CASE STUDY
Golden Discs
A MULTI-LOCATION RETAILER'S SUCCESS STORY
Retail
INDUSTRY
100+
EMPLOYEES
19
Locations
2017
USER SINCE
High street retail is facing difficult times, but some companies have found the right formula.
The BACKGROUND
Founded in 1962, Golden Discs is Ireland’s best known and loved music and entertainment retailer. It remains “a local brick-and-mortar family-run business” whose staff love to meet new customers for a friendly chat and offer advice on music, video, books and much more.
Today at Golden Discs customers can still find all the latest vinyl, alongside new release albums, the biggest movies and TV boxsets, unbeatable offers and promotions, with an extensive range of accessories, headphones and so much more. In-store and online.
Golden Discs employs a staff of 100 at 19 stores across Ireland. Each store has a manager and a supervisor.
The Challenge
Scheduling staff was a huge difficulty for Golden Discs for a number of reasons. The first was that they had several locations, the second was the number of staff in each of their locations. The manager admits that trying to create weekly schedules across all stores was seriously time-consuming and “a real headache”.
Golden Discs had quite a few old fashioned manual processes they still implemented. Staff would often record their attendance, again manually with timesheets that were then sent to the company’s Dublin Head Office every week. Then when it came to running the payroll, administrators had to collect, collate and put in order these timesheets from all the stores.
As you can imagine, this only led to a series of mistakes, discrepancies and so on as the information had to be passed around too many different people, causing a bit of confusion at the same time.
The Solution
So Golden Discs was looking for a solution to ease the workload which they happily found with Bizimply.
Five head office users now have administrative rights to the cloud-based system, and there are fifty Bizimply users altogether.
Kieran Gallagher is now Operations Manager at Golden Discs, but also worked as a store manager with experience “with and without Bizimply”.
He takes up the story: “Bizimply was so handy and easy to use – it’s now the first tool I use in the morning and the last one I use in the evening. When I was a store manager it was already saving me about an hour a week for scheduling alone.”
Golden Discs now has live attendance information, reflecting precisely the hours that staff work, which can be sent to head office accounts and payroll once the records have been signed off by store managers.
That means no more email back and forth with queries. Payroll runs far more efficiently and the process is simplified with everyone working off a single, cloud-based system.
“Bizimply lets us keep track of turnover, staff costs and many other things that are important to running the business. For example, our staff can pre-book holidays and it is automatically logged. So we no longer depend on me having all that information in my head. Plus we get lots of insights that help improve management of the business, such as measuring percentage sales per hours worked – that’s a feature I cannot live without.”
“All in all, Bizimply is my most useful assistant in running Golden Discs. Just what we were looking for,” concludes Kieran.
