Case Study: Panera Bread achieves real-time workforce visibility and faster payroll processing with Workday Adaptive Planning

Panera scales rapidly with real-time visibility into its workforce

Panera Bread, a bakery-café chain founded in 1981 with 900 locations and 52,000 associates, was expanding into catering, delivery, and consumer products while managing a high-turnover, multi-job workforce. Its legacy systems couldn’t keep up with rapid growth and complex pay rules, so Panera needed an agile, scalable finance and HR platform to provide real-time workforce insight and support continued expansion.

By deploying Workday (9-month rollout), Panera gained up-to-the-minute visibility into hours and overtime, enabling better staffing decisions, improved café health, and HR functioning as business partners. Results included reduced payroll cycle time (4 days to 1.5 days), 34,000+ employee self-service transactions, $1.6M annual savings from benefits arrears collection, and much faster job-title creation (2 days vs. 6 months).

Panera Bread