Cutting hours is the obvious lever. It is also the most expensive lever to pull, because every hour you cut is risk: risk that the Drive-Thru backs up, risk that the Dining Room goes dirty, risk that a regular customer notices.
The faster gain, in our experience across 620+ stores, is to fix two things you can fix without changing the schedule: position placement and the training rating model. Both are silent labor costs.
The average CFA store has roughly 12 positions in its FOH Lunch Peak Layout. If your placements are wrong on 2 of them, every shift, you are paying full labor for half the productivity on those positions. The math is brutal: that is roughly 8% labor leak just from placement, before you have looked at scheduling.
OneClick's Auto Schedule reads each Team Member's training ratings and places them on the position they are best on. The leak closes the day Auto Schedule starts running.
If your Team Members have not been rated, your Leaders are making placement decisions from memory. Memory is not random. But it is biased toward the Team Members who showed up loudest in the last shift. The Team Member who quietly does iPOS 2 well does not get placed there next time, because no one wrote it down.
The four-tier rating system (not qualified, qualified, above average, super star) takes 30 seconds per Team Member per position to record once. After that, the data drives placement automatically.
This is not a substitute for actually being thoughtful about your schedule. If your store is over-staffed, OneClick will not fix that. The labor reduction comes from making the labor you already have work better.
Most stores see meaningful variance within 30 days. Operators who commit to the rating workflow during the first 30 days see the full effect within 60.
Yes. The Operator at Chick-fil-A® Woburn, MA (one of the highest-volume CFA stores in New England) uses OneClick specifically because the volume makes whiteboard placement impossible.
4-8% in the first 90 days, depending on how disciplined the store was about placement before OneClick. David Thanepohn saw 8.6% in his first 90 days.