CASE STUDY

Cool Running Events

A SUCCESS STORY

cool running events logo

EVENTS

INDUSTRY

100+

EMPLOYEES

6

Locations

2021

USER SINCE

Cool Running Events (CRE) is an event management company specialising in the production, management and marketing of pop up events. The company operates nationally known and award winning brands such as Ice Skating.ie, The Nightmare Realm and Ocean Escapes. 

Cool Running Events are Ireland’s largest operator of seasonal ice rinks, operating in the ice rink business since 2004 (Cool Running Events was established in 2007). The company has installed and managed major ice rinks in shopping centres, event centres and locations such as Millennium Park Blanchardstown Centre, Mahon Point Shopping Centre Cork, Dundrum Town Centre, The Royal Dublin Society (RDS), Citywest Convention Centre, Mullingar Town Park, The Mall- Castlebar and Winterval Waterford.

We have expanded into varied events (Ocean Escapes, Summer Bay, The Nightmare Realm, Christmas World) whilst constructing and managing ice skating rinks around the country over the winter. It’s pretty cool having them onboard the Bizimply community!

The Challenge

Cool Running Events opened their doors back in 2007. Since then, they have expanded with multiple events and multiple locations; which also resulted in managing a bigger team.

“All admin work was completed by hand and on spreadsheets,” explains Sarah, “from scheduling shifts, to recording shift times of employees to payroll”.

However, Sarah knew as the business grew and the team expanded, they needed a reliable scheduling and timekeeping system.

At the top of Sarah’s main concerns was Scheduling of her employees. With events, it is always unpredictable how busy it will be so trying to assign shifts was always a task. Some shifts required full-time staff whereas others could be part-time or on call, trying to accommodate and manage this across several locations was starting to become a continuous struggle. 

As shift times were hard to predict, it also meant managing the hours that staff clocked in and out were hard to track too. Often staff would forget to manually record when they started a shift or when they finished; “We had no formal process in place for staff to submit their working hours, we knew that our records were inaccurate because often staff would forget to write down their hours and we would have to estimate their shift times.”

Manually carrying out the time and attendance of employees in this way will always lead to having higher labour costs for your business. With Bizimply, you can begin saving on labour costs straight away as you can have completely accurate records of when staff clocked in and out on the Timestation app. 

Sarah developed on this saying; “Getting the data from multiple sources, all in inconsistent formats to figure out payroll, was just becoming an endless nightmare!”

cool running events

The Solution

“Bizimply has helped us overcome a lot of challenges, straight away we began to see results.” 

Sarah saw instant results from Scheduling and Payroll straight away, what used to take hours to complete. They are now able to run payroll in 20-30 minutes; “I have saved so much time on payroll alone”.

With Bizimply, Sarah is now able to approve the hours worked at each event, avoid any misunderstandings or errors, set the schedule up and copy it for future events, which means it can be published within minutes. 

It’s simple and easy to make changes to the schedule and republish it for our employees to see.”

Through the MyZimply app employees have instant access to the schedule as soon as it is published. The majority of Cool Running Events staff are students and we all know they like to have a social life too! Sarah told us how; “Staff love having the transparency and the ability to pull up their schedule at any time, they’ve said how much easier it is for them to be able to plan activities outside of work too.”

As shift patterns don’t fluctuate too much, Sarah said that it doesn’t require changing the schedule often unless someone has booked time off or put in an unavailability request. Once one schedule has been created for each location, it can be copied and used each week going forward. “I can’t believe how fast and easy it is to copy over a schedule, click publish and I’m done. It’s very rare any adjustments are required too so I’m now only spending minutes to publish a schedule, if even!”

Cool Running Events have reduced their schedule time by 60%  – a massive time saving for them to focus on entertaining customers and making sure everything runs smoothly. 

With some locations of Cool Running Events being seasonal it means that staff are only seasonal too.  Bizimply allows you to simply deactivate these employees until the location reopens for the season again, when reactivated all their information from before is still securely stored, saving managers the time of having to input all employee information again. 

With our employees steadily coming and going, the process of making sure we have the right amount of staff coverage is important and has been much easier with Bizimply. We are able to conveniently add new employees to our account at any time and they are immediately a part of the Cool Runnings gang! Straight away we can assign shifts and track their hours, this is a huge benefit for a seasonal business like us.”

Do you want to make similar changes? Speak to one of our business advisors today to find out how we can improve your business. Just book in below 👇🏻

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