The situation
The client — one of the largest Wendy’s franchise operators in the United States, running hundreds of restaurants across multiple regions — had a fundamentally scale-driven HR operations problem. At franchise volume, every employee movement through the organization — a hire, a termination, a transfer between stores, a pay rate change, a role promotion — requires coordinated updates across at least three systems: the HR and payroll platform, the operational back-office system, and the POS platform where shift assignments and timekeeping happen.
Across 425 restaurants and thousands of employees, those employee movements happen constantly. Done manually, it’s several full-time jobs’ worth of coordination work every week, plus the inevitable data drift when updates land in one system but not another. A terminated employee still showing in POS is a theft risk. A transfer still routed to the wrong store is a scheduling error. A missed pay rate change is a payroll complaint or a compliance exposure.
Standard HR software doesn’t natively solve this. Each system expects to be the source of truth. Getting three systems to stay synchronized is an integration problem, not a configuration problem.
How we approached it
We built a seamless integration connecting three core operational platforms:
- ADP — payroll and HR system of record
- Restaurant Systems International (RSI) — QSR operations platform
- NCR Aloha — POS platform where shifts, clock-ins, and location assignments happen
The integration handles Moves, Adds, and Changes (MAC events) automatically. When an employee is hired, terminated, transferred, promoted, or repriced, the change flows from the system of record through the integration layer and propagates to every system that needs to know — in the right format, with the right timing, with the correct effective dates.
We designed the logic around how the client’s HR operations actually worked. Different MAC event types carry different downstream implications, different timing rules, and different validation requirements. Rather than force the client into a standard template, we built the integration to match their operational reality.
Why MAC automation matters at this scale
QSR operations at 425 restaurants generate hundreds of workforce change events per week. At that volume, the cost of manual coordination compounds quickly — both as labor hours burned by HR and operations staff, and as data drift that creates downstream problems. An employee still appearing in POS after termination creates theft risk. A missed transfer generates scheduling and paycheck errors. A missed rate change creates compliance exposure.
Automated MAC handling solves all of that — but only if the integration is reliable enough to trust. If the automation makes a mistake, you’ve just scaled the problem. The engineering bar for this kind of integration is different from one-time data migration work: the integration has to run correctly every time, without drama, indefinitely.
Outcome
- Seamless MAC integration across ADP, RSI, and NCR Aloha — moves, adds, and changes propagate automatically across all three systems
- Hours of HR and operations coordination time recovered every week, scaling with the business rather than the staff headcount
- Reduced data drift between systems, eliminating the downstream problems that come from payroll/ops/POS falling out of sync
- Infrastructure built to scale — the same integration handles 425 restaurants as cleanly as it would handle 600 or 800, supporting the client’s continued franchise growth
What this demonstrates
Integration engineering at QSR franchise scale, where the operational reality — hundreds of employee changes per week across hundreds of locations — demands automation that simply works. Multi-platform orchestration across ADP, RSI, and NCR Aloha, covering the three core systems of any QSR operation. And the kind of infrastructure work that quietly scales an operator’s ability to grow: less manual coordination per additional restaurant added, which is the point.