2 Sisters Food Group Saves 5,000 hours a year with UKG

2 Sisters Food Group is a multinational food manufacturer based in the U.K. that supplies chicken, pizza, bakery items, and ready meals to major retailers and food service customers. The manufacturer operates two lines of business – a poultry division and a meal solutions division – and employs 14,000 people at 14 manufacturing sites the U.K.

Challenges

For years, 2 Sisters Food Group relied on three separate systems to capture employee time and attendance as well as manage its multigenerational and multilingual frontline workforce across its enterprise. Without a centralized solution for its complex workforce management needs, the organization was spending an extraordinary amount of time processing employee timecards and holiday requests and reconciling payroll. It also needed a better way to schedule full-time employees as well as communicate quickly and effectively with contingent staff – known as its flexible employee population – who are often called upon to fill shifts across manufacturing facilities.

Solutions

An existing customer already leveraging UKG technology for a portion of its workforce, 2 Sisters Food Group chose to migrate to the AI-powered UKG Pro Workforce Management™ suite as its single source for all workforce management needs, citing the solution’s flexibility and the manufacturer’s long-time relationship with UKG as well as UKG’s industry expertise and position as a global leader in workforce management.

“We are a 24/7 operation with a variety of shifts, which include eight-week rotations. We needed a solution that could accommodate those shifts and streamline time and attendance across all facilities. The UKG Pro Workforce Management suite was especially intuitive and the perfect fit to meet our complex needs,” said Victoria Askew, Head of HR Systems at 2 Sisters Food Group.

Results

Since implementing the UKG Pro Workforce Management suite, 2 Sisters Food Group has achieved exceptional time and cost savings and has improved transparency among workers, which earned the manufacturer a Customer Excellence Award from UKG.

“Our HR and payroll teams have experienced significant benefits with UKG, reducing non-clocking processing time by 600+ hours and saving nearly 4,300 hours annually in exception processing. We no longer have to worry about maintaining three separate solutions. Everything we need is right in UKG,” said Askew.

According to the UKG 2024 Manufacturing Talent Trends Report, many manufacturers still rely on outdated solutions such as spreadsheets to manage and engage frontline workers. Fewer than 1 in 10 manufacturers surveyed embrace AI-driven technology to make the employee experience better, and more than half (53%) of employees say their employer isn’t doing enough with mobile technology. 2 Sisters says its commitment to innovating the employee experience with the mobile-first UKG Pro Workforce Management suite has resulted in a more engaging and transparent workplace.

“Holiday requests were previously done on paper, so they weren’t always captured accurately or processed in a timely manner,” said Askew. “We’ve since moved to having employees submit those requests in the UKG Pro mobile app, which means employees can do that from the comfort of home, and UKG recommends whether we should approve based on how many people are needed in our plants at any point in time. So, this new process hasn’t just reduced the amount of time it takes to approve requests, it helps ensure we’re being fair and transparent with employees throughout the process.”

The dramatic decrease in manual work has led to another notable – and welcomed – outcome.

“By automating our processes, HR employees are focused on more value-added activities,” said Askew. “Rather than sift through paper forms, they can spend their time on learning and development opportunities that benefit employees across our sites.”

With a diverse workforce spread out across the U.K., another one of 2 Sister Food Group’s challenges was communicating with employees who represent 36 different nationalities, which has been made easier by the UKG Pro Workforce Management suite.

“We have a multigenerational, multilingual workforce and we need to make sure we’re getting the right messages to the right people in the right language. That’s been challenging but we’ve been able to translate our communications into 16 different languages so far, and that’s been well received.”

Also well received is 2 Sister Food Group’s ability to communicate with contingent staff in a more efficient and effective way through UKG.

“Our flexible employee population used to be managed manually. That meant we’d have to text each worker individually to ask if they could fill a shift, which added up to more than 250 text messages per week at just one of our sites. Now, managing this population in UKG, we can look at the different areas of our factories to determine where we need to place those workers and what we need them to do and then use broadcast messaging in our UKG suite to let them know their shifts are available and booked. It’s been revolutionary,” said Askew.

Looking to the future, 2 Sisters Food Group is looking to implement advanced forecasting in its UKG suite to better schedule workers, fill shifts, and align roles and skills across its manufacturing facilities.