Ensuring employee discipline and productivity

Wondersoft was established in the year 1996. With over 100 employees and its head office in Chennai, Wondersoft focuses on unique and innovative solutions for retail and distribution businesses. Wondersoft has over 6000 satisfied customers in India and abroad across various segments.

CASE STUDY

Style Spa is the furniture arm of the SK Poddar group of companies which has interests in diverse businesses, ranging from fertilizers to heavy engineering to project management.

Style Spa Furniture Ltd has been in the business of furniture retailing for more than a decade and is head quartered in Chennai. Style Spa is present in 65 cities with a chain of nearly 100 stores managed by a team of qualified and trained professionals. Style Spa is charting out an aggressive growth plan over the next few years and store expansion is a part of the agenda.

Requirement:  Style Spa has been adopting a manual attendance system, with standard checks and controls, however, recognising that with passage of time, increased number of stores and wider span of control for the area managers, it would be necessary to opt for a technology driven solution.

Challenges: While store discipline was ensured with the existing system, it became evident that enhancing productivity of the store team would become necessary in a competitive market place. The HR and Admin at their Chennai Head Office had to rely and follow the attendance and leave records given by the stores. Manual data consolidation had to be done for the entire enterprise at the HO.

The solution provided: Wondersoft launched this unique and innovative solution WhoIsIn in 2009, after about 18 months of R&D. WhoIsIn is a web based biometric attendance management system, which ensures employee discipline and improves employee productivity. The solution needs only a PC with an internet connection at every store. Wondersoft offers it on a SaaS (Software as a service), an OPEX model. No investment on any biometric devices, servers, leased lines, IT resources etc is needed. It is specially targeted at retail chains, which have multiple stores in different cities, to give them comprehensive information about employee presence and movement across their entire chain.

Benefits: WhoIsIn enables Style Spa HO team to track employee movements now without the presence of the camera at a store. After an initial pilot done within a single city, the solution has been recently extended across the country in a phased manner. There is now clear data available on timely arrival of the employees at each store. WhoIsIn sends an SMS automatically at 10.15am (the stores open at 10am) to the area managers with a summary of the attendance at the stores. Style Spa is able to track the attendance of their area managers and regional managers too, who visit multiple stores. One of the most noteworthy benefits is that the data for all the stores is all together, and always available live and in a consolidated form. They can take reports at the store, region, zone or all-India level anytime.

“The management of a retail chain can now rely on the live information from WhoIsIn, through  sms and emails on employee movements, for better management and control. There are other features too for the benefits of both the employees as well as the HR team.”

Sabhari Shankar Chidambaram, Director, Wondersoft  

“We are a young and dynamic organisation that differentiates itself purely by our service and believe that enhanced employee productivity will aid us in our passionate quest for being the best in the industry. Embracing such tools is important for any growing organisation to maximise both efficiency and effectiveness of the employee contribution.”

Arun Mahajan, Managing Director, Style Spa