Crown for Manufacturing

The specialist solution for streamlining your workforce management and advancing your operational performance.

Empowered managers: The immediate availability of comprehensive Time & Attendance data empowers line managers to really take responsibility for their teams, leading to greater precision, confidence and accountability.

Accurate deployment of labour: Our system helps you to assign the right people with the right skills to the right production tasks. This creates a precision workforce, fit for purpose and lean.

Control of costs: By employing the right people at the right time, you strictly control your costs. You cut overtime, administration time and absence. You see the cost of your workforce in real time rather than weeks later, as you might when using traditional spreadsheets. You always know exactly where you are.

Employee Management: Managers are automatically informed who worked what hours, who worked overtime, who worked on what activity, what was the labour cost, who was on planned leave, who had unauthorised absence; the same applies for who’s working what tomorrow, this week, next week and so on.

Integration: Often a very real fear for manufacturing companies taking on a new workforce management system, with Crown all those worries are taken away. Our system integrates perfectly with all software across Payroll, HR and ERP. You’ll be amazed how straightforward it is, not least because we have a Systems Integration Services Department dedicated to ensuring smooth integrations.

Employee Empowerment: Work-life balance measures help improve employee positivity towards work and consequently their productivity.

Your success revolves around making your workforce management environment simple, efficient and cost-effective. Multiple shifts, multiple sites and complex rule sets can all hugely increase administration and management workload, leading to operational inefficiency and increased costs.

Crown’s Time & Attendance system solves all these problems, also giving you three critically important tools: speed, flexibility and visibility. Here is how Crown will directly help your business

Managing the challenges of a complex workforce environment

• Crown does difficult well: we are renowned for solving complex workforce issues

• Crown is trusted by customers, who are loyal to us because of the service they receive

• Crown has been transforming businesses through workforce management for 30 years, with over 400,000 people using a Crown workforce management system every day.

• We pride ourselves on knowing our customers well, fostering excellent individual relationships and retaining outstanding agility to ensure we can always meet customers’ needs.

• Crown’s products and services are created with ease-of-use in mind but also to give maximum commercial advantage to our customers.

• Crown puts control and visibility at your fingertips.

• We operate with openness, honesty and transparency and a genuine commitment to partnership.

Crown at a glance

Scenario 2The manager of this section of the shop floor looks on his computer to check the shifts today.

He sees that he has a few staff on holiday but he has already covered their work, with the Crown system only allowing him to substitute a colleague with the right skills, experience and availability.

There is not a piece of paper or a spreadsheet in sight. He can be confident that all holiday bookings are now compliant because when an employee tries to book holiday, the system will check who is already off and only allow the booking where stipulations have been met.

There are a couple of gaps on the production line though and the manager searches the two employees’ absence records. He is informed by the line supervisor that one has been off on a Thursday four times in the last six weeks - but he already knows this because the system has already emailed him on the occasion of the fourth absence. Another employee has been absent all week – interestingly the week they asked for holiday, but had been turned down. Fortunately already picked up by the system, the manager only has to action the automated workflow task to speak to these employees as part of the company disciplinary process.

Meanwhile the line manager uses the Crown system to identify two replacement employees with the right skills to transfer onto the production line.

Within ten minutes, he has everything sorted and is walking the shop floor, knowing he can access Time & Attendance information at a moment’s notice on his mobile.

Scenario 1 On the shop floor one morning, it’s clear there are a number of employees missing.

The manager of this section has to address the issue quickly. Does he shut the production line down? Move staff from another line? Call on agency staff? It’s a dilemma that needs addressing urgently.

The manager has a feeling that some of the absentees have become regular offenders but he has no way of accessing the figures until speaking to HR next week. Colleagues on the shop floor tell him they think a few people are on holiday and he has a vague recollection of signing some holiday forms but doesn’t remember it being this many - and now he can’t put his hands on the paperwork amongst the scores of files in the office.

Anyway, that can wait. Right now, the manager has a production line that is not performing to standard, agency staff to brief and overtime to plan. He hopes to catch up over the next few days but it will cost him and the company. Then he’ll try and find out what happened to the missing staff - if he can find the time.

Be honest...How much of your workforce management is manual and inaccurate - and maybe even guesswork?

Do you really know how much your current processes cost your business?

Which of these two scenarios is most familiar?

Whatever your role, Crown is on your side

Jim, the Operations Director, drops into one of his company’s plants on a Friday afternoon to see the management team. He has noticed that output is down and decides to ask the Production Manager about it.

The Production Manager says volume is always down on a Friday. Jim decides to take a walk around the plant and is surprised to see all the usual staff at work - although he notices a considerably more relaxed atmosphere. He asks the Production Manager about staffing levels on a Friday and is told that they’re the same as Monday to Thursday.

The Production Manager says that she has so much paperwork to get through (including scores of Time & Attendance spreadsheets, holiday forms and so on) that she just hadn’t got round to adjusting the rostering according to the lower Friday output. So with the same number of staff but a much lower volume to deliver, staff have been working at far from optimum performance. A check back on the paperwork reveals that absence has also rocketed on a Friday.

The Production Manager receives a roasting from Jim for being lazy and sloppy around rostering; she is left wondering what she could have done differently when it was almost impossible to track rostering, holidays and absences on dozens of spreadsheets every week.

It could have all been so different for everyone...

If Jim’s company had been using Crown Workforce Management, he would have had immediate visibility of the numbers around the workforce on the production line and would have been alerted to the discrepancy between high staff numbers and low production output. The line managers reporting to him would have been submitting regular reports generated by the Crown system.

Jim could concentrate on taking a largely strategic overview, overseeing a team who had all the tools they needed to be successful and accountable managers. His staff performance reviews would have been enhanced by having all the relevant information immediately to hand. He also would know that the Visitor Management element of the Crown software would ensure that VIP visitors - for example from key customers - would be expected, identified, welcomed and accounted for at all times.

With a reduction in the number of staff needed on a Friday, many employees were delighted to volunteer for a long weekend and a better work-life balance. This also ultimately led to a happier workforce with lower absenteeism.

Inspired Workforce ManagementCrown’s workforce management transforms your whole business. It gives staff across the business tools to do their job better, with better information, more precision and great agility.

Below we look at just one example of how this might work in practice across an organisation.

But it wouldn’t just be Operations Director Jim whose job was transformed....

The Financial Director doesn’t have to keep checking in with Jim because she can see it all in front of her whenever she needs to. Taking up-to-the-minute information to the Board is now simple and unerringly accurate, and using the big data available from the system gives her an unprecedented overview of workforce performance in the company. She can see the effect on the bottom line of a reduced absenteeism and reduced overtime, as well as increased payroll accuracy and dramatically reduced administration costs across the company.

The Chief Executive is no longer concerned about the diminishing profit margin resulting from increased labour costs and reduced productivity. He is free to think creatively and strategically about the business rather than firefighting the latest problem. The detail provided by the big data from Crown is invaluable in helping him form his strategy for the coming years.

The Health & Safety Officer is delighted because fire registration and visitor management is a foolproof part of Crown’s software.

The IT department stop tearing their hair out as different site managers seek different IT solutions to the workforce management conundrum. Instead, the team works with Crown to introduce the system and ensure it integrates with all other existing business and finance applications. Crown addresses all technical issues as part of the service. The ROI easily covered the subscription/on-premise costs to Crown.

The Production Manager has immediate visibility of the deployment of staff, and Crown helps her to make it an exact science that sees the right people in the right place with the right skills at the right time. She can see when holidays are coming up and prepare accordingly and she can adjust staff deployment easily in the face of changing demand. She has also set up alerts to automatically make her aware of any suspicious absence patterns.

The HR team enjoy a much lower staff churn and far fewer grievances. They aren’t troubled by Production Managers asking for training qualifications and certification information because they had it all in front of them at the click of a button. Any absence through illness was smoothly managed by line managers according to the company return to work protocol, automatically implemented by the Crown system.

The Payroll department breathe a sigh of relief as the Crown system simplifies their task enormously and they no longer have the usual high levels of anxiety as payday approaches as they try to work out who did what, in what role and at what rate, if it was overtime, if they turned up and so on. Line managers now take responsibility for much of this work. Payment is now right first time, every time and works like clockwork.

The Plant Operators on the production floor now know exactly where they are: they know they only work alternate Fridays so can make plans accordingly; they also know that their arrival, departure and breaks are monitored so absenteeism has dropped massively. They are pleased to be able to request holidays and notify absences straight on to the Crown system via their phones. Their improved work-life balance has reduced absenteeism and will help prevent stress and burnout.

The company’s existing time and attendance system was labour-intensive and user-unfriendly; labour analysis information could take up to a week to retrieve information and format. Payroll Manager Peter Bryson-Meehan said they needed a system to, “adapt to our way of working and operate quickly and effectively. It also needed to be able to show real-time information and help us to improve our existing processes.” The company found the Crown system quick, smart, simple and adaptable. Peter adds:

“Within the manufacturing scope there are a lot of changes to what our employees are working shift-wise; now it’s very simple, easy and quick to make those changes. Another major attraction is the speed of clock data recovery, which is instantaneous. This gives our managers greater autonomy over their own environments so they can deal with absences and anything else that comes along more or less instantly.

“We use the business process management module for a return-to-work process - changing from our previous seven-step process to just one. That greatly helps the various managers administer absence and the health and safety aspects of those returning to work.

“The activity management tool allows us to allocate hours to specific boat lines and other activities, enabling us to control and interrogate the time taken for certain things. That allows us to improve the processes and also the boat build times.

“Another major benefit lies with the helpdesk and Crown’s staff and the fact they are friendly, always willing to talk to us and tackle problems as they arise and try to find the best solution for what we need.”

Client Testimonial:

PRINCESS YACHTS INTERNATIONAL PLCPrincess Yachts International plc builds over 200 luxury boats a year across six sites in Plymouth covering over 1.1 million ft2. With 3,000 staff working across these sites, workforce management is business critical. The company turned to Crown when it wanted to replace its ageing time and attendance system with one that would address management needs now and into the future.

Client Testimonial: UNILEVER ICE CREAM“There’s no need for dedicated administrators, absences are down through immediate access to better information, and the payroll is accurate. The company is now deploying people more cost effectively too. Crown’s time and attendance system has enabled us to get a grip on our activities and to manage absence in a more consistent way. We’ve used it to drive down costs significantly in the business”

Andrew Hurcum, HR Manager, Unilever Ice Cream

Crown Computing Limitedwww.crownwfm.com

Tel: +44 (0)1827 309800Email: info@crowncomputing.co.uk