Nestle Cuddington
Nestle Cuddington
Nestle use Mitrefinch TMS to help manage their Annualised Hours
Nestlé is an International Company responsible for producing many household brands within the food and drinks sector. Their Cuddington site produces many of Nestlé's dairy products including top brands Munch Bunch and Ski yoghurts.
Nestle Cuddington have been enjoying the benefits of an annualised hours system for nearly 10 years. They primarily introduced annualised hours to improve flexibility in production, so they were better equipped to deal with fluctuations throughout the year, this has been successful and has brought additional benefits too. The plant employs 130 staff, and currently 80 members of staff, predominately production workers and engineers, are on annualised hours.
There are various ways of introducing annualised hours. In the case of Nestlé Cuddington, there is a defined bank of hours that each employee works throughout the year, shift patterns are then drawn up taking into account seasonal peaks and troughs, with an additional bank of 100 hours per employee. Mitrefinch clocking terminals are used to capture all the data required to keep a track of employee attendance, and their annualised hours used to date. The HR department also makes use of the reports within Mitrefinch TMS , to easily check any exceptions to the standard clocking pattern of employees.
The benefits to Nestlé Cuddington have extended to include accurate budgeting for annual staffing costs, a reduction on administration costs and the ability to eliminate costly unpredictable overtime. Nestlé Cuddington use some of the 100 banked hours for staff training programmes helping to increase the skills base within the factory, or to cover staff absences. Alternatively any hours that are not used within the year are written off and as such can be seen as one of the staff benefits of working at the site.
An added benefit has been improved staff attendance – in fact the greater security of annualised hours has created improved morale within the workforce. It means that staff can work flexibly, yet they know they will get a fixed salary per month, and they will have advanced knowledge of what hours they will be working throughout the year.
From Nestlé Cuddington's point of view, where their primary concern is staff welfare, they feel that a good balance has been achieved between this and the operational objectives of the business.
Naomi White, HR Business Partner, Cuddington Factory.
