– and grew into the UK’s largest specialist fragrance retailer. The Perfume Shop, now part of global health and beauty leader, A.S Watson, boasts over 220 stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland, a fragrant fixture of the high street.
When The Perfume Shop first opened its doors in 1992, with stores in Birmingham, Belfast and Milton Keynes, it was with one thing in mind: a genuine passion for perfume. It’s this expertise in fragrance, and pocketfriendly prices, that saw the brand rapidly expand its store footprint, now with 2000 staff across its retail real estate. But, with rapid expansion, comes growing pains, particularly in the areas of staff scheduling and time and attendance (T&A). The business was using paper rotas and an in-house time and attendance system that was almost totally manual, and saw shifts unfilled and a total lack of visibility for the head office team. “We had no control over budget versus our spend, and no central view of our staffing,” says Hardik Dave, Lead Project Manager at The Perfume Shop. “For our employees, it wasn’t easy to apply for holidays, it definitely wasn’t simple to see their shifts in advance or apply for gap shifts.”
Enter Rotageek’s digital scheduling solution. The Perfume Shop wanted to digitise and automate their systems, across the store universe. Rotageek’s smart scheduling provided one, intuitive solution for both scheduling and timesheets, while giving the head office team a central view of staffing across the business and even automating a starter and leaver process. Store managers now save at least 3 hours a week usually taken up with scheduling, plus don’t have the hassle of finding cover with the process of filling gap shifts now a breeze. They’ve got a world-class scheduling app in their Perfume Shop-branded pockets, giving them flexibility and visibility.