Namco

Namco UK Limited is part of the Bandai Namco Group, founded in Japan in 1955. Its family entertainment venues exist to provide fun & inspiration for people of all ages with the likes of ten-pin bowling, amusements, dodgems and more recently, escape rooms, climbing walls and adventure golf. All its venues are complemented with substantial food and beverage offerings making them highly visited hospitality attractions.

As the business expanded, its approach to staff scheduling became more and more inconsistent. Some venues were using old school spreadsheets and others had legacy rota software in place.

Streamlining staff scheduling

The Namco team wanted an approach to staff scheduling that would work across the diverse business. A solution that was easy to use, cost effective, came with great customer support and was flexible, yet off the shelf. Neither of their existing approaches met these criteria. The spreadsheets were time consuming and left a lot of room for error; whilst sparse product updates and lack of support from the incumbent rota software provider had become a big frustration for the team at Namco.

So in January 2020, they set about their search for a new, superior staff scheduling solution; one that would be a better fit for the entire business. After an extensive search the Namco team settled on Rotaready; a solution from experts in the Hospitality and Leisure industry that met all of their criteria.

We'd looked at a number of staff scheduling solutions, but Rotaready was a clear winner for us. Not only did it tick all of the boxes in terms of functionality, we loved that it was a solution tailored to our industry. That gave us a lot of confidence that it was the right solution for us!

Implementation & integrations

Rotaready worked closely with the team at Namco to understand their business needs and implemented Rotaready across all sites, in just over two weeks. Part of the roll out included an integration with Namco's till system.

With this integration the team at Namco has real time visibility over costs and wage spend. Sales figures are pulled directly from the EPOS solution into Rotaready; automatically populating key tools and reports with revenue data.

Rotaready took care of everything when it came to the integration with our till system. We told them what we wanted and it happened - it was an entirely painless process.

Implementing Rotaready across the business has enabled Namco to streamline its approach to both staff scheduling and cost control; helping managers to make more commercially aligned scheduling decisions as a result.

Effortless holiday management

The business has also benefited from having greater visibility over staff holiday. Employees use the Rotaready app to request holiday, making holiday management easier than ever for managers.

Before Rotaready, holiday management was completely manual, making monitoring employee holidays and calculating accrual a real headache for us. Having everything under one system has made things so much easier - holiday management is more accurate than ever and we're saving both time and money as a result.

What's next?

Rotaready's customer success team are continuing to work closely with Namco 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 enabling Rotaready's integration with Namco's training solution. This will automatically create employee profiles within their training system, and in real-time. Any changes made to employee information within Rotaready, such as job role, date of birth or leavers, will also be automatically updated within the training system.

Removing double entry of data will both free up time for the team at Namco and ensure consistent records across solutions.