Labor management is usually the biggest single expense for conveyor and self-service carwash operations. In a recession, efficient staff scheduling and labor cost controls can spell the difference between survival and success.
As most operators know, employee scheduling and time and attendance management is not as easy as it looks. To properly manage labor costs, you’ve got to constantly monitor employees with varying skill sets and availability, communicate a frequently changing staff roster to employees that are rarely onsite at the same time, manage time off requests, and handle dozens of work schedule questions or shift swap requests. You also have to keep employees from riding the clock or punching other staff members in. You may even have to monitor staff members who are minors or move shifts around to be sure that every shift has an English speaker or that an employee with particular training is on hand.
To be successful in the carwash and detailing business, you have to balance your staff members and the load level scheduling – ensuring that the staff are in place to handle the required number of vehicles quickly during busy periods, but not be overstaffed during slow periods – all while effectively managing and anticipating accurate labor costs.
Employee and staff management software allows operators to cut carwash staff scheduling and attendance management time from hours to minutes. Managers and operators can manage schedules at one or many stores, schedule to put staff members with particular skills or the most experienced staff into high volume time slots, notify employees of upcoming work schedules and send schedule changes by email or text message, monitor attendance from a remote location, and forecast your labor costs.
The hours you save with online employee scheduling and time and attendance systems will streamline your management time, freeing you to focus on the strategic decisions of running a successful carwash/detailing operation, rather than phone calls from disgruntled employees who didnt realize their schedule had changed. The fine-tuning you can do with employee scheduling, the reduction in missed or late shifts, the decrease in unnecessary overtime, and the ability to forecast labor needs and costs will save you money. In fact, labor management software can increase carwash profits by 3-5%.