How Custom Planet maximises their production lines with Workforce.com

OVERVIEW

Founded in 2008 and based in Newcastle, England, the textile company, Custom Planet, specialises in providing quality custom clothing and has grown to become one of the leading printwear providers in the UK. With a team of 35, they have industry-leading expertise in clothing customisation, including specialist knowledge in screen printing, digital printing, and embroidery among many others. A main goal of Custom planet is to provide customers with high-quality products, excellent craftsmanship, and outstanding customer service.

CHALLENGE

The challenges at Custom Planet stemmed from the complexity to manage varied working hours. The office staff at Customer Planet have fixed working hours from Monday to Friday, whereas the working hours within the Production department are much more varied and complex - throughout the week they have shift workers, staff who work overtime on specific days and staff who only work on weekends. This became challenging as managers had to consider each of these variables when creating rotas and tracking labour costs to ensure that staff are on the right pay for the right hours.

SOLUTION

“Workforce.com allowed us to put rules in for individuals and groups, so that we weren't having to go through a huge list of who did what and at what point overtime kicked in. It just cleared all that up for us and made everything a lot easier.”

-John Armstrong, director of Custom Planet

The implementation of Workforce.com was a swift process for Custom Planet. The Customer Success team immediately identified the needs of Custom Planet and set up the Workforce software accordingly.

RESULTS

Shift Rules

For Custom Planet, Workforce.com instantly solved their issues by applying shift rules for staff on the Workforce software. This led to a significant reduction in questions that managers received from staff regarding pay and hours worked as they could see this information on their Workforce app. For managers, time was no longer being consumed by referring back to past rotas and timesheets to see when staff clocked-in or clocked-out. The Workforce software takes into account when staff are expected to work or do overtime and makes all the calculations.

Labour tracking with Live Insights

Since adopting Workforce.com, the percentage of production wages against production output has fallen for Custom Planet. When they have 15 staff down in production, that percentage falls from approximately 30% to 26.5% in a year. The simple reason for this is that they could track this through Workforce.com, which shows where they are spending the same amount of wages and where their production output is not optimised. This is identified by the Workforce software straight away, which creates invaluable savings for Custom Planet at the end of the year.

Less Questions for Managers

The simplicity of the Workforce software enables it to be user friendly to all staff at Custom Planet. “The staff all seem really happy with Workforce.com” says John Armstrong, director of Custom Planet. They now have less questions about pay slips, holiday requests, rotas and hours worked because they know how to find it all within the Workforce software - this has ultimately been an enormous time saver for the managers at Custom Planet.

“The customer service side was brilliant, which meant the set up was so easy”

-John Armstrong, director of Custom Planet

Custom Planet is becoming more technical in their operations compared to competitors. With Workforce.com, they save immense labour costs which gives them an advantage and enables them to dedicate time and capital on areas that align with their strategy.