Predictive workforce estimates how many staff are required for future shifts. These predictions are visible on the daily roster view when creating rosters.
The predictions are based on projected future demand (in sales revenue, transactions or some other demand metric) combined with a ratio of how many employees are required to service the demand.
What types of businesses should use predictive workforce?
Predictive workforce requires historical demand data to be imported to Tanda. The easiest way to do this is with a point of sale integration to Tanda. If you're unsure if your point of sale system has an existing integration, see our available integrations in Settings > Integrations > POS Integrations or Demand Data Integrations.
Because you will require sales or transaction data to be imported into Tanda regularly, it's usually not practical to do this manually, although it is possible to manually import your demand data.
Setting up your sales data
After integrating your point of sale system, navigate to Settings > Integrations > Manage Datastreams.
Click on the data stream you want to configure:
Decide if you want to create projections of historical sales (in dollar amount totals) or transactions (in number of transactions) or another stat you have imported. Use the selector to make a choice
Select the teams you want to 'join' the data stream to. This means when rostering or reporting for that respective team, the datastream will be associated.
Creating demand projections
To open the demand prediction tool, navigate to the daily roster view. On the left side bar, click Predicted Demand to bring up the demand prediction tool.
Projections can be made based on an average of several previous dates/single day or via Tanda's AI forecaster or via imported forecast data. To choose your method or forecasting head to Settings > Integrations > Demand Forecasting.
You can modify the projected total sales using the modifer (percentage), or by entering a new total sales amount for the day. Modifying the prediction will retain the same pattern of sales, but increase or decrease the amounts proportionally across the day. You can also "fine-tune" predictions at different points of the day.
Configuring required staff predictions
To enter the ratios of how many employees are required relative to demand, go to the daily roster, select 'Table' in the prediction table filters and select 'edit' on the top left. This can also be done in data stream setup (you may have noticed this earlier).
This opens up a field to enter a ratio of the value of demand (sales, transactions, etc.) required before each additional employee is required.
You can enter the ratios in either of the below ways:
Option A: enter a simple ratio, e.g. for every $50 in a 15 minute block, roster a staff member.
Option B: enter a ratio for each additional employee. Click the cog wheel icon to define the specific value you want to roster each additional employee separated by a comma. E.g. entering '50, 120, 280' means $50 for staff member 1, $120 for staff member 2, $280 for staff member 3 and so forth.
These staffing ratios are applied to the projected demand to calculate the suggested staff counts shown on the projections table.
It is also possible to apply different ratios across different parts of the day via the Day Part Ratios uploader found in your tools on the left hand side of the roster screen.
You can set ratios for different parts of the day via the CSV upload, and the ratios will be set in the back end allowing different staffing approaches across the period.
Staff requirements before and after store open hours
Periods where there is no demand data - where the store is being opened and closed can also be factored in using the below steps.
Enter your business hours
The business hours are editable on the roster side bar. These are the hours that your business trades.
Enter how long it takes to open and close the store outside of trading hours
Open the Cognitive creator settings, and confirm the amount of time required to open/close the the shift outside of the trading hours.
During these times, the minimum staff count defined under the 'Staff' tab becomes the required number of employees suggested in the projection table:
Combining the requirements of multiple teams
The assisting teams feature is used to combine several teams towards contributing to a common staffing requirement.
For example in a cafe, the main team might be called 'Barista', but other teams like 'Team Leader' and 'Store Manager' might also work serving customers.
Rather than setting up individual ratios for each team, you can make the teams of 'Team Leader' and 'Store Manager' an assisting team of Barista - making their staff numbers count towards the staffing requirement of Barista.
To use assisting teams, navigate to Settings > Feature Management > Assisting Teams and enable the feature.
Make all the operational teams that serve customers an assisting team of the main team that customer facing team members work in.
This is done in each team's settings by navigating to Workforce > Teams > Edit team > Advanced Options > Assisting teams: