Organization
5 Star Event Services
5 Star Event Services is the largest provider of staffing and security services for events in the Houston, Texas area. The company’s prestigious customer list includes the Houston Astros (MLB), Houston Rockets (NBA), The Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, Verizon Wireless Theater and Toyota Center.
Location: Houston, Texas, USA
Industry: Security/Events & Venues
Company size: 50-200 employees
Challenges
When the fast-growing company doubled the size of its workforce, it realized it needed a better way to manage constantly changing staffing requirements and employee schedules. The office staff scheduled approximately 200 employees every week using mostly manual processes. Every employee had to call the office to provide availability and request shifts – at times requiring them to wait 15 to 20 minutes before talking to someone.
“It was all done on paper and spreadsheets. We had no employee overtime tracking ability, nor were we able to pull up individual employee schedules with ease,” said Bobby Jones, licensed manager of 5 Star Event Services. “That made even the simplest of queries time-consuming and tedious.”
They wanted to improve internal efficiency and employee relations by moving beyond manual staffing practices.
Solution
In the search for an automated workforce management system, 5 Star turned to Celayix.
Celayix centralizes employee scheduling and time and attendance all in one place. This allows office staff to create staff schedules, record employee attendance, and summarize billing and payroll information more quickly, on the web.
“Celayix is a valued business partner and we would recommend them to any organization that faces the challenge of scheduling a constantly changing workforce. The true value of the solution comes from having the ability to integrate employee scheduling, employee time and attendance, and payroll all in one system.”
Bobby Jones, Licensed Manager
Results
Improved internal communication and employee retention
With a centralized system, all office staff view the same staff schedule information in real-time, and always know whether events are sufficiently staffed.
From there, they can view all available shifts in a calendar or list view, and drill down further for complete event details. Employees simply check the boxes of the events they would like to work and Celayix automatically schedules them.
Intelligent scheduling in Celayix ensures that employees never see shifts that conflict with those for which they are already scheduled. Employees also cannot cancel a shift online, preventing last-minute changes without a call to the office.
From a single screen, employees view all their scheduled shifts by month, week or day, and print it out. That frees office staff from the tedious work once required to get employees slotted into shifts, and elevates employee satisfaction. “Celayix has dramatically changed employee scheduling,” he said. “It’s alleviated a lot of phone traffic with employees calling about shifts, which helps us retain our good employees.”
Increased adaptability to last-minute changes
With event schedules on the screen in front of them, 5 Star managers always know exactly how an event is staffed, and whether they need to fill any openings. If an employee cancels at the last minute, staff simply run a report to find all employees that have indicated availability for that day and time.
“Now all we do is run a simple report and the information is right at our fingertips,” Jones said. “Celayix has really helped us respond quickly and efficiently when last-minute events arise, or when staff becomes unavailable at the last minute before the start of a shift – a situation that happens all too often.”
Elimination of errors and manual data entry for billing and payroll processing
The payroll integration meant that 5 Star can now feed employee attendance information directly into ADP, saving time and eliminating errors caused by re-keying shift hours.
“The reasons we went with Celayix boiled down to getting the best value for our software investment,” Jones said. “Celayix offered features that made our company more efficient and their products integrated with our existing ADP payroll system.”
Scheduling software that scales with business growth
In a business where the level of service provided to existing customers determines success, 5 Star Event Services depends on Celayix to have the right people at the right place at the right time. “That’s huge when you consider the amount of employees we have to deal with,” Jones said. “We can grow our company without having to bring on additional schedulers – add more jobs without adding more staff.”
