Sankey's

Sankey's restaurant has been run by the Sankey family since the 1960's, with third generation Matthew Sankey now at the helm. In 2009 Matthew expanded the Sankey's offering by opening its very first shop with co-owner Graeme Anderson, after the pair met by chance at the world famous Billingsgate Fish Market.

Having both grown up in the seafood industry and sharing a passion for fish, they wanted to ensure that this passion was always reflected in the level of service every single one of Sankey's customers receives. Part of this was making sure they have the right people on hand to meet demand and that their staff can focus the majority of their time on the customers rather than administrative tasks.

A laborious approach to staff scheduling

Initially the business was using spreadsheets and digital calendars to create rotas and manage staff absences. But with this approach it was taking hours to build rotas each week; a poor use of time and resources.

The business wanted to make better use of its time, so Matthew and Graeme set about finding a solution that could speed up laborious tasks such as building and sharing staff rotas and monitoring staff attendance.

Sankey's approached Rotaready following a recommendation from another customer. After seeing a demo of the platform, the decision to work with Rotaready was easy for the pair and they set about implementation immediately. Working closely with the team at Rotaready they had both sites live in under two weeks.

Deciding to work with Rotaready was a really easy decision for us. You get the best of both worlds; a product with a really logical and clear front end, and all the magic happening behind the scenes.

Game changing results

Sankey's use the majority of the product's features but have found staff templates and cost control particularly useful. Since setting up a series of templates at the very beginning they haven't had to make any changes and are able to build weekly rotas completely automatically. Prior to this, it was taking almost a whole day every week.

Cost control and sanitisation have also been instrumental in Sankey's budgeting and ensuring staff are being paid accurately, with hours being automatically trimmed by Rotaready based on customised settings and overtime rules.

Attendance discrepancies are also a thing of the past thanks to Rotaready. Managers are able to log in to HQ and easily view and resolve any flagged attendance issues with the click of a button. Staff have full visibility of their upcoming shifts via the mobile app so always know when they are working next. And thanks to instant rota validation, there are no longer any issues with regards to staff exceeding contractual hours or break times.

An ongoing partnership

Going forward Rotaready will continue to work closely with Sankey's to ensure they are getting the most out of all new features and developments. Next on the agenda for Sankey's is enabling integrations between Rotaready and its payroll and EPOS systems, Quickbooks and Goodtill.

Working with Rotaready has been a pleasure. Even as a small business we feel highly valued, the team really take our feedback on board and are always on hand to help us with anything we need. I would recommend Rotaready to anyone looking for an outstanding workforce management partner.