CUSTOMEr STory

Winnipeg Jets

Throughout the NHL season, the Winnipeg Jets deliver an unmatched guest experience at the 15,321-capacity Canada Life Centre, managing 1,300 frontline staff across customer service, ushering, and maintenance through every game night. See how True North Sports + Entertainment uses Tanda to cut scheduling time by 75%, streamline shift replacements, and control labour costs across a demanding live-event operation.

Overview
The Key Challenges
The Solution
The Results
Tanda in action
Overview

Winnipeg lost its NHL team in 1996, a blow the city felt deeply. Hockey returned a few months later with the Manitoba Moose, an AHL team relocated from Minnesota by a local ownership group, but the mission went further than that. Fifteen years later, True North Sports + Entertainment succeeded in bringing the Jets back to Winnipeg.

"There were parties in the streets when it happened," reflects Kristin LaCroix, True North's Director of Technology Services. As a Winnipeg native, LaCroix deeply understands what hockey means to one of the NHL's smallest market cities. "Being involved in the National Hockey League gives us a big audience throughout North America. We want to represent the city in a way that everyone can feel proud of."

Today, True North owns and operates a portfolio that includes Canada Life Centre, the Burton Cummings Theatre, and the True North Youth Foundation, with the Winnipeg Jets and the Manitoba Moose at the centre of it all.

The Key Challenges

As the Jets' success continued to grow on and off the ice, frontline managers across customer service, ushering, and maintenance struggled to keep pace with the administrative load. Managing the labour of a 1,300-strong workforce is difficult at the best of times, and doing it entirely manually made it harder.

"There's a lot of different things our managers could be doing other than playing with Excel for hours every week," says LaCroix. Last-minute call-outs happened regularly, sending managers into a cycle of calls, texts, and emails to find replacements before shift start.

Time tracking was equally manual. "It was very laborious," shares LaCroix. "Managers would write down an employee's name, their start and end time, and someone would then take that timesheet and type it into a database." Non-standardized rounding habits across teams pulled timesheet accuracy down, compounding mistakes and driving up wasted labour costs.

  • Managers spent hours each week building schedules from scratch in spreadsheets
  • Last-minute call-outs meant chasing replacements through calls, texts, and emails before every shift
  • A pen-and-paper timekeeping process with inconsistent rounding drove errors and wasted labour cost
The Solution

The Jets chose to move on from manual processes and partner with Tanda to automate workforce management across the organization. They needed a cloud-based platform that could sync scheduling and time clocks across mobile and desktop, optimize shift creation, streamline replacements, and record time accurately without manual data entry.

The goal wasn't just operational efficiency. Easier work for managers and employees meant better experiences for fans on game day. "We want to make sure that every touch point of the guest journey is frictionless and welcoming," LaCroix says.

Tanda has unleashed our management team from their traditional manual methods. It has really given them the freedom to create a better experience for our guests.
Kristin LaCroix, True North Sports + Entertainment
The Results

Since partnering with Tanda, the Jets have given managers their time back, reshaped the employee experience, and delivered better game-day service for the people of Winnipeg.

With workforce management now centralized and automated, Jets management can focus on what matters most, winning on the ice and delivering an outstanding fan experience at Canada Life Centre.

"Winnipeggers survive some pretty tough winters," LaCroix proudly states. "We really band together a lot of the time and help each other out." That sense of community is exactly what ties the Jets to the people of Winnipeg.

Results

2

Streamlined shift replacements

The Jets now fill an average of 80 shift replacements per week through Tanda. When someone can't make a shift, managers send an open-shift alert and available staff claim it through the app, with no calls, group texts, or email chains. "With Tanda, switching shifts is so much easier. I don't know anyone who's not using it," says LaCroix.

3

Standardized time and clearer costs

The Jets set their own time clock rounding rules, so every clock-in and clock-out is adjusted consistently across teams. Managers can also break wage costs down by week, by day, and by individual shift, with the overtime impact of each coverage request surfaced up front. "Tanda is preparing us to become a little bit more strategic in how we schedule," shares LaCroix.

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