Rowse Honey,

Oxfordshire

For over 70 years, honey has been the passion of Rowse Honey in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. Over 200 staff (including agency staff) are employed at The Beehive, the Rowse factory in Wallingford.

"We had been with Chronologic (previously Access-to-Time), for many years and, although the support provided by them for the old system was excellent, we knew it was time to look for a new system and they were the obvious choice.

We have so many different shifts in use with lots of different working schedules, there were concerns about whether the complexity could be handled. As it turned out, our concerns were unfounded as the WFM system has so many different and clever ways to handle all the different shifts and calculations, it's easy to get exactly the output we need.

The new system was much easier for employees to use, with the proximity fobs you don't get issues with swipe badges being lost or moved from the racks."

For the team at Rowse, two key benefits delivered by WFM by Chronologic are accurate pay and time savings on payroll preparation.

"In the past, we always had to modify the export to correct for shortcomings in the old system. The payroll preparation used to take at least a day and now it's finished by lunch time. This saves the company paying overtime to get the hours ready for payroll. The accuracy of the hours means that there are no discrepancies between the hours worked and those being paid. We now have a complete and accurate audit from times clocked to payroll. The daily edits for missed clockings and overtime authorisation on the old system used to take an hour as a minimum and now with the exception management it's about 15 minutes. Another saving!

All the different shift rates are handled easily. Even the fact that we have different rates for different shifts and shifts are swapped all the time, the overtime calculations come out correctly every time. The calendar for absences and holidays is really easy to manage as well, and makes responding to the question "How many holiday days have I got left?” really easy - we just bring up the calendar for someone and we know that the holidays are correct, this just wasn't possible in the old system. We no longer need to set up the calendars on an annual basis either, WFM just rolls forward without intervention… that's bliss! Now that the system is looking after itself there’s more time to get on with other tasks.”