With the aim to consolidate HR reporting across locations, Wren chose Synel’s hosted solution to centralise reporting.
Background
Selling the largest and most diverse range of kitchens in the United Kingdom, with thousands of styles, unit sizes, and special feature units, Wren Kitchens helps you find the kitchen of your dreams – whatever your budget. Founded by Malcolm Healey (73) in 2009, Wren now employs 4,000 people, and has seen sales of £1 billion in the past four years.
Recent years have seen the organisation invest as much as £40 million in a new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility at its headquarters, ‘The Nest’, located in Barton. The 750,000 sq ft facility is on Falkland Way and will house around 1,500 people once completed. In addition, Wren also operates a stand-alone facility on Foxhills Industrial Estate in Scunthorpe.
The requirement was for a Time and Attendance and Access Control solution to manage over 4,000 employees across all sites. Employee attendance is now being recorded with Synel’s Facial Recognition devices and our Fingerprint devices allow their staff access to the building. All the data is captured in one flexible web based solution, TimeLOG Web.
Complete Support for Full-Time Operations
Our highly professional and qualified people ensure the smooth operation of Synel systems at all times… and peace of mind for the management at Wren Kitchens too!
Biometrics That Work
Wren has chosen to implement Facial Recognition in manufacturing sites, as fingerprints could be affected by cuts and abrasions sustained while working. Fingerprint readers can therefore be unsuitable, while non-biometric solutions are at higher risk of misuse. Facial Recognition Systems provide an ideal solution in this circumstance. For most office-based employees, Wren uses Fingerprint Reading devices instead.
4,000 employees are clocking in and out of Wren Kitchens every day. Synel UK has also installed turnstiles in most areas of Wren’s sites, as required.
Minimise Device and Licence Usage
One of the major challenges Synel UK had to overcome in this project was to allocate different devices to employees per site. As each typical time and attendance recording device has the ability to store data of up to 2,000 templates, and Wren already had a total of 4,000 employees, that meant that different devices had to be allocated to different employees per site.
The TimeLOGWeb System, on the other hand, was able to precisely record the attendance of all 4,000 employees. In that way, the company not only achieved significant savings by using only one Software licence, but was also able to centralise the operations of HR, Time and Attendance and Access Control in an efficient way.
Way Forward
In the near future, Synel and Wren Kitchens aim to work together to complete payroll integration so that these records are automatically forwarded to the payroll division. Our development team is creating specific rules so this integration will be a reality soon.
