With over 160 locations across two brands, Papa Gino’s saw a significant opportunity to streamline and standardize how schedules were built and managed across its system.
At Crunchtime’s Ops Summit 2024, one of the standout moments came when the New England-based brand shared its journey of labor management transformation. Greg Sheehan, Director of Learning & Development at Papa Gino’s and D’Angelo Grilled Sandwiches, shared how implementing Teamworx, Crunchtime’s labor and scheduling app, has helped the brand modernize scheduling, increase efficiency, and drive stronger alignment across operations, ultimately leading to significant time savings and increased visibility at the above-store level.
Let’s dive into the biggest takeaways from the session.
From Fragmented to Focused: The Challenge Before Teamworx
Before adopting Teamworx, labor management across the Papa Gino’s system was inconsistent and inefficient.
“We had an antiquated scheduling system; we would use Excel files, and it was a mixed bag of ways that people created schedules,” Greg said. “It made it very hard to manage labor as a brand because everyone was doing something a little different.”
This lack of standardization created friction at the operator level, making it difficult for area managers to enforce labor guidelines or approve schedules efficiently and effectively.
“It was hard to set guidelines that worked for all and that were communicated effectively. It also made it very hard to approve schedules as an area manager.”
The Rollout: Building a Foundation for Adoption
Papa Gino’s knew that the key to long-term success was more than just implementation: it was building a system that people could trust and adopt quickly.
“For the rollout process, we worked with our implementation team and our CSM to create our labor standards in Crunchtime. To learn how to do sales forecasting, decide how we want to configure the sales forecasting recommendation for the default calculations, train people on how to do that, create labor templates that would interact with those forecasts, and teach our managers how to create schedules within Teamworks.”
One major accelerator was the support from the Crunchtime implementation team.
“The Teamworks implementation team was there every step of the way. They helped understand where we were at from a labor perspective, what our goals and targets were at that time, and they recommended the best ways for us to create and develop our templates.”
Gaining Buy-In: Educating the Team
A crucial part of the rollout was securing operator and manager buy-in. They realized that many of their store managers were used to creating store schedules their own way, and might be resistant to a new system. Instead of a top-down mandate, Papa Gino’s invested in hands-on education.
“We held a workshop for all of our managers, we walked through sales forecasting, best practices, and from there we went into scheduling. Here's how you build a Teamworx schedule. Here are the templates available to you. We spent a lot of time reeducating our team, and we found that that had a lot of value and created a lot of buy-in.”
Immediate and Long-Term Wins
From day one, the time savings were evident. Between the custom revenue-based templates that could be applied to each store and auto-scheduling, the new system allowed for more efficient and accurate scheduling company-wide.
“The time to create a schedule was cut in half,” Greg noted. “There were significant efficiency gains right away.”
The Bottom Line: More Time to Focus on Guest Experience
By adopting a scheduling solution that ensures the right people are in the right place at the right time, Papa Gino’s has empowered its teams to deliver exceptional guest experiences while maintaining the labor efficiency needed to protect profitability every day.
To learn more about how Papa Gino's unlocks smarter scheduling and tighter inventory with Crunchtime, read the full case study here.
