A workforce management transformation program — forecasting, scheduling, and the ATLAS system rollout — for a national travel center and retail chain with a multi-thousand-person hourly workforce.
| Title | Workforce Management Transformation |
| Category | Workforce Management |
| Organization | A national travel center and retail chain |
| Scale | Multi-thousand-person hourly workforce across distributed field sites |
| Role | Sr. Project Manager |
| Duration | Multi-year program |
Scheduling sat on a patchwork of spreadsheets and store-level judgment. Forecast accuracy drifted quarter to quarter, leaving sites either overstaffed on slow days or short on peak days. Labor cost grew faster than revenue covered. Site managers had no consistent view of where hours were going or whether the staffing model matched the demand pattern they were actually running.
I project-managed the workforce management program and coordinated with Operations, Finance, and Store Leadership to align on the labor plan. I project-managed the ATLAS scheduling system rollout, partnered with the analytics team on the forecasting redesign, and coordinated with Regional Managers so the new model landed in each market. I helped implement the new forecast cadence and supported the weekly operating review that kept the program moving.
The program started with the forecast. We redesigned the demand model using transactional data, weather patterns, regional traffic, and event calendars — then validated it against actual labor outcomes for the prior year before we trusted it. I coordinated with Finance on labor budgets that reflected the new forecast, and supported Regional Managers as they surfaced the local patterns a national model would miss. Governance ran through a weekly labor operating review where the conversation was no longer "are we over budget" but "why did this site miss the model and what changed."
That weekly cadence was the heart of the program. Site managers got a consistent view of where their hours were going. The analytics team owned the model refinement. Operations owned the scheduling discipline. Finance owned the variance explanation. The ATLAS system was the connective tissue — not a standalone software rollout, but a system that lived inside a governance structure that already existed. Risk management meant protecting the model from becoming a debate instead of a tool.
The program delivered $5M in annual labor savings through the ATLAS system rollout and the forecasting accuracy gains that followed. The savings came from scheduling discipline, not from cuts — by getting hours to the demand pattern, the same labor budget covered more revenue.
If workforce cost is outpacing the forecast, this is the kind of program that fixes it.
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