Case Study

Baxter Storey

BaxterStorey is an independent contract caterer whose services range from managing staff restaurants, cafés and deli bars to offering fine dining, hospitality services, private dining and partners luncheon rooms.

TeamSpirit has been working with the company since 2003, helping to establish a comprehensive HR and payroll management system which has created significant savings in time and manpower.

These savings are vital: BaxterStorey has been through a period of rapid expansion following a series of acquisitions - moving from 1,500 monthly paid staff to a staggering 7,500 in the space of a couple of years. The ability to accurately track information across the workforce in a streamlined HR operation has never been more important.

Spread out

BaxterStorey’s impressive roster of blue chip clients span a range of business and industry sectors including finance, media, retail and automotive.

And the sheer breadth of BaxterStorey’s services present perhaps the greatest challenge when it comes to administrative requirements. Payroll Manager, Cathy Bell explains why, “With up to 700 individual work units throughout the UK, a very user-friendly approach to systems is essential because we are heavily reliant on our unit managers. The back-end system has to be straightforward.”

With a high turnover of staff – roughly 40% per annum, the norm in the catering and hospitality industries – it is vital that the system immediately reflects the latest changes.

Accessible

“The team here has a lot of starters and leavers to process,” says Bell. “And to do that it requires the correct information from its own people. BaxterStorey’s workforce covers a very broad spectrum, from senior managers overseeing individual catering and hospitality, to dinner ladies. The system has to suit them all.”

“Before TeamSpirit came on board, Excel spreadsheets would have to be printed and sent to Bell’s team by whoever was managing each of these work units to update all staff movements on a given day. But now, using the TeamSpirit system’s Web-based Manager Access module, those same managers can remotely file employees’ time sheets containing attendance/absence hours and any monetary adjustments. Over the course of a year, this sole basic change saves a week of five people’s time,” comments Bell.

And that is not the only time saving. Using the client’s previous payroll system, a report showing each employee’s address would have had to have been created by the software provider themselves. “This seemingly simple process would take a couple of days from request to delivery. Using TeamSpirit, we can do it ourselves in a couple of minutes. The TeamSpirit Report Writer is so easy to use that my team is now able to handle report requests in-house.”

In the money

BaxterStorey’s previous system could not calculate tax or National Insurance contributions. With TeamSpirit, Bell’s team can use the ‘re-run’ facility to run the payroll as many times as required for any number of employees, performing net to gross calculations as well as gross to net.

Payroll alone accounts for around 40% of the cost that BaxterStorey bills its clients for, making accuracy essential – a requirement which would be relatively straightforward in most other businesses. But in an organisation made up of hundreds of business units, some of which consist of just a couple of workers who may interchange with other units as the need arises, the calculations require a system that is simple enough to use whilst including enough flexibility to avoid errors.

For example, explains Bell, a unit may find a kitchen porter off sick one morning. They need a replacement, who comes from another unit working for a different client. The porter who is “loaned” to the depleted operation must have his or her pay correctly deducted. “Cross-charging is performed very simply now,” Bell continues. “By simply keying the hours and the department into the system, there’s both a time saving and a reduction in the possibility of error.”

As Bell explains, “The big advantage for us is that we don’t have to physically calculate the removal of cost from one department to another – it’s all done automatically within the system.”

Scalability

A key selling point for BaxterStorey was that TeamSpirit enabled the company to grow without having to constantly upgrade or purchase add-ons. “Beyond what we are using already, there is a whole host of other tools available, so we have the scope to go back and look at them should our needs change,” explains Bell. “The TeamSpirit system is robust enough to accommodate an increase in employees or any growth in number of units, or any change in functionality we may need.”

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