Project: Somerset Care

The first trial sites received Rota Horizon in 2010, and Somerset Care is now implementing Rota Horizon in all of its sites across the UK.

Although the development process was complicated at times, the Thinking Software team stayed motivated when the going got tough. It was sometimes quite difficult to explain exactly what we needed, but despite the pain, the project stayed on course and delivered an excellent solution that everyone likes

Keith

Before Horizon was implemented, each care home managed its own rotas in its own way. Our manual systems meant that we had no consistent approach. Rota Horizon is easy for people to learn and use – you just create a shift, and then drag and drop it into place. This makes training easy, and when you’re rolling-out to multiple sites across a large geographical area, that’s an important consideration.

What’s more, RotaOne has good “on-screen reports” – reports that actually look like a “shift roster” – so people see what they expect to see.

Taking the project as a whole, Keith mentioned two key drivers for implementing Rota Horizon – Standardisation and Control.

a) Standardisation Somerset Care needed a standardised approach to planning across the whole organisation, making it easier for people to work across different homes, and to ensure better information for management decisions.

In our homes, the manager/deputy and administrator are always involved in the admin of the system. They like the fact that it makes life easier for everyone, particularly with regard to the holiday planning tab – this is a great feature which cuts out a number of manual, paper-based tasks and saves a lot of time and stress.

b) Control “Our payroll is processed on a weekly basis, and because Rota Horizon exports information to our PayRite Payroll package, we can do the whole job in less than 2 hours now. We now have real confidence that our payroll is correct and easy to audit. Before Horizon, it took more people much longer to process – and that’s before the discrepancies and errors were dealt with – payroll queries and errors are very rare now, and just as important, our management labour cost information is correct and quick to produce.”

I can do nearly all of my administrative work on one screen – the main ROTA screen – and we find that the reports, which cover topics like sickness, absence, payroll forecasting and contracted hours status, make it possible for individual home managers to take charge of controlling their costs.

Keith

We’ve enjoyed working with Thinking Software – we would certainly recommend them — and we look forward to their help in meeting our needs as we expand Somerset Care.

Keith Crockett, Assistant Director of IT, Somerset Care