Hospitality Case Study - The Lewis Partnership

Company: The Lewis Partnership

Location: Staffordshire, England

Business Area: Hospitality - Hotel

System: Focus Pro using Handpunch 1000 Clocking Terminals

The Lewis Partnership is a leading hospitality company based in Staffordshire. The group includes a number of bars and luxury hotels. The Lewis Partnership contacted us looking for a Time & Attendance system for two of their hotels: The Moat House and The Swan.

An existing system was already installed using Internet based software and a fingerprint clocking terminal. For various reasons, the existing system was not performing as they wanted, so their requirements were for more reliable biometric terminals and for software that could cope with the specific needs of the hotel industry.

Egress Systems installed the Focus Pro software with a Handpunch 1000 biometric clocking terminal at The Moat House and The Swan. Both hotels shared the same SQL Server database, with software users at The Swan connecting to the main server at the Moat House via Citrix.

Hotels are often among the most complex environments for a Time & Attendance system to handle efficiently. The Rota facility within Focus Pro provides an ideal method to allocate employees to shift patterns. The Rota allows employees to be allocated to shifts, including split-shifts, across different departments, referred to as cost centres. This allows reports to be produced showing planned hours and costs against actual hours and costs across different departments.

Altogether, The Swan and The Moat House have over 950 shift rules between them. However the management of these shifts has been simplified by not only departmentalising the shifts, but also engaging the department managers themselves to take responsibility for planning the rota's for their own staff and for maintaining absences and clocking anomalies. Focus Pro allows full configuration of what users of the system can see and do. Department managers can be set to only view and edit their own staff for example.

Another issue often facing the hotel industry is calculating the amount of holiday entitlement earned, especially for seasonal staff. To assist with this, Focus Pro was enhanced to include an easy to use method of calculating holiday owed, based upon a simple formula.

The installation at the Lewis Partnership is certainly one we at Egress Systems are very proud of. Almost every aspect of the software is being used to its full potential and it is satisfying to witness the benefits that it brings as a result.

“Originally both of our sites were using biometric fingerprint readers, which we found to be very temperamental, leaving us with a lot of missing or incorrect information and several employees were unable to use for varying reasons. We decided to go with the hand punch clock to see if this could be eradicated, we were not disappointed, there is not one employee that is unable to use this terminal and therefore we are getting good and accurate reports.”

“After using internet based software for several years we found that with the Focus software being ran in house we did not have the added problem of connectivity.”

“There are many extremely good features within Focus, it is user friendly and provides the company with up to date information. Some of the features we have found most useful are the Rota costing and budgeting, the cost variance report is particularly good for this as it allows our department heads to see the difference between what their original rota cost had been to their actual cost. Rota's are quick and easy to plot, absences easily recorded and various reports can be ran to collate required information. Timesheet information can be edited when needed and there is plenty of areas within the software to keep notes and comments re adjustments. The software has worked very well between the two sites and we have five licensed users which we have had no problem with people not being able to get on.”

“Egress have been extremely helpful regarding any teething problems and have gone out of their way to assist and support our company, whether that be sorting a glitch in the system to re-writing an entire part of the software to suit our needs. I have no hesitation in recommending this system to anyone that requires an advanced yet user friendly Time and Attendance program.”

Comments above are made by Beverley Richards, Hotel Payroll Manager at The Moat House Hotel and have been used with her kind permission.

See also ...
Focus Pro Software Handpunch Biometric Hand Reader Focus Cost Benefits