CASE STUDY
Markree Castle
A SUCCESS STORY
Hotel
INDUSTRY
400
EMPLOYEES
4
Locations
2021
USER SINCE
Owned and operated by the renowned Irish hotelier family, the Corscaddens, the award-winning Romantic Castles of Ireland collection is like no other hotel collection in Ireland. With a castle in each corner of Ireland, the Romantic Castles of Ireland is the largest independent and privately-owned collection of luxury castles in the country. Guests are immersed in a rich Irish history and treated to a true Irish Castle experience combining old-world elegance with modern-day comforts in each of the Romantic Castles of Ireland.
Guests come first at Romantic Castles of Ireland, so each castle runs relatively independently so they can provide the most white-glove service. However, despite a thriving business and great reviews, it led to back-office, scheduling, attendance and reporting issues. After a few weeks using Bizimply, each castle was able to reduce their admin by X hours per week, prove labour-law compliance and standardise reporting without compromising on their front-of-house guest experience.
The Challenge
Before Bizimply, Nick, Ops Manager in Markree Castle was using excel for building rotas – each HOD (Head of Department) would create schedules in their own way/style. There was also a lack of clarity as to how much labour costs were for each department when creating the rota.
Time and Attendance of staff was all completed manually via a timesheet, they knew this wasn’t very compliance-proof and it left it that they had no idea of their labour-sales percentage by department.
This extended to each of the castles, and each Manager had different processes in fulfilling all the tasks. This informal approach made it difficult to benchmark and report using the same data.
“We still did quite a lot of our work manually here at the Castle, we now realise how much time we were wasting before Bizimply”
The Solution
After implementing Bizimply, first in Markree and then throughout the group – Romantic Castles noticed an immediate improvement in three key areas.
First up was Scheduling, they replaced Excel spreadsheets with Bizimply’s simple, colour-coded drag-and-drop system that instantly costs out your labour by each department as you build the schedule. RCI managers were amazed at the hours they were saving per week.
“We are now getting accurate and up-to-date data that we can use to optimise our scheduling; using it to ensure the right amount of staff are working to cover the demand of our customers.”
Another area they saw a huge difference in was Compliance. Before Bizimply, the castle was using old-school biometric machines, most of the time they were faulty and wouldn’t work for kitchen staff with wet hands or else they used manual timesheets. The manual timesheets were a time consuming process and led to quite a few errors when it came to Payroll as the finance department would have to manually enter each employee’s hours, calculate overtime and holidays – it often got complicated.
RCI could now prove they were complying with labour-laws, breaks and reducing employee queries about payroll.
“We have minimised any errors we once had with payroll, staff get paid the correct amount and on time, the time spent on payroll has gone from 1-2 days to max 1 hour – such a difference! ”
The final area Markree Castle saw improvements was on Reporting. They love that within the Bizimply account you can use the same dashboard for costs, sales, wage percentage – all by department and by day. This view has saved a huge amount of admin time for the group as they now have all data needed to hand and they can access it from anywhere.
“The live data on the dashboards provides us with our overall business performance, it allows us to see where we need to improve and what we can continue to do well – it’s a fantastic insight and one that every organisation should have.”
Markree Castle are amazed with the improvements they have seen in their business so far;
“Everything is working very well for us and we cannot wait to see the continued improvements we can make here at the Castle.”