How Planday and Tenzo work together

How Planday and Tenzo work together

No matter how big your hospitality business, bar or restaurant is, you need data to make smarter decisions. Whether it’s smarter tracking of employee schedules or hours, or inputting trends from external factors like weather patterns to make sure you’ve got the right number of people at the right time, data is what can help set you apart from your competitors. The Planday Blog sat down with Tenzo Co-Founder Adam Taylor to see how they help customers do just this. 

Better data to make smarter decisions

It’s often said data is the new oil. In the fast-paced and challenging world of hospitality, the smallest change in processes — with decisions backed by data — can make an enormous difference to your margins, and help retain the people and customers who make your businesses a success for longer.

From minimising stock wastage to making scheduling and payroll simpler, every hospitality business can benefit from data-backed decision-making that makes your operation more efficient. As analysis from Forbes Magazine found, for hospitality businesses — including some of the biggest brands and chains in the market — the smallest change in things like scheduling rounding errors or inventory mistakes makes an enormous difference to your bottom line.

Adam says that’s where the integration between Planday and Tenzo can make the biggest difference.  

“The integration of Planday and Tenzo allows customers to make smart decisions based on multiple different data sources,” Adam tells The Planday Blog.

“Planday obviously has an amazing tool for scheduling and planning your labour. Tenzo analysis then allows you to connect that to different data sources, be it sales data, inventory data, social media data and various other different data sources. It gives you a kind of a holistic view of your business.

“Layering on interesting things like AI forecasts makes it become like predictive analytics that can help you think even smarter about scheduling, and many other decisions.”

Adam says there are three key benefits to customers from using Planday and Tenzo together.

“Number one, Tenzo helps with analytics and reporting. We produce dashboards that give you the information you need quickly, no matter where you are. We’re very mobile first. This means you can get all your sort of insights there. You can compare across locations. So, if you’re a seven unit operation, you can build dynamic score cards, handling the management reporting side of things,” Adam says.

“Planday and Tenzo save you time. So, at the end of a month a customer, or end of a week, may spend time downloading things, copying, pasting spreadsheets, trying to generate reports.

By having all this data flow into one place, with Planday and Tenzo together you’ve got all the richness of the data coming from Planday, but you’ve got it simplified for management reporting. That saves you time and hassle, which is a real benefit for all busy businesses.

“Then, number three is obviously labour optimisation. You can then identify where you had problems in the past. You can easily start to understand where you had too many people on at a given time. And then also see where you needed extra staff and for how long. This is when you can get into the predictive stuff — which is a really powerful part of this partnership. You can put the very accurate sales forecast coming through Tenzo with your scheduling data from Planday and make sure you’re looking at things in a smarter way for the future.”

What happens when you put Planday and Tenzo together?

Adam says when all these data points from Planday and Tenzo come together, smart businesses can unlock the key to better decision making for the future.

“Take all this data and see — do these two things make sense and align up? Then you can start to send predictive alerts and notifications to make sure you have the right people in the right place,” Adam says.

“For example, you could say next Tuesday it’s going to rain, you’re staffing for eight people, but you only need two. This is where you can use the predictive capabilities of the partnership. First, this will save you time and energy. And second, you either save labour costs or actually even more importantly, you have your labour in the busy periods help you drive sales. 

“I think often people think that this is a goal of trying to reduce labour costs, but actually I really believe it is not — it’s about getting it right. Together, we want to make sure you buy your staff in the right places, so that you sell that extra dollar. As opposed to trying to just save the 30 cents.”

Manage things on the go

Planday and Tenzo both understand that in the busy hospitality sector, tracking things in real-time is an important asset. If you’re running one of the biggest restaurant chains or a local bar, you need to have an insight at all times into factors like sales data, labour costs and predictive capabilities in case you need to make a change quickly. Adam says that’s why both platforms are mobile first, so you can get the data and insights you need no matter where you are.

“Building the platforms as mobile first just makes sense — it’s the way that people want to engage with shifts scheduling and planning. It’s the main way businesses will interact with the people who work in their restaurants and bars. And, whether you’re a local bar manager or you work in the head office of one of the bigger chains or corporations, using mobile devices is actually the way that people want to engage with data,” Adam says.

“So gone are the days of kind of complicated spreadsheets and PDFs. It’s all in dashboards and it’s all something you should be able to pull out on your phone straight away.

“And with Planday and Tenzo working together, that’s exactly what can happen.”

Want to get smart about COVID-19 and your hospitality business?

Planday and Tenzo’s CEOs were part of an expert panel with insights from what data can tell us today and practical tips for your hospitality business right now.

– What smart businesses are doing today

– How Government support can help you

– How to set your business up to bounce back stronger