CASE STUDY
Bretzel Bakery
REAL BREAD, EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT
Bakery
INDUSTRY
50+
EMPLOYEES
2
Locations
2019
USER SINCE
The Bretzel Bakery is a real Dublin institution. Its motto: “Real bread takes time and dedication”. Since 1870 its bakers have faithfully produced an enticing and exotic array of “real” bread and cakes, prepared by hand to timeless recipes and baked in original brick-lined ovens. That takes time, but just ask the customers, and they will tell you it’s worthwhile! Bretzel products are distributed to some of the best food shops throughout Ireland’s capital.
The Background
The company has kept the soul of the original bakery while modernising the systems surrounding it; the main bakery is now situated in a world-class facility in Harold’s Cross, while the original bakery, shop and café remains in Lennox Street, Portobello, Dublin 8.
Thus, time-honoured artisan methods go hand-in-hand with modern technology to meet contemporary commercial demand and to cut out costly overheads. Ask Managing Director William Despard what he puts in the bread that makes it taste so good, and he will tell you: “It’s what I don’t put in the bread that makes it so good.” A similar philosophy is now being applied to staff rostering and time management. The Bretzel Bakery wanted the team to focus on what they are good at, which meant cutting out unnecessary admin effort.
The Bretzel Bakery’s café team, for example, are always happy, smiling and willing to share their expert knowledge on all things bread related. They take time to make customers feel welcome. Altogether, the Bretzel Bakery currently employs over 50 staff at its two locations, plus three administrators working on accounts.
The Challenge
Until March 2019, however, staff scheduling required a lot of manual effort as everything was done with an Excel sheet, with output then sent out to staff in PDF format.
There was no clocking system in place and therefore no way to track employee hours or breaks. “We simply didn’t have any system,” says Wieslaw Drabik, Operations Manager at the Bretzel Bakery.
“In the beginning, we were a small bakery where such system wasn’t really needed, but as we grew we realised we would require a clock-in system to be able to provide accurate data,” he adds.
To add up the hours for calculating the payroll, the Bretzel Bakery’s accounts team had to look through the rostered hours and monitor overtime to find out what hours employees had actually worked.
“We had nothing to tell us for sure if staff had finished on time, had taken breaks or if they came in late,” says Wieslaw.
The accounts team would then enter the hours manually into Sage Micropay. The whole process took more than five hours per week – unproductive time that could be better spent on other activities.
The Solution
Now, all rosters are created in Bizimply with a simple drag and drop procedure. The rosters are then shared with employees across locations on their mobile devices.
That gives employees and managers greater visibility over scheduled hours. Misunderstanding and miscommunication is now far less likely to occur.
Attendance can now be easily and quickly monitored via the Timestation app on Bizimply. Recording breaks is extremely important part of their management processes.
And finally, Bizimply creates an attendance report that can be imported directly into Sage Payroll Professional.
“Payroll used to take us five to six hours per week to process. Since implementing Bizimply, we have saved 50% of our time, if not more, Bizimply has cut out unnecessary effort. It’s brilliant,” says Wieslaw.