Everything’s coming up Roses Only: How Workforce.com helps save 100s of hours a week

Valentine’s Day: On this day celebrating love and relationships, couples, friends, and family prepare their choice of gifts for the special people in their lives. Hearts adorn storefronts, packages and discounts abound, and behind the bustle and celebration are the retailers that make it all happen.

Today is one of the busiest days of the year for the Roses Only Group, a business founded in 1995 that has grown into one of the leading flower retailers. It brings together more than 45 years of floristry and retail experience to create a business that provides gifts of all kinds to those who want to share the love: boxed roses, seasonal flowers, full arrangements, wines and champagnes, chocolates, and more.

We caught up with Chief Operating Officer Kelly Taggart as she prepared for the busy season to ask about how she manages it all. “A day in the life of me,” Kelly says, “no two days are the same.”

The search for the perfect software fit

Not everything was always wrapped up neatly at the Roses Only headquarters. “Our biggest workforce management problem was really about planning scheduling,” Kelly says. “Previously we were working in spreadsheets, and as a growing team, you tend to spend a lot of time in those spreadsheets. That time would be much better spent elsewhere, on making the business more productive.”

Using spreadsheets was an ordeal. Roses Only holds multiple warehouse locations and an online store. With many teams and all 300-plus staff working in-house, balancing administrative tasks without a good platform was challenging.

That search for better shift scheduling software led them to Workforce.com

Kelly recalls: “When we were comparing solutions, what actually stood out was the feedback Workforce.com had received from all of their existing clients. And for me personally, and for us as a business, recommendations are so important. For Workforce.com to get that client feedback, that was a big factor in our decision.”

They implemented Workforce across the organization to positive reception. Changing from a manual process to a technology solution suited the team, with them even having some fun with the selfie photos in the employee time clock. The integrations the platform offered was a big part of that decision, as Roses Only uses bespoke systems and they found it fit neatly in alongside their preferred payroll software.

Trimming hundreds of hours from scheduling means more time for operations

Roses Only has been using Workforce.com for so long, the team barely thinks of the problems it helped solve.

“They would be things like the administration time managers take to look at what time people show up to work every day. You really want your managers to be leading the team and making them more productive and hitting those business targets, not clock-watching.”

All in all, Kelly estimates Workforce saves them 100 hours a week across all locations. These saved hours go a long way—especially on huge business days like today, Valentine’s Day, and other peak periods like Mother’s Day and Christmas where they use the shift scheduling software to compare labor data from the previous year.

Roses Only uses a significant amount of big data in its operations, and that’s essential to their success each peak season. Understanding their processes and building efficiency into them is key to scaling for significant events. By having efficient operations already set in place, they don’t need to make too many changes: it’s just the same, only bigger.

“We found it’s even more beneficial with the extreme growth that we’ve had in the last 2 years, that our managers have been able to focus on other things besides managing people’s time and schedules because they have such a great platform in Workforce,” Kelly adds.

Blooming in a competitive industry

So what’s next for the retailer? As the market leader in delivered flowers and gifts, the organization is setting its sights on supporting the future of its business through leadership development. They’ll also continue to serve their customers in the best way they know: with efficiency, productivity, and excellent service.

“Everyone’s collecting information, and you’ve got to be able to put that information through in the right way and understand what customers are trying to do, so you can provide them with what they’re looking for. Then look at your own infrastructure and the way that your operations are set out, the way that your teams are set out, to support that offering to your customers.

“This business, in particular, has been in the industry for the past 12 years, and we have been online in a big way from the beginning. So we’ve already experienced many of these learnings and we’re making sure our infrastructure is supporting what we’re learning from that big data so that we can be the most productive that we can.”

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