Customer story · Screwfix

The pace was set from the start, as Screwfix chose an ambitious route: a new system and autoscheduling from day one.

Screwfix signed its contract on Christmas Eve and had a pilot store live in time for its managers' conference.

From there, champions in each area got a two-month head start on the system. They became real advocates for Rotageek, then trained their peers before the wider rollout.

With so much change at once, Ben knew trust would make or break adoption, because to a colleague a rota isn’t just admin, it’s their week, their plans and their life outside work.

Previously, my manager has looked after me, knows I've got a yoga class on a Friday evening. Is the system going to know that? How much is my life going to change by bringing in the system?

Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix

The team leaned into building that confidence, and Ben is refreshingly honest that, at first, they leaned a little too far:

We had this phrase, trust the system, trust the system, trust the system. For some people that went too far, it became: the system says this, so that's what you've got to do.

Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix

The answer wasn't to trust the system less. It was to be clearer about which decisions belong to the system and which still belong to a manager. Managers were reminded that the rota is still theirs: they check it, sense-check it and stay responsible for it, so colleagues keep their confidence in it too.

For Ben, the biggest lesson was that the tool is only part of the picture. How it fits into the way the business runs matters just as much.

It's easy to bring in a tool and think you just click a button and your schedules are produced, and that's it. How much autonomy and agency you've given your managers and staff to use it in the best way is something that really needs to be considered. How that tool fits into your system and your strategy is arguably more important than the software alone.

Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix

So Screwfix kept things deliberately simple. Rather than loading the schedule with every task, the team built in only the work that needs doing immediately: the customer standing in front of you and the delivery driver at the door.

Everything else is down to the manager's judgement, so when the store is suddenly busy, nobody has to choose between serving a customer and following the rota.

Go-live wasn't the finish line, either. Thirteen months in, the team is now fine-tuning:

We're now thirteen months into this journey, and it's about what we're tweaking now, finding the balance between not having a rigid system that will inevitably be wrong sometimes, and making sure we've got enough staff for the tasks that are genuinely urgent.

Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix

Managers back on the shop floor. Part of Screwfix's business case was taking rota admin off branch managers. The bigger win is what managers now do with that time.

Our branch managers are doing less time managing and more time serving customers, putting stock away, all the things that only a person can really do.

Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix

An app colleagues actually choose to keep. Screwfix hoped colleagues would put the Rotageek app on their own phones, but had no idea how many would. The uptake measure came back in the mid-nineties, and for Ben, that says more than any efficiency stat.

We had no idea what the uptake on the personal app would be. The measure we've got is in the mid-nineties. If I'm going to let this sit on my phone and intrude on my life through notifications, I'll only keep it if it's genuinely serving a purpose. It's not because it's saving the business money.

Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix

A vote of confidence from the people who use it most. At Screwfix's managers' conference, around seven months after go-live, the implementation team were put forward for Team of the Year, an award the branch managers vote on.

Our implementation team were put forward for team of the year award... and the branch managers vote on team of the year. Getting that feedback from branch managers to say, of all the things we've done this year, that's had the best impact on me and my team, that's it.

Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix

With the foundations in place, Screwfix is now focused on using the insight and data it has to decide what genuinely adds value next, and what to resist adding.

Ben is also hoping the time given back to managers will show up in more colleague check-ins being completed, the kind of development conversation that's often the first thing to slip when stores get busy.