Haldane Fisher

Contact: Doreen Henderson

“Everything we requested, and more, was delivered within an impressive time frame.”

At a Glance

Sector: Retail

Employees: 500 across 15 locations

Product Installed: TMS (Time and Attendance software) 

Client Objectives: Management of work-sharing rosters, sharing information across divisions, facilitation of remote clocking-in, reduction of costs

They say: More control of staff, and a reduction in absenteeism – all leading to increased productivity

TMS Replaces Time-Consuming Old System

Haldane Fisher is one of the leading independent suppliers to the construction industry in Ireland and the UK, serving both trade customers and the general public.  The business was founded in 1946 and has grown organically through acquisition to incorporate 15 sites.

Haldane Fisher installed Advance Systems’ time and attendance software, TMS, in 1997. Prior to this they used a system of manual punch cards to record employee time and attendance.  According to Doreen Henderson, “working with the punch card system was incredibly time consuming.  Every week, we manually calculated total hours worked, cleared anomalies by contacting the various managers, subtracted all instances of lateness and sickness, manually cross checked the accuracy of all this information and then finally input total hours to payroll.  We needed a better system.

Ability to Deal with Shift Patterns

Haldane Fisher selected Advance Systems out of three suppliers of time and attendance software that gave system demonstrations. “From our first meeting with Advance Systems, they were very accommodating with our specific requests. They arranged a site visit with one of their clients so that we could see the time and attendance system in operation. The level of functionality in TMS was of a high standard to that which we hadn’t seen before.  We operate many shift patterns and TMS had the ability to deal with them all accurately and automatically, says Ms Henderson”.

System Built to Exact Requirements

“Advance Systems have been incredibly thorough and patient in building the system to our exact requirements.  Everything we requested, and more, was delivered within an impressive time frame.  The ‘anything is possible’ attitude from Advance Systems staff was one of the main reasons that we selected them as our preferred supplier. They tested everything to the nth degree to make sure that all our rules were built into TMS correctly.  While finalising the link to Pegasus Payroll the calculation, although complicated due to the number of shifts we operate, had to be completely accurate and Advance Systems got it right.  We couldn’t afford even the slightest error and were confident that Advance Systems would achieve this for us.”

Monitor Employee Attendance

“TMS has many varying functions at Haldane Fisher”, Ms Henderson explains.  “Our employees clock in and out at Swipe Card Terminals.   Employee attendance information is centralised at Head Office.  TMS is able to deal with our varying shifts, it accurately and automatically captures employee data i.e. hours worked, sickness, lateness, holidays, and exports this directly to our Payroll on a weekly basis.  We can monitor lateness, sickness and holidays for each employee at a glance.”

Records of Past Employees

“TMS gives us immediate access to detailed records for almost 1000 employees including past employees.  We can very easily look back at any employee information as far back as 1997.”

Flexible and User-Friendly

“TMS is a very user friendly and easy system to work with. If there is ever anything additional that we want TMS to achieve for us, we just phone the Support Desk and it gets sorted out very quickly which takes the pressure off us. Both Advance Systems as a company and TMS as a system have always provided the flexibility that we really need.”