28 WORKFORCEMANAGEMENT
AUTHENTIC FOOD COMPANY SELECTS KRONOS
to the foodservice and retail sector, has selected Kronos to provide real-time visibility into the working hours of its employees across three sites in the UK. Key drivers of the project are to gain a greater understanding of labour costs against specifi c production lines, products and customers, and to automate a number of time consuming payroll-related processes.
T
he Authentic Food Company, the leading supplier of quality international ready meals and snacks
Ian Lee, The Authentic Food Company IT manager, explained: “As the company grew in size, we were rapidly outgrowing our old system and needed a time and attendance solution that would help us drill down into labour costs on each production shift and area, manage our workforce in real-time, automate the process of recording hours and remove the manual element from the payroll process. We researched the market thoroughly and selected Kronos as it gave us exactly what we wanted and more.”
Prior to selecting Kronos, The Authentic Food Company found that a high level of manual intervention was needed before the payroll could be signed off each week, which was costly, time-consuming and prone to errors. In addition to this, labour data was only available in arrears, making it diffi cult to manage the business proactively and in real-time. The complex pay rules held within Kronos will calculate the varying pay rates for the different job functions that can be carried out during a single shift, together with overtime, premium time and forward holiday pay.
STORE MANAGERS KNOW BEST
An impressive 85% of store managers believe a good wireless headset system linking staff and enabling them to communicate instantly improved customer service and sped up the scan and throughput of customers at the tills. Quail Digital undertook a before and after audit of 120 stores that had installed a wireless headset system and the results revealed that retail stores can save 36 hours every week at the checkouts once customer queries and supervisor requests are dealt with more speedily. Staff could
RETAIL TECHNOLOGY JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011
also respond much more quickly to customer queries on the shop fl oor with instant communication between employees via the headsets. “It is easy for the checkouts to become a bottleneck. Price queries, age-related authorisations, even requests for more baskets and change can signifi cantly slow down service at the till. Operators regularly have to wait for a supervisor response or holler at colleagues across the shop fl oor to grab their attention and ask for help, which looks unprofessional and holds up the
queue,” said Tom Downes, chief executive of Quail Digital, which is a specialist manufacturer of headset communications systems for retailers. “On the shop fl oor itself, often
customers are left hanging around while staff try to fi nd someone to deal with a query or they have to wander around aimlessly trying to fi nd someone to speak to. These days it does not take long for customers to get frustrated and leave and stores cannot afford to lose custom in this way.”
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