Willmotts Transport is one of the leading independent warehousing and distribution retail companies in the South West. We’re delighted that HR Director, Jess Rogers, was able to take some time out to talk to us about her experience of working with Access so far, and their plans for the future.
Willmotts are users of our warehouse and inventory solution Mintsoft, and more recently, of Access PeopleHR. Having moved most of its essential HR functions to PeopleHR, we’re now working with Willmotts to fully realise the potential of our software, and implement further positive change throughout their business.
About Willmotts Transport
Established in 1918, Willmotts provides logistics solutions and warehousing to a wide range of clients across various industries, including food goods, beauty products, and retail support. Being a part of a Pallet Network via their partnership and as a founding member of Palletforce enables overnight deliveries of consignments of any size from a single pallet upwards anywhere in the UK.
With BRC accreditation and ISO9001 certification, Willmotts takes pride in its prompt and reliable service from a dedicated and knowledgeable workforce. All backed by over a century of experience.
Our partnership so far
With office-based employees, warehouse operatives, and a fleet of drivers deployed nationwide, Willmotts needed an HR solution capable of managing various ways of working. It needed to incorporate rotas, shift patterns, and logbooks, and be bespoke to their industry, as well as helping them to streamline their processes, and become paperless.
“Take booking holidays as an example,” Jess explains. “Before, managers would book days off for our drivers, but they had to be relied on to follow the manual process correctly. If they didn’t, that would result in not enough vehicle cover, and then we’d be in trouble. Now all holiday requests are submitted in the app, by the employee, and are automatically sent to the right people to approve them. We’ve got total visibility and control.”
Today, all Willmotts’ shift information, annual leave, recruitment and onboarding, and health and safety compliance information, along with a wealth of other HR requirements are live in PeopleHR. And since employee numbers have grown from 80 to around 300 in the last 4 years, Jess and her team are relieved to have the system in place. “I honestly don’t know how we’d manage without this software now. Everything’s in there. It’s our bible!”
Business benefits and impact
We asked Jess to talk us through some of the positive outcomes Willmotts has experienced since coming on board with PeopleHR. “The list of benefits is huge,” she told us. “It’s helped us completely streamline our processes. We’ve been able to replace the majority of our manual forms and spreadsheets with app-based activities. There’s very little paper timesheets being handed in every week. It’s so much easier. It saves so much time. There’s less room for human error. And given the amount of paper we were using, especially for recruitment and onboarding, it’s had a positive environmental impact as well, which is important to us.”
Jess goes on to say, “And another major benefit for a multi-site organisation such as ours, is the ability to have access to all our data in real time, on-the-go, via the app. If we want to send important, time-sensitive information to all our drivers across the UK, we can do it instantly. That’s an enormous benefit”.
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Unexpected benefits
We also asked Jess if there was any functionality she wasn’t expecting to see, or that she wasn’t expecting to be as impactful. “I didn’t realise the reporting would be as powerful as it is. I like that I can create my own reports. For example, I can run reports which tell me when employees need to renew their regulatory training or health and safety requirements, such as fork lift training, first aid training, an eye test, or a medical check. Now we can have complete confidence in our compliance.”
And being BRC accredited, Willmotts is subject to auditing. “We have no idea whose records they’ll ask for, but we don’t need to worry because no matter what they want to see: driving licenses, induction documents, training records, everything they need is in PeopleHR.”
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What’s next for Willmotts and Access?
With the transformation of its core HR functions complete, Jess is planning to get to grips with more of what PeopleHR can deliver. “We know it does so much more than we’re using it for, and now we’ve got some time back, we can start to explore that. We’ve got training booked in for next month, and we’re all looking forward it. We’re especially excited to see what Ripple® can do for us.”
Access’ Ripple® HR workflow management software automates tasks, saving time and reducing risk, while your flows run smoothly in the background.
