CASE STUDY

Chicago-based Owner Operator

LIFELENZ is a cloud-based automated workforce and human capital management platform solving challenges related to onboarding new employees, sales & labor forecasting, scheduling & time clock/keeping, insights & reporting, and labor law compliance. The platform uses AI and machine learning to automatically self-tune and self-manage models specific to a particular store with hyperlocal attributes.

Customer Challenges

The customer operates McDonald’s restaurants in the greater Chicago, Illinois metropolitan area.  In July 2022, the company acquired an additional 19 stores, bringing the total up to 31 locations with over 1300 employees.    

The customer stated the number one reason to engage LIFELENZ was the city of Chicago instituted new compliance pay mandates on employers requiring changes in schedules in writing for employees, among other things.  The company’s existing solution, required by McDonald’s for their franchisees, could not handle the new mandate. In addition, the current solution was a bit archaic, lacking accuracy required, and didn’t provide the level of features the LIFELENZ solution provided.  

Implementing a solution that exceeded expectations

The customer said their initial concern was if LIFELENZ would meet those new compliance mandates imposed by Chicago.  Learning to manage all the new requirements Chicago was making the company pany comply with was daunting. Their people were spending a lot of time on administration to be compliant.  In addition, the company had been looking at other vendors for a communication App enabling the store General Managers (GM) to. Those concerns were lessened greatly in the initial customer presentation where the LIFELENZ team demonstrated and detailed successes they’ve enabled with similar customers in the New York area.  

Once the decision to move forward, there were the usual concerns with any new software solution, regarding the transition and the impact/potential downtime to their business operation and would the solution work as advertise.  

The customer happily reported the transition to the new system went smoothly, “the LIFELENZ team did a good job of training us. They came to our location for employee training.  It was a good two-way dialogue – we asked questions, you asked questions. We went through rotations. It went well, and we quickly got up to speed and confident about the solution.”

In addition, there were no disruptions to our existing solutions. Since Lifelenz is cloud-based, it seamlessly integrated into their existing systems.  Additional hardware and services to implement and support wasn’t required. From a support perspective, even though the platform was tailored to the demands of the customer, they were happy to state: “everything works the way you guys (LIFELENZ) said it would. If anything went down or doesn't work, even to this day, if something doesn't work, we just open a support ticket and you guys resolve it relatively quickly.”

The Bottom Line:   Did it Work?

The bottom line was if the LIFELENZ platform met the customer’s needs.  They gladly reported a significant increased ability to comply with the new labor laws in Chicago. The customer stated, “that's one of the best things about LIFELENZ is that you make it so easy for us to be able to comply. If there's any issues, red flags. Even if there are going to be compliance issues, which is fine, but at least we know what it is. It's tracked properly and we're able to pay it out. No issues!”

Additionally, the customer took advantage of the cloud-based scheduling features.   While scheduling is always going to be a tedious process, LIFELENZ made it easier for the customer to handle the schedules.   With the intuitive App, it is much easier to build schedules and add new employees, which tends to be time consuming.    

The customer stated, “it was hard to quantify, but having the daily activity readily available does help the GMs gauge are things going good/bad. Seeing our labor on the fly on our smartphone with the app helps with profit because if I can see my labor on my phone quickly, even if they are off, they can access the data easily. Then, they can make those decisions if there are too many people on the floor.  will save us some and increase profitability. “

The customer favorably reported that all their stores have implemented and are using LIFELENZ.    When asked if they would recommend it to other franchisees, he stated, “Absolutely, oh, you switch right away. I have recommended the LIFELENZ platform to a couple of operators.”  They have met our challenges with labor laws and compliance, sales, and labor forecasting and dramatically improved our scheduling. In the end, our store GMs are much more in control, which trickles down to better communication and improved employee morale with our employees.