SK Chilled Foods Ltd, a fast growing UK company specialising in the supply of own label ethnic meals and snacks, has installed Open Options. The system has paid for itself within six months; reducing the workforce by 14%; and realised a 40% improvement in unauthorised absences.
| Number of employees |
| 700 |
| Business Sector |
| Food & Drink |
| Location |
| Cleveland |
| Product Used |
| Open Options |
| - Time and Attendance |
| - Payroll Interface |
With a wealth of management and employee information now available at the touch of a button, SK can now plan ahead to an even more successful future, confident that the Crown system will support its growing business demands.
Based in Cleveland, SK Chilled Foods Ltd has expanded at a phenomenal rate over the past five years and, by October 2000, was employing over 700 people across its three main Teeside manufacturing sites. The company was reliant on a manual clockcard system, which had been in place since 1986 and had become woefully ineffective at keeping track of overtime costs and unauthorised absences.
Having to collect clockcards and enter individual attendance data into the Pegasus payroll system manually was not only very time-consuming, but also often inaccurate because of human error. Producing reliable management information on a timely basis was therefore impossible.
Anne Yare, Human Resources Manager at SK, explains: "We are a very fast moving organisation and we have to be able to respond and plan very carefully and that includes people as well. We were losing time and money because we could not react to events fast enough. The manual clockcard system was merely a mechanism to pay people. What we needed was a management tool that would enable us to generate reliable information in a timely manner".
"It was important for our business to have an holistic approach to an overall site control and people management solution. Crown's Open Options system allows the full integration of our payroll and human resources planning systems, which helps with the complexity of our site planning process. Rather than losing people or using temporary labour when we don't need to, we now plan our output around the rolling sales forecast, taking into account absences due to holidays and work time requirements".
SK Chilled Foods has discovered that the benefits of the Crown system go beyond simply the business benefits. Users benefit, too. Being Windows-based, staff found the system both easy to use and less stressful, as Karen Sudron, Payroll Manager, explains: "Being able to download the information from Crown on to the Opera Payroll system has made immense savings in time. We can also answer wages queries very quickly, too, because we have all the information to hand. We no longer have to trawl back through mountains of clock cards. The transformation in the way we work is incredible".
Looking towards the future, Nicholas Kay, Corporate Account Manager, Crown Computing, says: "I think we can safely say that everyone at SK is delighted with the Open Options system. The success means they can now plan ahead and implement more of the features and facilities available".
Following the successful trial of Activity Management, full scale implementation is planned for 2002, as Anne Yare confirms: "The advantage of Activity Management is that it should provide a true costing of each product we make. We know that because we tried and tested this element of Open Options last December, our busiest time of the year. We set up a company called Christmas Ltd, with all activities, including employee time and attendance, costed to that company rather than the site. This gave us all the information we needed to produce a more accurate projection of actual costs; and that will make us even more efficient".
