CASE STUDY
Follow Leisure Group
A SUCCESS STORY
Hospitality
INDUSTRY
100+
EMPLOYEES
9
Locations
2018
USER SINCE
Follow Leisure creates brands, communities and social spaces and their approach is simple: fresh, creative and innovative. They supply, manage and franchise market leading brands within the Hospitality and Leisure industry. Follow Leisure Group is a multi-venue hospitality operator and owner of some of Northern Ireland’s leading eateries including Slim’s Healthy Kitchen, Canteen, Output Espresso and Morning Martha.
The Challenge
Founder, Gary McIldowney has been in the hospitality industry for years. He knows first-hand the time it takes to fulfil each responsibility to keep the daily operations of the business going. From creating and costing out schedules, reviewing employee time cards and running payroll using pen and paper, out-dated clunky machines, and multiple spreadsheets.
“We were using a combination of spreadsheets and biometric machines for scheduling, tracking employee time and attendance, and preparing payroll. Having different systems that didn’t integrate with each other was a task in itself.” It took Gary and his team hours, if not days each week checking employees start and finish times while trying to compare spreadsheets to records from the biometric machine we used for tracking attendance.
“Crazy amounts of hours were wasted each week mainly due to manually inputting the information into our payroll software. This was happening across all locations, so you can imagine the length of time to complete payroll.”
Originally, like many others in the industry, staff could only check their rota schedules on a print out at work. One of the biggest problems were clashes between versions, because there were so many different forms of communication – from Whatsapp, email to phone calls the whole process was extremely messy. Gary quickly realised they needed software that would eliminate all that and help the organisation run as smoothly as possible. Output of the solution was to help Gary and his team save money and time. They researched a few options in depth and spent some time looking at features and cost comparisons, because they did not want to lose any more time choosing a system that did not benefit them.
The Solution
The reason Gary and his team went with Bizimply was down to; “the ease of use and how it brought 3 different processes into one simple dashboard, each process now works in tandem. That’s what stood out for us!”
“Creating schedules was so simple and the fact that you can see the costs as you build the schedule and prior to publishing, makes life so much easier for everyone in the business”
Lowering labour costs and streamlining their outdated processes was the Follow Leisure Groups main goal when starting with Bizimply. After implementing Bizimply, Follow Leisure Group immediately started to see the benefits. “Bizimply has definitely proven itself when it comes to reducing labour costs across all our locations.”
“If you take into consideration how our managers previously ran payroll, approved employee time cards, made schedules and cost them, it now saves each manager 6 hours a week. Across 9 locations, you are looking at saving over 54 hours per week, it’s insane when you calculate it out like that!”
Bizimply’s accuracy and consistency plays a huge benefit to Gary in this area.
Gary spoke about how Bizimply has helped each of their restaurants and cafes achieve a baseline labour cost across the Group; “With such granular insight to our data, we now know what our labour costs should be for each location. We are able to forecast demand better and we have lowered costs across multiple locations”
Gary has definitely seen the benefits of Bizimply and has even referred us to several of his friends within the industry. Across each location, managers are able to look after their workforce with ease and this is even prominent through each team and their heightened productivity and ability to efficiently communicate and work well together to continue providing an excellent level of service that represents each of Follow Leisures brands.
