Case Study: El Pollo Loco achieves a connected, efficient workforce with Dayforce

El Pollo Loco cooks up a connected workforce

El Pollo Loco, a fast‑casual restaurant chain founded in 1975 with nearly 500 locations and about 5,000 employees, was hampered by a patchwork of disconnected legacy systems and custom middleware for scheduling, payroll, and recruiting. Managers had to log into multiple platforms to get a complete view of workforce data, making reporting, compliance, and day‑to‑day workforce management time‑consuming and error‑prone as the company scaled.

After evaluating several vendors, El Pollo Loco implemented Ceridian Dayforce—a unified, mobile‑first HCM with a single database—rolling it out to 196 corporate stores in March 2020. The consolidation of roughly 10 systems into one improved timekeeping, scheduling, payroll and communication (critical during COVID), enabled data‑driven compensation decisions and recruiting insights, supported a $2M merit increase rollout, simplified audits, and provided a single source of truth to help the company scale and operate more efficiently.

El Pollo Loco

Michelle Coombs

Director, HR Systems & Processes