Know what's coming, before it hits the counter.

One forecast, from the week to the quarter-hour

Operators think in weeks. Shifts happen in fifteen-minute blocks. The same forecast answers both without switching tools.

1. W for the shape of the trading week at a glance.
2. D to drill into a single day, hour by hour.
3. Labour broken down by role, filtered however you need it.
4. Compare against the same week one or two weeks back.

The number gets better while you sleep

Forecasts behave like weather forecasts — they sharpen as the date approaches. Every version is kept, so you always work from the best available read.

1. Pick the latest so your judgement sits on the freshest data.
2. Older versions stay available for comparison and audit.
3. No usable history for a day? Replace Forecast borrows a comparable one.

“LIFELENZ forecasts become more accurate as the date approaches.”

See the peak inside the peak

An hourly view tells you lunch is busy. A fifteen-minute view tells you the twenty minutes that decide whether the queue holds.

1. 1 hr for the shape of the day; 15 min for the pinch points.
2. Express demand in whichever driver runs your business.
3. Labour redistributes underneath whichever view you choose.

Every day part, priced in labour

Sales forecast and the labour hours it implies, side by side, before a single shift exists. This is where the cost of the week is decided.

1. Forecast and labour hours for every day part.
2. The afternoon trough is where labour percentage quietly leaks.
3. Change a day part and the hours recalculate on the spot.

Demand and people on the same picture

The line is what your guests are about to do. The bars are the people it takes to serve them. When those two shapes disagree, you are either losing sales or paying for idle time.

1. Roles colour-coded, with employee counts on every interval.
2. Store hours along the bottom — coverage legible at a glance.
3. Hide a role from the graph without touching the labour totals.

You still know things the model doesn't

Road works outside. A school playoff down the road. A competitor closed for refit. Type it straight onto the day part and the whole plan follows — logged, attributed and reversible.

1. Adjust a day part or the whole day; it saves as you type.
2. The note records why; the bin puts it back.
3. Labour hours re-allocate automatically across roles.
4. History shows who changed what, when, and by how much.

The discipline that makes it work: only adjust for something the model could not have known.

Approve once, and the roster builds itself

Approval locks the number and freezes the labour target — so scheduling starts from ground that will not shift underneath it.

1. Submit for Approval with a comment; retract any time.
2. Above-store approval, or clear a whole estate in one pass.
3. AOS only runs on an approved forecast — the two are joined at the hip.
4. Afterwards, accuracy is measured against actuals and flagged in red past your threshold.

This is the handshake between forecasting and scheduling — and the reason 91% of schedules ran automated at McDonald's UK&I.