Most hospitality groups have already solved their immediate operational headaches. You’ve moved away from paper rotas, digitised your shift management with Bizimply, and got a handle on your core daily admin. According to Mark Withington, who leads solutions and onboarding at Tenzo, that’s where the real profit opportunity actually begins.
Speaking on The Connected Shift podcast with Bella, Mark explained what’s left on the table once foundational systems are up and running, and why connecting specialised, best-in-class tools like Bizimply to an analytics engine beats consolidating into a rigid, all-in-one platform every single time.
The Cost Hiding After the Easy Wins
Once a restaurant or pub group has its workforce scheduling and inventory sorted, there is typically still 3% to 5% of EBITDA sitting uncaptured across cost of goods sold (COGS) and labour.
Why? Because operational and finance teams spend hours manually stitching together data from their workforce management tools, inventory systems, and point of sale (POS) platforms. By the time the weekly reporting flash is finally compiled, there is no time left to ask high-value strategic questions:
- Is our labour model still aligned with actual hourly footfall?
- Where are supplier prices subtly creeping up?
- What does next week’s forecasted demand actually look like?
Manual Data Compilation
Spent Hours on Spreadsheets
Zero Time for Analysis
Connected Tech Stack
Automated Real-Time Data
Proactive Margin Control
The Power of Best-in-Class: Bizimply x Tenzo Integration
As Mark points out, multi-site operators often face a choice: pick a single generalist software platform or combine specialised, best-in-class point solutions. While all-in-one software promises simplicity, complex hospitality businesses quickly outgrow generic tools. This is precisely where combining Bizimply with Tenzo changes the game.
Bizimply acts as the operational heartbeat of your venues, streamlining employee rotas, tracking live attendance, and managing attendance data on the floor. When you feed Bizimply's rich workforce data directly into Tenzo’s performance platform, you upgrade labour reporting into a 360-degree real-time optimisation engine.
By syncing Bizimply data with Tenzo’s AI analytics platform, hospitality managers gain powerful end-to-end advantages:
- Precision Labour Forecasting: Tenzo’s machine-learning engine combines historical sales, weather data, and local events to project future hourly demand. This forecast feeds back into Bizimply, enabling store managers to build rotas matched perfectly to anticipated guest flow, preventing overstaffing during lulls and understaffing during rushes.
- Tenzo Passthrough for Frictionless Ops: Hospitality tech stacks often suffer from integration gaps where a POS cannot talk directly to an inventory or scheduling system. Tenzo Passthrough bridges this gap by pushing POS sales and forecast metrics straight into tools like Bizimply. Scheduling managers can monitor live sales figures and historical performance right inside Bizimply without ever toggling between platforms.
- Instant Labour Cost Alerts: Rather than realising labour was out of control at the end of the month, the combined data triggers proactive alerts when projected labour costs as a percentage of sales cross set safety thresholds. Managers can adjust shift patterns in Bizimply before incurring unnecessary wage expenses.
Real-World Results: Getting Weekends Back and Protecting Margins
What does a connected tech stack look like in action? Mark shared several real-world examples:
- Honest Burgers: With around 40 locations and a multi-tool stack (including specialised scheduling, HR, ordering, and review software), the commercial finance team used to spend every weekend manually generating daily, weekly, and monthly flashes. Implementing Tenzo to aggregate their stack, including their workforce tools, automated the process entirely. Finance reclaimed their weekends and redirected their energy toward labour productivity and purchasing analysis.
- Public House Group: A London pub operator used AI insights layered over site data to uncover why one location’s COGS was lagging. The system isolated a sales mix imbalance combined with a POS pricing typo, enabling them to capture a 5% to 6% improvement in COGS at that site.
- US Restaurant Group: Rather than cutting staff to protect margins, one general manager used AI reporting to safely increase peak-hour reservation caps on OpenTable while adjusting staffing schedules to match. By tracking wait times, turnover, and labour hours simultaneously, they grew revenue and improved labour efficiency without damaging the guest experience.
Insights Alone Don’t Drive Change: Aligning Incentives
Mark’s takeaway for operations managers still moving data manually between systems: finding the data insight is only half the battle; setting your organisation up to act on it is what counts.
He highlights Camino, a five-site London tapas group, who brought their labour cost down from 36% to 31%. They didn’t achieve this just by viewing dashboards, they tied general managers’ bonus structures directly to a balanced scorecard combining guest satisfaction, total sales, and Bizimply labour targets.
When your workforce data from Bizimply connects seamlessly with your sales and financial performance in Tenzo, your teams stop firefighting reports and start focusing on the work that actually protects the bottom line.
Watch the full conversation with Mark Withington on The Connected Shift.
