Pets at Home, the UK’s leading pet care brand, came to Rotageek with simple goals for their next scheduling solution. With 457 stores and over 6500 employees, they needed their scheduling processes to be simpler and take up much less admin time. And with the acquisition of various pet care services, they needed better visibility of the workforce and their skill sets, to be able to drive to a more customer-centric approach when it came to scheduling their staff.
Pets at Home came to us with a goal to simplify their IT estate. Following the launches of various in-store services, they wanted to streamline their internal systems to enable them to drive towards a customer-centric approach when it came to workforce scheduling. Rather than having dozens of applications and websites performing similar functions, they wanted as much of their tech to be centrally controlled as possible.
Their goals when it came to their workforce management solution were simple:
In addition to this, they also needed better visibility of their employee schedules. Within their 457 stores, Pets at Home had lots of different skill requirements and their internal company policies also required certain senior staff to work weekend shifts. They needed a real time and accurate view of the staff working each day and who had which skills, to make sure they were adhering to company policies and customer demand.
When it came to factoring annual leave into rotas, Pets at Home also needed the support of their scheduling solution. They wanted to break a common trend of their employees requesting last minute holidays which was causing major scheduling issues and low employee satisfaction. They needed a tool that would allow their workforce to easily book leave, view their remaining leave balance and simplify the approval process - which could then also be reflected in the rota.
INSERT NAME | Pets at Home
Since deploying Rotageek, Pets at Home have managed to significantly improve their scheduling processes and simplify their workforce management tech.
Using Digital Scheduling in Rotageek, they have been able to reduce the admin time it takes to plan and create their rotas. 6500 staff are now easily scheduled to their customer demand, and factors like annual leave, sickness, company policy and contractual obligations are factored into their schedules automatically.
By using shift start and end times in Rotageek to identify when an employee with a certain skill set is available, they are able to be agile and move their workforce resources around in store as needed - resulting in a better customer experience. And they’re empowered knowing that they are adhering to fairness principles and contractual obligations whilst doing so. And as for the last minute leave requests, this is now a thing of the past as their employees are able to see their remaining leave balance and book leave from the Rotageek app on their phone, at any time. These are then sent instantly to managers to approve which results in a better employee experience, as well as making sure they are forward planning their rota’s based on staff availability effectively. In fact they have filled over 98,000 gap shifts since their deployment to date (Nov 23) - which has saved a lot of ringing around to find cover!
Since their deployment, to date (Nov 23) Pets at Home have…
…with the help of Rotageek, we're excited to continue our partnership and watch these numbers grow!
Having seen such amazing results with Digital Scheduling from Rotageek, Pets at Home are now embarking on their Autoscheduling journey with us.
Currently operating with static demand across their stores, they wanted to better understand their customer demand, to be able to staff stores at the right level. With Rotageek they were hoping to better forecast the labour required so they can become more flexible and fluid with their rotas.
This is a crucial objective for the Pets at Home business - many of their staff are salaried and work fixed shifts, but the business wants to build on this to be able to give their employees greater flexibility in their schedules.
In February 2023, we undertook the first trials of Autoscheduler across 20 Pets at Home stores to gather vital data and understand how we would make an impact to the business. And the results spoke for themselves - their overall fit to demand increased by 15% (from 60% vs 75% with Autoscheduling) in 4 Pets at Home stores in just 3 months during the trial.
So seeing the benefits in having employees scheduled in the right place at the right time, led them to rollout across all of their 457 locations in the UK and ROI!
We’re so excited to continue the journey with Pets at Home and cannot wait to see the results of the full roll out of Autoscheduler. Watch this space!