Zero uncovered shifts across 415 colleagues and 72 sites.

• 39,625 shifts scheduled since September 2025: with the rota already built out to December 2027, giving managers visibility months ahead rather than week to week (20,946 shifts already taken place; 18,679 published ahead of time). 
• 12,708 clock-ins recorded, 11,025 matched to a completed clock-out: giving the council an auditable, real-time record of attendance across the estate instead of multiple spreadsheets.
• ~88,830 hours of actual worked time captured directly through the platform: replacing manual timesheets with a single, evidence-based source of hours worked, checkable in minutes rather than months. 
• 4,112 holiday and leave requests submitted since go-live, 3,865 approved (3,007 already elapsed, 1,105 booked ahead of time): giving managers one clear view of leave activity, planned as far in advance as the rota itself, instead of information scattered across email and paper forms.    

Just as telling as the figures above: since go-live, there has been no instance of a site being left uncovered, meaning no school has failed to open and no care home has gone short-staffed because of a missed shift. 

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 challenge

Managing a facilities workforce spread across a huge geographic area (split shifts, sickness cover, and hundreds of buildings) was never going to work on a spreadsheet.

West Lothian Council started with spreadsheets, then moved to Microsoft Teams, which helped, but only so far. As Tom Crawford, Area Manager for Facilities Management, explains, Teams "was great, but it was very limited... there wasn't any ability really for us to monitor it live or monitor and see what was going on." Neither approach gave managers real-time visibility of who was working, who was covered, and who wasn't turning up.

The stakes of getting it wrong were real. "So Monday's coming, we've not arranged cover because of the massive workforce, we've got spreadsheets everywhere trying to arrange cover, and the school's not open," Tom says. "That's not something that can happen. That's a service failure, a local government failure." Pupils turned away, parents contacted, staff unable to get into the building: even happening once a year was one time too many.

Looking back now, Tom is candid about how far the council has come: "I really am starting to wonder what we'd done before Rotageek, or how we even managed without it."

The solution

Rotageek is now West Lothian Council's single system for building rotas, tracking attendance and generating reports across its Facilities Management workforce, replacing spreadsheets and Microsoft Teams entirely.

Rotas are built at least a week ahead and pushed live every Wednesday, flowing through a Power BI dashboard that lets head teachers and council staff see who is on shift, in real time, across the whole of West Lothian. "It's not just being used, it's being used by us, but it's being viewed... by teachers, head teachers, and other council staff right across the entirety of West Lothian," Tom says. "We don't have a choice. It's the only thing that we want to use now."

One person now manages the entire rota alongside their day-to-day role, something Tom points to as proof of how much the platform has simplified running a workforce of this scale.

Strengthening auditability and actual hours worked.

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?"

Colleague adoption and experience

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.

Modernising a public-sector workforce under budget pressure

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.