About Ferguson Plarre
Ferguson Plarre Bakehouses is one of the longest standing and well-renowned producers of hand baked goods in Australia. Based in Melbourne, the family-owned business has a rich history of providing customers with sweets and savouries since the 1800s. The company faced a number of workforce challenges before engaging Tanda such as, difficulty navigating excessive amounts of administration and overspending on overtime due to scheduling inefficiencies. Ferguson Plarre wasn’t reaching its potential and action had to be taken to overcome these challenges. Chris Tankard, Culture & Human Resources Manager at Ferguson Plarre set out to find a solution – and since finding Tanda, has seen great success in improving day to day operations and employee satisfaction. Following their implementation of Tanda, Ferguson Plarre has adopted a highly optimised scheduling process, allowing them to accommodate for the constantly shifting demand for their products, significantly reducing the time spent maintaining staff rosters, absences and staffing costs.
The challenge: Legacy systems
Ferguson Plarre Bakehouses are committed to delivering freshly baked goods to its stores. With a staff of more than 150 employees, their goal is to provide the best quality products, while catering for constant shifts in their day to day sales. As such, they require a staff management system that can optimise their schedule according to demand data.
Previous systems used at Ferguson Plarre failed to achieve the results they needed to achieve their business mission. Their previous scheduling software was a platform that employees throughout the company avoided. Staff were reluctant to use it due to issues with reliability. Meanwhile, the managerial team found a great deal of effort was required to make basic adjustments to staff schedules, pay rates and documents. Not having access to the tools they needed led to higher staffing costs, frustrated staff, and the inability to dedicate time and energy to areas of the business that add value. As a result, the company was left with significant sunk costs in a system that didn’t give them outcomes and satisfaction in return.
A user friendly experience
Chris set out to find a user-friendly system that would be eagerly adopted by his team, a solution that would allow his front line staff to start thinking like business owners. This is why finding a great system functions more like a partnership than a service – especially when it comes to managing areas of the business as important as your employees – is crucial.
The Solution
Ferguson Plarre partnered with Tanda to address critical concerns in their day to day operations. Here’s how the team at Tanda work with Ferguson Plarre to manage and excel their business:
Cognitive rosters & rostering to demand allow Ferguson Plarre to roster staff on a room by room basis, ensuring they never over or under staff stations, eliminating inefficiency and unnecessary overtime.
Tanda’s dashboards and reporting suite enable Chris and the team to access valuable workforce metrics and alter their business practices for efficiency.
Tanda’s award engine applies the correct base rates, overtime, and allowances to completed shifts, eliminating the need to manually calculate pay rates and amend timesheets.
From implementation to ROI
Business tools only begin to return benefits when they are implemented quickly and adopted fully across the company. It’s not uncommon to find businesses adopting newer and better processes, only to be caught in the implementation stage, receiving fractional value for an extended period of time.
Implementing business systems can easily become a long and drawn out process, it’s one of the biggest reasons organisations don’t routinely assess the other solutions available to them. For Ferguson Plarre and the team at Tanda a gold standard implementation process was a must have.
Tanda assigned a dedicated implementation consultant to, ensuring that the implementation would run smoothly, so they could start getting value from the system as soon as possible. This meant assisting Chris and his team through the setup, integrating their existing systems into Tanda, and ensuring that staff knew how to use the system. A thorough implementation helps staff learn everything they need about Tanda and aids Ferguson Plarre in gaining a quick return on their investment.
$100,000 saved on wage spend
Using Tanda’s cognitive rosters and staff management tools, Ferguson Plarre significantly reduced the amount of unnecessary wage spend incurred each week, in excess of $100,000 per year and hundreds of hours in administration.
By predicting demand and staffing requirements well before each shift, they can efficiently plan and publish perfect schedules without the sizable administration burden it would typically require.
Ferguson Plarre saved the equivalent of two full time staff members when it came to reducing admin across production, rostering and reporting, these valuable savings allow them to reallocate their resources to other, more valuable areas of the business.
Focussing on creating value
Tanda provides Ferguson Plarre with greatly simplified admin processes, allowing them to focus on the things that matter.
Moving forward, Ferguson Plarre Foods will continue to build on their rich history and continue to delight customers. As the business landscape continues to shift, they are well-equipped to face these changes because they have a platform that enables them to be agile and make data-driven decisions.
Workforce management has a lot of moving parts, but it doesn’t have to be a burden. Tanda can take out the administrative side of managing your team so you can focus more on growing your business.
