Customer story · West Lothian Council

About West Lothian Council

West Lothian Council is a local authority in Scotland, delivering services to communities across the region, including running its network of primary and secondary schools, care homes and wider council facilities.

Within the council, the Facilities Management team keeps this estate running day to day: supply staff, janitors and catering colleagues working across schools and care homes, spread over a wide geographic area.

Before Rotageek, the team relied on spreadsheets, and later Microsoft Teams, to manage rotas, approaches that had served the council well at a smaller scale, but were increasingly stretched by the size and complexity of the estate.

The council considered sticking with Microsoft Teams, and looked at other tools on the market, but needed something built for the complexity of local government: real-time visibility, integrated clocking, and reporting, not five different systems stitched together.

The clincher was Rotageek's skills and tasks functionality. West Lothian holds a bank of 300+ supply staff, each requiring the correct PVG (Protecting Vulnerable Groups) status before they can be placed in a school or care home.

Rotageek let the council tag staff by skill and automatically restrict shift broadcasts to only those qualified, turning a job that took "hours and hours" of manual cross-referencing into what Tom describes as a five-minute task. "We can send the shifts out for a care home, and it will only go to the people that we've given that skill to," he says. "That is a game changer."

Rather than switching the whole estate over in one go, West Lothian piloted Rotageek in a single unit first, to see how it held up in practice. "It was flawless, really," Tom says. With training support in place from Rotageek's implementation team, including Tony, the council set its own go-live date and moved with confidence: "We're ready now. Everything's uploaded, I understand the system, and Tony's there if I need him. Let's just press go.”

There was some early pushback once the system went live, which Tom puts down to natural resistance to change rather than any issue with the platform itself, and within a month it had settled into the norm across the workforce.

Before Rotageek, managers had limited ability to confirm whether planned hours matched hours actually worked. Today, a weekly audit (start/finish times against actual clock-in and clock-out) feeds directly into Power BI, giving the council an evidence-based view of attendance in minutes rather than months. "You're talking within 5-10 minutes being able to display information that you just could never have done before, it would have taken you months." Tom says.

Since go-live, the platform has recorded 12,708 clock-in events, 11,025 of them matched to a completed clock-out, captured automatically rather than compiled by hand. Across shifts that have already taken place, that adds up to roughly 88,830 hours of actual worked time logged directly through the platform, against roughly 161,079 scheduled hours for the same period, a gap managers can now see and query in minutes.

That level of visibility took some trust-building to get there. "Initially employees tend to always think that you're spying on them or you're watching where they're going, especially the clocking in and out," Tom explains. "It's not about finding out whether they're at their work or not. What Rotageek allows us to do is keep on top of the people that are consistently not clocking in and making sure: are they okay? Is there a reason they're not at work?"

Rotageek has also transformed the day-to-day experience for colleagues. Where staff once had to wait for a phone call from the office or catch a printed sheet on a noticeboard, they can now see their rota, request cover and get shift notifications from their phone, even the night before, from home. That shift shows up clearly in the data: 99.8% of all clock-ins now happen through the mobile app rather than the web.

Uptake has been especially strong among the council's floating staff, who move between buildings day to day. "It certainly made it easier for our floating staff," Tom says. "They love it. They can be at home and see straight away what shift they're on in the morning, what time they're starting, and who they're working with."

Some colleagues needed hands-on support getting started with the app (including staff nearing retirement age, unfamiliar with QR codes), but once set up, adoption has been smooth, with no reports of the app being too complex to use.

West Lothian Council operates in a public sector environment under sustained budget pressure, consulting with residents on future priorities through its "WL 2028: Your Council, Your Say" programme.

While the council's finance team, rather than Facilities Management, owns the savings case, Tom points to the visibility Rotageek gives colleagues like Jamie Fisher, Facilities and Support Services Manager, as the foundation for those conversations: "The reports that he could generate would let him see where there are gaps and where he could save money or where he's having to put overtime."

For Tom, the biggest impact isn't the system itself: it's what the time it frees up allows managers to do instead.

Asked what he'd say to another public-sector organisation weighing up the same decision, Tom didn't hesitate: "I would say you really need to try this or see it at least in action. Certainly the way we use it for that massive amount of people that we've got is demonstrable and proof of concept for Rotageek that it not only works, it is, as I keep saying, game-changing."