Organization
One Floral (previously Lakeshore Inc.)
For more than 40 years, One Floral has supplied high-quality plant products to the supermarket and floral industries. Walk into just about any supermarket or lawn and garden store in Canada, and chances are, you will find potted plants and flowers grown by One Floral.
Location: Jordan Station, Ontario, Canada
Industry: Nursery & Garden
Company size: 200-500 employees
Challenges
One Floral’s expansive facilities, located in Jordan Station, Ontario, employ 250 regular employees. However, as many as 500 combined permanent and seasonal workers fill the greenhouses during seasonal peaks.
With so many workers, One Floral’s Human Resources Department previously spent 10-20 hours a week manually creating employee schedules in Excel spreadsheets. That left room for errors, made it challenging to identify employee overtime, and resulted in high employee overtime costs.
Likewise, creating weekly, monthly and quarterly reports by hand required countless hours of Human Resources time. On top of that, One Floral had no way of knowing where scheduled workers actually spent their time once they arrived, complicating departmental budgeting.
Solution
One Floral consistently turns to technology to help enhance quality and customer service, and streamline operations. In 2007, the company chose to automate employee scheduling and enhance employee time and attendance tracking with Celayix. Flexibility and compatibility with One Floral’s current and future IT infrastructure were key to the decision.
“Celayix is economical, and at the same time is flexible to handle our needs now and as we expand and add sites,” said Greg Bruckner, network administrator. “It’s compatible with the hand-punch hardware we already have and with our staff payroll application.”
With support from Celayix, Bruckner and Rebecca Arnold, software analyst, implemented and connected Celayix with existing systems.
“It’s easy to use, so we didn’t need to spend a large amount of time learning and training—nice from an IT perspective,” Bruckner said.
Plus, compatibility with the company’s hand-punch hardware also meant that the change was minimal but transparent for employees.
“With fewer overtime errors, we will save a lot of money in the long run.”
Rebecca Arnold, Software Analyst
Results
Reduced scheduling time by 80-85%
HR relies on Celayix for employee scheduling, employee time and attendance tracking, and reporting, while department supervisors view and adjust staffing schedules on their own.
Human Resources easily builds each week’s employee schedule, tracking time-off, and vacation, holiday and overtime pay. They no longer need to count shifts by hand on Excel spreadsheets to know if an area is covered effectively. And they see immediately if staff scheduling puts any employees into overtime, which shows up in red on the scheduler screen.
The ease of navigating Celayix allows department supervisors to adjust employee schedules on their own, rather than emailing Human Resources with those requests.
Since implementing Celayix, One Floral has decreased staff scheduling time down to two or three hours a week, effectively reducing the total time by 80 to 85%. At the same time, Human Resources improves the quality and efficiency of its staff scheduling. The right people are assigned at the right places and times, and One Floral significantly lowers employee overtime costs.
“With fewer employee overtime errors, we will save a lot of money in the long run,” Arnold said.
Improved insights for cost tracking and planning
Celayix also gives One Floral significantly more insight into where and when employees work after they clock-in. Without it, One Floral found it impossible to budget correctly. Employees would be assigned to a “home department,” but often moved around to different tasks in the facility. Now, if one person assists across three different departments in the course of one week, HR knows exactly where and how many hours—assisting with employee cost tracking and planning.
“We use Celayix as a labor and cost management tool as well,” Arnold said. “Now, we can match employee punches to the staff schedule, so we’re getting proper accounting and cost tracking.” Thanks to automated attendance matching, One Floral also has all the information it needs to process payroll by importing employee time and attendance data from Celayix right into its staff payroll application, Clarity by AK Microsystems.
More detailed employee time and attendance data gives One Floral important insight to support decision-making and budgeting regarding labor.
Most importantly, Celayix reduces reporting down to the push of a button. Bruckner and Arnold can create custom reports as needed, helping HR pull richer data about employee scheduling and employee time and attendance. With automated reporting, they cut reporting time by 95 percent.
“Reporting with Celayix will save Human Resources at least 10 hours a week not having to create those manually,” Arnold said.
Overall, One Floral couldn’t have been happier with the results they saw after implementing Celayix. With both time and cost savings, they could see immediate return on their investment. If you’d like to see how Celayix can help transform your organization – get in touch today!
