Hozelock manufactures equipment for garden watering, spraying and aquatics.
Challenges
Like many manufacturers, Hozelock faces the challenges of fluctuating material costs and the threat of cheaper products from the Far East. In addition, this highly seasonal business requires a demand-driven workforce. As part of a continuous improvement plan, Hozelock needed to update its people performance management system, to gain real-time workforce visibility.
Hozelock needed a solution that could:
- Collect shop floor data
- Automate time and attendance and reduce the associated paperwork
- Provide real-time visibility of the variable workforce to enable responsive and informed decision making
- Provide visibility of performance and cost by line, product, individual or company
- Support the growing needs of the organisation
Solutions
Hozelock invested in real-time workforce management from UKG, fully integrated with payroll and ERP solutions, and designed to drive significant efficiency and real-time data visibility across the organisation. The time and attendance module was and up and running within four months, providing immediate benefits.
Time and attendance
- Provides real-time visibility of lateness, sickness and holidays, as well as employee availability
- Delivers payroll accuracy, eliminating pay-related queries
- Enables close management of labour costs
- Enables planning and management of fluctuating labour requirements and flexible working contracts
- Promotes a fair and equal working environment
- Enables fast and straightforward enrolment of new starters
- Labour tracking
- Enables shop-floor data collection
- Measures productivity to enable ongoing improvements to operations
Enables close scrutiny of performance and output of different assembly lines to pinpoint under- or over-performing lines
“We now have more labour-related information than ever before which allows us to constantly improve our performance as an overall business.”
Dave Turner
Manufacturing Accountant
Results
Workforce management from UKG has delivered numerous benefits to Hozelock. Automated time and attendance ensure payroll accuracy, and has reduced administration time and eliminated payroll queries, saving 9.5 man-days per week. Real-time workforce visibility facilitates tighter control of labour costs, including immediate overtime approval, which previously took five days. Assembly productivity was immediately boosted by 2% and further analysis of shop floor data drove a 12% reduction in labour costs for some product lines, enabling standards to be re-aligned to a more accurate cost base which can impact margins.
