Introduction
Employees are happier since S&A Foods introduced Open Options from Crown. The software which was introduced in 2001 replaced a previous system, which had resulted in a number of employees being paid incorrectly, creating obvious workload issues for the payroll team as the errors were corrected. “With Open Options employee relations have improved significantly” commented Shane Sweeney, HR Controller “Our employees now receive a much improved service, and have a greater confidence in the system”
Background
| Number of employees |
| over 800 |
| Business Sector |
| Food & Drink |
| Location |
| Derby |
| Product Used |
| Open Options |
| - Time and Attendance |
| - Access Control |
Derby based S&A Foods has gone from strength to strength since the founder, Perween Warsi, set up the Company 18 years ago in her kitchen. She identified a gap in the market for supermarket ready made meals that would match the taste and quality of those served in Indian homes. Her vision paid off with contracts to manufacture ethnic meals for a number of supermarket chains and caterers throughout the UK and Europe, The business, with a current turnover in excess of 75m, employs more than 800 people at it’s Derby Headquarters. All product development, a staggering 250 new products a year, is conducted at the site under the watchful eye of Perween who is passionate about food quality in her drive to ensure ‘Sensationally Better Eating.’ The phenomenal growth of S&A was not, however, without problems. As the Company grew, the original systems needed to be replaced to streamline business processes. IT Manager, John Cutts remarked “It was obvious that we needed to replace the existing T&A and Payroll systems with best of breed products that would help us run the business more efficiently.”
The selection Process
A project was set up to review a number of Workforce Management Systems that could replace the previous Time and Attendance System and integrate with the payroll system. Critical to selection was the assurance that the new system would improve the speed and accuracy of the provision of attendance information to help S&A Foods better manage absence and hence reduce cost. Additionally the system needed to improve the flow of payable hours information to reduce the incidence and cost of overpayments. With a large workforce working variable shifts, the new system had to be able to deal with the existing work patterns and be sufficiently flexible to accommodate any new working patterns that they may wish to introduce in the future. Finally S&A needed to be assured that Working Time Regulations could be monitored more accurately. “Open Options Time and Attendance from Crown was chosen as it matched all our requirements and as an added bonus could utilise our existing Feedback time clocks” commented John Cutts. “We were impressed by the flexibility and power of the system and felt that Crown’s professional approach would offer the best solution to help us move forward. This was backed up by the excellent references we received from their customer base which gave us the confidence to proceed.”
