A 350-staff hospitality group runs operations across thirteen sites. The rostering process used to be a fortnightly spreadsheet pass with three managers cross-checking penalty rates, qualifications, and leave - eight hours of work per cycle, with errors that compounded on shift swap.
Cognitiv was brought in through a warm referral to build a custom AI scheduler. The honest assessment: mature tooling already existed, so rather than over-building, Cognitiv recommended and implemented an existing workforce-management platform - configured against the venue's real awards, availability, and leave rules, with a human signing off each weekly draft. Predicted annual saving: $1M AUD. The board cared about the dollar figure. The projected seventy-five per cent efficiency lift on the rostering team was the number they would feel week to week.
The system runs as a weekly cycle. A human still signs off the draft. It respects the actual EBA, not a paraphrase of it. The value Cognitiv added was choosing and configuring the right tool - and knowing when not to build.