesting time off and trading shifts has involved a web of paper notes and favors for generations of service industry workers.
But instead of playing phone tag, Lewinsky opened an app called
and submitted a time off request. Shortly after, a notification indicated his shift was covered and his manager had approved the swap.
Lewinsky marked the occasion with a celebratory tweet, and the Austin-based company responded: “#YAAASSS!”
Rewriting the restaurant model
Two restaurant workers frustrated with the manual, offline complexities of their industry launched HotSchedules in 1999. David Cantu and Ray Pawlikowki started the service as a relatively basic website for a college project, but it quickly gained popularity as a shift trading tool. It now has 600 employees in six offices around the world, supporting more than 1.8 million restaurant and retail workers in 120,000 locations across 26 countries.
President and CEO Anthony Lye (pictured right) attributes that success at least in part to a shift of attitudes in the service industry, which traditionally viewed technology as a necessary evil for running a restaurant.
“As the younger people are coming in to take over restaurants, they’re surprised to find those restaurants haven’t adopted tech,” he said. “They’re seeing it as more of a primary agenda point more than ever in the last five to seven years.”
That change has coincided with mobile devices saturating the market, allowing even cooks in harsh kitchen environments to submit data to a cloud-based management program on the fly. The company even began making versions of its software for the Apple Watch last April, one month after Apple unveiled the device.
“Just last month, we had more than 60 million logins to our apps … the bulk of which are mobile only,” Lye said. “They can run their business much more near real time than ever before.”
HotSchedules has clients ranging in size from corporate chains with large scale IT organizations to local, independent establishments that are literally left to their own devices.
They may be using those devices more, but even tech savvy restaurateurs aren’t likely to be comfortable coding to an API. HotSchedules allows a variety of methods to integrate with their programs, including uploading CSV files in batches in addition to real time and FTP data transfers.
Serving the whole house
As the company has grown, HotSchedules has expanded its software toolkit to serve other areas of managing a restaurant, including referral-based recruiting, onboarding and training through e-learning modules, payroll adjustments and inventory management.
The expansions have come from strategic partnerships with other software and equipment makers, largely through open platforms and APIs, and have accelerated rapidly in the past few months.
“Running a restaurant is really hard,” Lye said. “People work 60 to 70 hours a week to make no money. We focus on their two biggest expenses: People and food. Anything we can do to save money on labor.”
And HotSchedules has saved restaurants a lot of money on labor. A franchise group that owns 13 Auntie Anne’s locations and a Cinnabon throughout Washington state and Alaska used the software to reduce the time spent preparing store schedules for Black Friday from six hours to about 10 minutes.
They also quickly caught a shift supervisor who had been stealing cash deposits.
The Austin-based Tacos And Tequila restaurant group reported saving $17,500 annually per location by using HotSchedules to create schedules.
In addition to the company’s existing solutions for labor management, including an Affordable Care Act advisor module and POS integrations that leverage sales data for staff forecasting, the company has begun to expand into recruiting solutions and recording food safety checks.
Those two areas are the focus of the company’s three most recent partnership announcements: On February 8, the company began a multiphase collaboration with PeopleMatter to link the two companies’ complementary talent hiring and management applications.
On February 17, the company linked with PAR Technology Corporation’s Brink POS to allow PAR users to sync point of sale data with three applications: HotSchedules labor management, Reveal and Inventory.
Today, HotSchedules announced another partnership leveraging its same IoT platform, this time with Connecticut-based Cooper-Atkins, a manufacturer of instruments for measuring temperature and humidity for compliance with food safety regulations.
The Cooper-Atkins Blue2 is a temperature probe for food, air and surfaces that replaces the old method of recording food safety checks by hand with a Bluetooth transmitter that interfaces with third party applications such as HotSchedules Logbook, a tool for restaurant managers to keep an eye on their operation from virtually every angle.
HotSchedules plans to continue the trend, with a series of announcements a spokesperson described as “rolling thunder.” Lye said it’s all part of the company’s strategy to be the end-to-end solution for the service industry.
“We’re going to stitch together POS data, labor, inventory, supplier, hiring data and even weather and traffic and fryer and refrigerator. All of these provide input to drive forecasting,” he said. “Hopefully companies that used to compete with us now no longer do because they can’t afford to invest like we do, and don’t have the breadth or depth to cover all the bases.”
