I'm Carol Fletcher. I’m the HR Manager for Aunt Bessie's in Hull. We manage 500 employees and 150 agency staff across two sites and we’ve used a Kronos system to manage absence since 2004.

Timely, accurate absence information supports HR excellence at Aunt Bessie's
Aunt Bessie's Foods is the fastest growing frozen food manufacturer in the UK. With 500 employees, 150 agency staff, two factories and around 34 million Yorkshire puddings to produce every week, the company continuously reviews its business practices to ensure that operations are efficient and cost effective.

In 2004 Aunt Bessie's replaced its manual clocking system with Kronos Workforce Central® and experienced all the advantages of a good Time & Attendance system: accurate payroll, a significant decrease in clock card analysis and few payroll errors and complaints. Using Kronos also led to significant improvements in the way in which absence could be monitored and measured, and resulted in a 27% decrease in absence levels at the main site.

Prior to 2004, absence management at Aunt Bessie's was done manually with an administrator responsible each week for gathering all the clock cards and manually transferring details of absent employees onto payroll input sheets. With a payroll input deadline of Monday, a member of staff would be required to work on Sunday to transfer all the information from the payroll input sheets into the payroll system.

Carol Fletcher, HR Manager at Aunt Bessie's Foods remembers, “With a totally manual system, even very basic absence management was difficult to achieve. Recurring absence, for example, could only be spotted by finding the payroll input sheet for each employee for each of the 52 weeks in a year, and scanning the sheets to see if absence patterns could be spotted. Multiply that by 500 employees and you can see the challenge we faced.”

















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