Craveable Brands sits behind four well-known Australian quick service restaurant brands: Red Rooster, Oporto, Chicken Treat and Chargrill Charlie’s. As a franchisor, it supports more than 400 business owners operating over 600 restaurants, employing 13,000 people and serving more than a million customers each week. That’s no mean feat!
At that scale, labour is one of the most important levers in the business. So when Craveable set out to improve how it managed workforce operations, the impact was significant.
Since rolling out Tanda across its network, the business has reduced labour costs by $4.4 million, improved compliance outcomes, and given franchise partners time back to focus on running their restaurants.
Challenges
When the cracks start to show
There wasn’t a single breaking point, but rather a growing sense that the way labour was being managed wasn’t going to scale well.
On the surface, everything worked. Stores were open. Teams were rostered. Customers were served.
But behind that, small inefficiencies were stacking up.
Onboarding was manual and paper-based. Contracts were “everywhere in the office”.
Rostering required pulling together multiple sources of information across different systems, from sales data to labour targets and availability.
For franchise partners like Ankith Ray, this approach was cumbersome.
“I was using multiple softwares just to accomplish the same thing.”
And compliance, while understood, relied heavily on managers applying complex rules themselves.
Individually, these weren’t critical issues. But together, friction was bubbling up across the network. These inefficiencies cost time, introduced risk, and made it harder to operate consistently at scale.
The bigger problem: no clear visibility
For Chief Financial & Operating Officer Tim Fawaz, the issue went deeper than manual processes or disconnected systems.
It was a lack of visibility into one of the most important drivers of the business.
“Labour management was not transparent. The system we had wasn’t intuitive and we didn’t have a particularly good understanding of the levers or the mechanisms to improve and optimise labour.”
That had a compounding effect. Rostering decisions were often based on past data, without an easy way to adjust to changing trading patterns throughout the day.
In practice, that showed up in a few ways:
1. Staff could be rostered at the wrong times, with too many people on during quiet periods and not enough during the rush.
2. Inefficiencies could sit inside individual stores without head office having a clear view of them.
3. It was difficult to tell which stores were performing well, and which were just getting by.
4. Opportunities to improve weren’t obvious and had to be pieced together manually.
Without a clear view of labour performance, it wasn’t just difficult to optimise. It was also difficult to understand how much those inefficiencies were really costing.
Or, as Tim puts it, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Building a system that could scale
Once those gaps were clear, the focus shifted to what a better system actually needed to do.
Chief People Officer Kathryn Farnell saw that this wasn’t about fixing one part of the process. It was about making the entire operation easier to manage across the network.
That meant moving away from disconnected tools and manual processes, and bringing everything into one place. Hiring, onboarding, rostering, and payroll needed to work together, not sit across different systems.
“We wanted a complete workforce management system because what we had before didn’t cover the full suite of onboarding and payroll needs.”
Just as importantly, it needed to simplify compliance.
Operating under the Fast Food Industry Award brings a lot of complexity that can’t be managed through manual checks alone. Anyone who has dealt with these rules knows how quickly things can get messy.
For Kathryn, having those rules built directly into the system wasn’t optional. The goal wasn’t to make managers experts in award interpretation; it was to give them a system that helps them get it right as part of their day-to-day work.
Franchise partners needed something that reduced admin, not added to it. Employees needed to handle simple tasks without going through a manager. And the support centre needed a clear view across the network.
This wasn’t just a new piece of software, but rather a shift in how workforce operations would run at scale.
After a comprehensive evaluation, Craveable selected Tanda and rolled it out across the entire franchise network.
“We needed to have the industry award out of the box to simplify really complex legislation.”
What changes, and what that unlocks
The biggest shift is in how decisions are made day-to-day. Craveable’s experience shows what happens when workforce management is treated as one connected system, not a set of separate tasks.
Rostering moves from something built first and checked later, to something shaped in real time.
Instead of pulling together multiple reports, franchise partners like Ankith can see how sales and labour line up as they are building the roster.
“In Tanda, I can see sales per hour while I’m rostering. I don’t need multiple reports anymore.”
Labour is matched to demand as it happens. Over time, that more precise allocation adds up, contributing to a $4.4 million reduction in labour costs across the network.
As Tim explains:
“It's not about reducing labour; it's about putting it in the right places at the right time.”
You can see the difference in store: better coverage during busy periods, less overstaffing when things are quiet, and a more consistent customer experience.
Compliance follows the same pattern.
Instead of relying on managers to interpret rules manually, things like breaks, overtime, and pay conditions are built into Tanda. These rules guide decisions as rosters are created and timesheets are approved.
In practice, that means managers can’t accidentally roster in a way that breaches compliance. The system acts as a guardrail, flagging or preventing issues before they happen.
This reduces risk across the network and improves audit confidence.
Onboarding becomes much simpler.
What used to be paper-based became digital. Contracts, right-to-work checks, and documents were all handled in Tanda, instead of being spread across the office.
For franchise partners, that means fewer errors, better compliance, and less time spent chasing paperwork.
And for employees, the change is just as tangible.
With a mobile-first system, everyday tasks like accepting shifts, swapping shifts, or applying for leave can be handled instantly in Tanda.
“Team members can do everything from their mobiles. That’s something they’ve really loved.”
Across the network, things run more smoothly, and teams are more engaged.
For franchise partners, one of the most immediate impacts is time.
Ankith saves around three hours each week, time that had previously been spent on admin, checking timesheets, or managing fragmented systems.
“Saving time means I can spend more time in the store, working on customer service and food quality.”
And for those who lean further into the system, using predictive rostering and labour insights more actively, the gains are even more pronounced. Some achieve up to 4% labour optimisation.
Results
4% labour optimisation at store level
3 hours saved per franchisee per week
