7shifts is a restaurant workforce and scheduling management application, which also features collaboration features, from the Canadian company of the same name.
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WorkForce Suite
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
The WorkForce Suite, by WorkForce Software, is a mobile-first, cloud-based modern workforce management solution with integrated employee communications and collaboration capabilities. The WorkForce Suite aims to help global enterprise organizations optimize their labor, protect against compliance risks, and maximize productivity while building a highly engaged, resilient, and agile workforce.
7Shifts is ideal for a broad number of restaurant clients, whether it is a single unit, independent location or multi-unit, multi-jurisdiction group like ours. Pricing is very reasonable, and as mentioned earlier, a lightweight and intuitive platform makes it easy to implement and maintain, and scalable for growth
EmpCenter is really well suited for companies with minimal variety in time keeping needs. Certainly somewhere that has fairly regular work schedules and operational needs the system would be programmed for and meet those needs quite well. I think they assert themselves as a product specifically for those more complex companies, and I believe it is one of a few products available for companies with many employee types and complex work schedule and pay needs, but because of those complexities each have their own specific customizations I feel it is difficult for the company to then manage the different products that end up existing. Each ends up being unique so applying large scale changes doesn't work well as something we may request and need if applied over EmpCenter in general may cause problems for another company. Therefore everything has to be done on an individual basis and is more time consuming and costly.
works well with other systems. We were able to collect data from another time system, Avaya phone systems and even a point of sale system with not a lot of difficulty.
They know their product and integration points. They were able to troubleshoot problems with hardware time collection devices quite quickly. We found the devices they sold to be quite durable.
Out of the box they have more reports than I would have anticipated. Creating new reports was sometimes a task if it was complex but there were usually similar reports you could use as a starter template
When creating schedules I wish there was a way to remember the last schedule you were on instead of ordering them in alphabetical order.
When working on a schedule, again when you revisit it, it alphabetizes the employees instead of keeping them in the order you add them. This is pertinent for our business because we're reservation-based and work off of a rotating schedule where the lowest ones are called off if there are not enough reservations.
After spending close to 5 years to decide on which payroll product to acquire for our University, I cannot image we would switch now that we have it in use.
I would say everyone at our store really appreciates the fact that we have 7shifts. We would be lost with out it. It would be hard to find anyone that does not support the software.
For me, 7Shifts has the same amount of functionality, but for a much better price. The app functionality of 7shifts was easier to navigate and allowed me to do more than HotSchedules. I've recommended it to several other local businesses who have implemented it as well and had great luck.
EmpCenter is a new software to the company however, I only trained on the old software for a few months before EmpCenter was introduced. I think EmpCenter has a smoother data entry process and can run more in depth reports, but since this is the system I know best I cannot accurately compare it to previous software.
Positive: Less call outs/ and missed communication due to internal conversations that were never communicated. For example, employees tell manager A they are not coming but Manager A does not tell manage B and C.
Positive: Manager log book has helped multiple departments stay in touch and on the pulse of the floor operation. Departments like HR, events, reservations, AP/ AR, etc. are not empowered to be more proactive
Labor and sales are tracked and can be forecasted which has helps us schedule SMARTER
EmpCenter has reduced the amount of time administrators are spending on payroll. Certainly it has made our entry to our pay system more efficient since we can simply load the data from the time keeping system and we are not collecting actual physical signatures and paper timesheets that must be reviewed for accuracy and completeness. The system does this for us and some automatic calculating of certain pay due that we were hand adding. However the feedback I am getting is that the supervisors feel their work has been increased greatly. They are spending more time correcting and approving time. Essentially the work we were doing in our central offices to review and correct time the supervisor must now do as they approve the time. We have now asked them to be more responsible for proper reporting and use which requires they know more about the rules and many different aspects of pay than they had before. We have employees who are union represented and get some benefits from the contract others do not receive, contract employees who have certain pay aspects in their contracts that must be known, as well as temporary employees and students who get very different pay from the other employees. While some things have been programmed for the system to know and handle, some things must be added to the time sheet to pay properly or the way time is reported is different (some clock out for lunch some don't) supervisors must now know these differences while that used to be a role that was more mine as an administrator. Now I just help them and audit and review.
