February 2002

Payroll administration has been reduced and attendance information improved at South Wales-based O.P Chocolate following a significant deal with Crown Computing.

O.P Chocolate make and distribute chocolate wafers, teacakes and snowballs for the own-brand market from its Merthyr Tydfil factory.
The company, which is part of the French Cemoi group, set Staffordshire-based Crown Computing the challenge of finding a solution that fulfilled the employee management needs for its 500-strong workforce.

And the system also had to integrate existing architecture into the solution in order to minimise costs.

Mike Hawkesford, Crown Computing Ltd Managing Director, said: "O.P. Chocolate set out to find a partner company that could provide it with a total solution which was flexible enough to allow for future expansion and account for new working methods while solving its immediate requirements.

"The system's ability to deal with annualised hours was a crucial factor in O.P. Chocolate's decision to use Crown."

Gareth Thomas, O.P. Chocolate's Information Systems Manager, said: "Crown's FM&C/400 solution has given us the ability to put the attendance and control information on every screen without the need for re-investment in new networks and hardware.

"By linking the system to our JBA Payroll system we have reduced the administrative effort need to prepare our weekly payroll, and removed the need for maintaining the specially written interface to our old time and attendance system."

Crown's FM&C/400 solution not only met all O.P.Chocolate's requirements but it also allowed the firm to integrate its existing Feedback clocks from a previous system thus reducing the cost of the project.

FM&C/400 runs on an IBM AS400 system, has strategically scaleable suite of products, is rich in functionality and provides a wealth of management information.

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