Atlantis Childcare Case Study
Background
Perth-based Atlantis Group opened in 2015. It was the only facility in Western Australia to offer child care, outside school hours care, an indoor play centre, and an early education training centre from a single purpose built location.
The vision for Atlantis is to provide high quality care helping families achieve a work-life balance, while ensuring children develop active, healthy lifestyles. Over the last five years Atlantis Group doubled its staff numbers and opened five new locations. And the group has no plans of slowing down its expansion any time soon.
Ian joined Atlantis as their General Manager two years ago. His goal was to take the business through a major period of growth and streamline current business operations. Coming from the Fitness Industry where rostering and time and attendance systems were common, Ian knew a similar solution was needed at Atlantis. It ultimately had to address manual processing errors across time and attendance, as well as payroll – allowing the business to scale effectively and provide a basis for budget and compliance management.
Why Ento?
We asked Ian what led the company to look at Workforce Management software and why Atlantis Group selected Ento as their vendor of choice.
“When I came onboard 2 years ago, we were doing a lot of manual processes and the errors were costing us significant money. Our biggest risk as a business was our management of rostering and time and attendance.”
Atlantis Group’s requirements included:
- Be easy to use and adopt across all centres, not just Head Office.
- Provide real-time insights into costs and compliance.
- Provide a positive return on investment within a short timeframe.
- Avoid large hardware costs to support time and attendance.
After an extensive process reviewing vendors, Ento was identified as Atlantis Group’s preferred solution based on our system’s ability to solve their key requirements.
Specifically, Ian identified the following unique capabilities from Ento:
Ento’s real-time reporting, costing and compliance
Ento’s unique ability to manage ECT and Diploma ratios in real time, allowing centre managers to maintain compliant staffing levels.
Intuitive and easy to use
Ento’s User Interface stood out from the crowd. Its simplicity means employees will use the system and require minimal training to get adoption across multiple centres.
Simple and effective digital time and attendance solution
Ento’s time and attendance removed manual inaccuracies of clocking in and out of shifts, and significantly reduced time to approve timesheets and process payroll.
80% reduction
in payroll
processing time
Results
Since implementing Ento, Atlantis Group has seen significant improvement across all of its key criteria set during the vendor selection process.
During our interview, Ian called out several improvements:
Compliance
Pro-active insights, alerts and rostering blockers allows Atlantis Group effectively manage compliant staffing levels for ECT ratios, Diploma, First Aid, and WWC. This means a higher quality of care for their families and a reduction in compliance risk.
Qualifications are managed using Ento’s workflow, CoreHR and Rostering modules. This automates the process of capturing, storing and referencing staff qualifications, while making changes to rosters in real time. With the added benefit of Ento’s qualification reporting, Atlantis has a day of operations and future view of compliance.
“Onboarding has been a helpful tool as we have our staff responsible for their own certifications. We get alerts on the rosters for expired qualifications and can notify staff ahead of time. We’re now working with Ento to put in roster compliance blockers to automate this further.”
Labour Costs
Prior to rolling out Ento the process of clocking in and out of shifts was manual and used paper timesheets. This meant calculating pay was error prone and lead to time loss costing the business a significant amount in processing time and labour costs. Once Ento’s digital time and attendance tool was introduced, manual calculation errors, time to process and accurate employee clocking in and out resulted in a significant improvements, namely:
- 4.5% overall reduction in labour costs.
- 90% reduction in manual processing errors.
Scalability
By removing manual processes, Ento has reduced the time to approve timesheets and process payroll by over 80%. Previously it would take the company 3 ½ days per week to process payroll, an almost full time job, the same process now only takes 1 ½ day per fortnight and with double the amount of staff. This sets Atlantis up to effectively scale their locations and staff without the need to hire more people to process timesheets and payroll.
90% reduction
in pay errors
Future plans for Atlantis
“Ento has been a key system in supporting our business as we scale. I’m looking forward to working with the team to bring other key metrics into Ento to further automate rostering.”