CASE STUDY
Humble Grape
A SUCCESS STORY
Hospitality
INDUSTRY
120
EMPLOYEES
9
LOCATIONS
2025
USERS SINCE
Simplifying Multi-Site Management with Bizimply
Overview
Founded in 2015, Humble Grape has grown from a single wine bar into a flourishing hospitality group with nine venues, including the much-loved Vivat Bacchus restaurants and their own trade business, Tiger Wines. With around 120 employees – including a 15-person head office team – Humble Grape brings together exceptional wine, food, and people under one culture of passion and simplicity.
As the business expanded, so did the complexity of managing staff across multiple sites. We spoke with Edyta Janicka (Head of HR) and Kevin Coetzee (Chief Operating Officer) about their experience using another workforce management provider for scheduling, HR, and payroll, and why the team made the switch to a more flexible, data-driven system to support growth and deliver the visibility they required.
Our previous platform was very restrictive with permissions – any changes required a lot of back and forth with their team, creating blockers that could last for weeks.
The Challenge
When Humble Grape acquired Vivat Bacchus and expanded operations, sharing staff between venues became part of everyday life. However, their existing system couldn’t keep up.
The previous platform offered an all-in-one approach but lacked the functionality to allocate costs correctly when employees worked across multiple sites. Wage costs were often recorded against the wrong venue, making it difficult to see true labour performance and costing data.
“If a team member worked at more than one site, the payroll costs didn’t split correctly – they all went to one location. We needed better visibility to manage costs accurately.” – Kevin Coetzee
The Search for a Better Solution
Humble Grape realised they needed an enterprise-level system built for multi-site hospitality – one that could handle shared staff complexities and offer full visibility across venues.
The team were immediately drawn to Bizimply’s specialised approach, where each feature – from scheduling to HR – is designed to work seamlessly, rather than as a “one-size-fits-all” solution. After a tailored demo, Humble Grape saw that Bizimply could deliver the structure and scalability they needed.
“With Bizimply, managers can now build and share schedules easily across sites, while cost data automatically allocates to the correct venue – giving the leadership team real-time visibility of labour costs, attendance, and compliance.” – Kevin Coetzee
Permissions controls also allow head office to give managers the access they need – and nothing more – supporting smoother operations and data security across the group, reducing unnecessary bottlenecks.
The impact
Since implementing Bizimply, Humble Grape has seen stronger alignment between sites and smoother collaboration between managers and HR.
“Reporting is Bizimply’s strongest asset – you can create virtually any report you can think of! We’ve never used a workforce management platform with such variety, and the flexibility to request custom reports is a huge advantage.” – Edyta Janicka
From an operational perspective, weekly wage cost reporting has become much simpler:
“We can now generate reports for the whole business in one go, showing every location in one place – making it much easier to review. It’s saved us at least two hours every week.” – Kevin Coetzee
General managers also benefit from the platform’s ease of use:
“Scheduling is easy and quick with Bizimply – popular shifts drop in automatically, which saves hours per week compared to our previous system.” – Edyta Janicka
Edyta highlighted the practical HR tools that improve compliance and reduce administrative work:
“The dashboard shows when visas and passports are about to expire… I love the e-signature tool, and I can pull a report to see who hasn’t signed yet.” – Edyta Janicka
At the employee level, Bizimply’s MyZimply app has been invaluable for the Operations team, enabling remote management and simplifying day-to-day workflows – a stark contrast to the “endless issues” experienced with the previous platform.
looking ahead
As Humble Grape continues to flourish, Bizimply will remain a central part of their growth journey, supporting smarter scheduling, smoother payroll, and more connected teams across all venues.
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