Workforce Management Transformation
A workforce management program — forecasting, scheduling, and the ATLAS system rollout — for a national travel center and retail chain with a multi-thousand-person hourly workforce.
Getting hours to the demand pattern.
A multi-year workforce management program for a national travel center and retail chain, led by Abdul Kunateh in a professional leadership role. The work covered three connected fronts — redesigning the demand forecast, bringing scheduling discipline to distributed field sites, and rolling out the ATLAS scheduling system inside an existing governance structure.
- 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
A separate program, not a duplicate entry
This is a distinct program with its own problem and its own leadership scope. It sits at a different employer from the Enterprise Cybersecurity Program and the Infrastructure & Cloud Modernization work — a national travel center and retail chain rather than the multi-site retail and fuel operator behind those two. Its multi-year continuity is shared with the Digital Growth & Cloud Scaling program at the same organization: two separate mandates, one ongoing relationship.
Labor cost running ahead of the operating reality.
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.
Turning a scheduling problem into a forecasting discipline.
Abdul project-managed the workforce management program and held the alignment it depended on:
Program management
Project-managing the workforce management program and coordinating with Operations, Finance and Store Leadership to align on a single labor plan.
ATLAS system rollout
Project-managing the ATLAS scheduling system rollout across distributed field sites.
Forecasting redesign
Partnering with the analytics team on the redesign of the demand forecast that the schedule would be built from.
Regional coordination
Coordinating with Regional Managers so the new model landed in each market rather than staying a national abstraction.
Cadence and governance
Helping implement the new forecast cadence and supporting the weekly operating review that kept the program moving.
Forecast first, schedule second, govern continuously.
The order mattered: a schedule is only as good as the demand model underneath it, and a model is only useful if someone owns it week to week.
Rebuild the forecast
The demand model was redesigned using transactional data, weather patterns, regional traffic and event calendars — then validated against the prior year's actual labor outcomes before anyone was asked to trust it.
Align the labor budget
Coordinating with Finance so labor budgets reflected the new forecast, and supporting Regional Managers as they surfaced the local patterns a national model would miss.
A weekly labor operating review
Governance ran through a weekly review where the conversation shifted from “are we over budget” to “why did this site miss the model, and what changed.” That cadence was the heart of the program.
Clear ownership per function
Site managers got a consistent view of where their hours were going. Analytics owned model refinement, Operations owned scheduling discipline, and Finance owned variance explanation.
ATLAS was the connective tissue rather than a standalone software rollout — a system living inside a governance structure that already existed. Risk management here meant protecting the model from becoming a debate instead of a tool.
The same labor budget covering more revenue.
$5M
Annual Labor Savings
Multi-Year
Program Duration
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.
Scheduling discipline, not workforce reductions.
About These Case Studies
The initiatives featured represent selected examples from Abdul Kunateh's professional career. Certain organization details, technologies, and operational information may be generalized to protect confidential and proprietary information. Results reflect collaborative organizational efforts; case studies demonstrate Abdul's leadership responsibilities, contributions, and strategic thinking within these initiatives.
Complex Problems Require More Than Good Ideas.
They require leadership, clarity, disciplined execution, and systems capable of turning strategy into measurable results. Whether leading transformation from inside an organization or advising leaders through Kunateh Impact, the work centers on one question: how do we build organizations capable of consistently turning potential into performance?