Signature Pub Group

Launched in 2003 by Nic Wood, Signature Pub Group's very first venue was the Grassmarket's Black Bull. Since then, the Edinburgh based pub group has opened a further 23 bars, restaurants and hotels across Scotland. Each venue unique in its delivery, offering, and for a time, approach to staff scheduling.

For almost 15 years, every site had its own way of scheduling staff rotas and monitoring time and attendance. Some were using Excel and others pen and paper, making it almost impossible to accurately schedule and track staff time. Not only was this approach vastly time consuming for managers, it left head office with very limited visibility over staff hours, wage costs and commercial performance.

The search for the perfect partner

So in January 2017, the business decided it was time to find a solution that could help streamline staff scheduling across the business.

Signature Pub Group wanted something that would not only make building staff rotas easier, and give head office greater visibility over costs, but one that would help them with HR and absence management, too. A central hub for important employee documents and a way of automatically ensuring they were compliant with legislation, such as the Working Time Regulations.

After an extensive search and reviewing a number of different staff scheduling platforms, Signature Pub Group turned to Rotaready to help take its workforce management to the next level.

Yes, Rotaready ticked all of the boxes in terms of functionality, but the nature of the business and enthusiasm of the team really stood out to us. It was never about just making another sale, it was about providing us with the best solution for our business.

A streamlined approach to staff scheduling

For us, a phased roll out was definitely the way to go. The team at Rotaready were on hand to support us throughout the implementation process, and have been ever since!

Implementing Rotaready has been a real game changer for the entire business. General Managers can easily build and share optimised staff rotas that are always compliant with business requirements and Working Time Regulations. Head Office have greater visibility and control over wage spend against revenues, plus a secure and accessible place to store important or time-sensitive employee documents. And employees can view upcoming shifts and request time off, via the Rotaready app.

Previously we would have only found out about any labour overspend at the end of each week. Now we have real-time visibility of this, which has enabled us to optimise wage spend in line with revenues and demand.

What's next?

Rotaready's customer success team are continuing to work closely with Signature Pub Group to ensure they're leveraging all the benefits of the platform, while feeding back to the engineering team to ensure the product remains as customer-centric as possible.

Next on the agenda is to implement Rotaready's tronc feature across the business. This will enable the team to automatically calculate tronc and ensure accurate tronc payments at the same time as regular pay runs.

Rotaready has been a great success for our business. It has continued to develop since we first implemented it in 2017, regularly introducing new and useful features which further enhance its value. The platform itself is robust, reliable and user-friendly and the team behind it are great. It's safe to say that I'd highly recommend Rotaready as a staff scheduling partner.