CASE STUDY
Centra
A SUCCESS STORY
RETAIL
INDUSTRY
60+
EMPLOYEES
3
Location
2019
USER SINCE
Centra gained more transparency over their data and significantly reduced time creating rosters
Centra is Ireland’s leading convenience retail group, with 480 bright, accessible stores in communities throughout the country.
Centra stores provide you with convenient shopping solutions, have all the items you need and are good value for money.
They have a reputation for quality, value and friendly service, and the fact that stores are independently owned and operated by local people means that shoppers get the best of both worlds – commitment to the traditional values of good fresh foods and excellent services, combined with the price power and state-of-the art retail systems of a big national foodstore group.
Centra is part of Musgrave Retail Partners Ireland, the retail franchise division of Musgrave Group, one of Ireland’s largest grocery and food distributors.
We spoke with James Ryan, owner of Centras located in Dublin and advocate for Bizimply.
The Challenge
Pre Bizimply, James ran everything in his Centra stores manually. He laughed and admitted; “I’m embarrassed to say that’s how it was!”
Managers used Excel to create weekly rotas, these would be printed out and pinned up in store and shared in the work group chat.Â
Without a formal time off and an unavailability system in place, managers would often have to go back and make adjustments to the schedule, find staff to cover shifts when others had booked off or were unavailable to work.
In addition to this, James and his managers were never fully aware of his labour costs across the stores, which was having an impact on store performance.Â
The Solution
James said, “Bizimply has upped the level of professionalism.”
“Something that stood out to me recently was when we had a new employee start and I told them they will receive their roster on the Bizimply Employee app – you should get a notification on your phone, and she thought that was great!”
“Usually this employee would just get a text of her hours on the Saturday, sort of like we would have done before Bizimply.”
What may sound like such a simple concept. It’s amazing how it leads to a more seamless way of working. Every staff member is notified of their upcoming shifts, they can access it any time on their mobile phone, even when they are out and about.Â
It reduces staff no shows and it has been proven to lead to a more productive and engaged work environment.
“I love the ease of use of the system. If someone books a day off it shows up straight away on the roster so there’s no going back and forth saying I booked that off then having to check records and adjust.”
Our Unavailability feature has completely revolutionised the way our customers manage their employee time off. The enhanced visibility of the time off showing up when creating the schedule has further reduced time spent creating rosters.Â
“The rostering is super and it just makes everything so clear.”
The transparency of data has also had a huge impact across the stores. James’ stores have managed to reduce labour costs by up to 10%.Â
“Now I can tell my managers, X hours for the week, Monday etc. I can take a quick glance at the roster and quickly see if it’s over our costs for the week, whereas before on Excel we didn’t have that data insight.”
We are delighted to be rolled out across James’ Centra stores and proud to have such a strong advocate for our software.Â
This is what encourages us here to continue our dedicated, hard work, so we can make every shift run like clockwork for our customers.
