Noah’s Hotel

Noah's on the Beach, part of the Quality Hotel Group, operates with 80-90 staff, most on a casual basis. They were eager to find a way of moving away from the hotel's existing manual system.

Challenge

Humanforce had been making life easier for Noah's Newcastle Beach-based hotel and restaurant for a couple of months when a cyclone tore through the coastal town and damaged the hotel. It was during this period of definitely-not-business-as-usual that Noah's realised Humanforce’s value was even greater than it first appeared.

"We already had extensive renovations planned. The storms added weeks to our closure period. Managing the employee repercussions of that would have been a nightmare without Humanforce. It's been a godsend,"

Solution

"Rostering is so much easier now," enthuses Lynette. "Quite a few of our rosters don’t change that much over time, so it's great to be able to duplicate them. And if we do need to make changes, everything is so much more transparent.

"Previously, if staff were unavailable for a shift they’d need to tell us about it in a diary. Managers would check the diary before doing the roster to see who was available. That meant there was always potential to miss something – always the chance of a breakdown in communication."

"Now we feed the changes into the system, it updates immediately, and alerts the people who need to know."

"We had to cancel a lot of functions after what happened, so we need to rebuild and that means keeping our costs to a minimum. Our managers can track progress using Humanforce, and Humanforce will make that process easy."

We divide the hotel into 8 operational departments, and each department has a manager who would have to plan individual rosters on a spreadsheet. Timesheets were manual too, pre-printed for staff to physically sign at the start of a shift and again at the end. Then managers would review and sign-off earch sheet at week end.

– Lynette Kaiser, Accounts Manager, Noah’s Hotel

Results

• Cost control and advanced forecasting

• Realtime communication

• Roster management & automation