Chris Eley (Produce) Ltd specialise in growing vegetables, lots of vegetables!
With over seven hundred and fifty acres of prime Lincolnshire land, the company produces a range of quality cauliflowers, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbages and potatoes.
Introduction
The company employs around sixty staff with three local agencies providing additional workers as the season workload demands. At peak there would be around one hundred people working on the farm.
The logistics of employing staff that are working in fields and greenhouses is somewhat different to factory and office workers. The most obvious difference is the scale of the workplace and the fact that there are less clearly defined entrances to the place of work. Also, because of the type of work – handling foodstuffs, hygiene and contamination are extremely important issues and new staff must undergo a detailed induction process when they join the company. This induction process follows guidelines specified by the British Retail Consortium
Requirement
The management requirement from an automated system was quite simple: The solution must be capable of handling a variety of work patterns that could be easily changed throughout the year. The solution must also allow the agency staff rota to be entered in advance so that the management are aware of who should be working on a given day. Also, staff that are new to the company should be easily identified to complete the required induction process.
Solution
timeware® was able to provide effective solutions for each requirement. To overcome the considerable distance issues, timeware® installed biometric attendance terminals connected to the company network by GPRS. Next by liaising with the independent agencies to ensure their staff rotas were provided in an acceptable Excel spreadsheet format, timeware were able to develop a unique automated integration process that populated the timeware® planner with staff listed on each spreadsheet. Any new staff that could not be found in the timeware® personnel module, or staff that had not worked for the company for over six weeks, were marked as ‘New starters’ and a note was made on the HR agenda to identify people required to complete a health check questionaire.
Summary
“There have been a number of benefits since the introduction of the system, mainly reductions is the time taken to produce management reports now that hours worked information is easily available in Excel format. The document storage feature combined with the user-defined fields enabled me to develop additional agenda alerts relating to staff that have not fully complete the company induction – an invaluable tool and a great asset in preparation for the yearly audit.”
Darren Beavis
Company Accountant
15th March 2013