Landmark Customer Case Studies - KEY Casual

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H Corrigall, Leadketty Farm, Dunning, Perth

Leadketty Farm is a third generation family business in Perthshire and is set in 70 acres, of which 40 acres is taken up with soft fruit and the remainder is put down to barley. A further 120 acres of land is cropped with potatoes grown for seed. The berry fields are split between strawberries (35 ac) and raspberries (5 ac) with 95% of the fruit marketed through Kentish Garden.

We have been growing soft fruit for 11 years supplying major supermarkets who all work in the same basic way with their suppliers and for that you need an accurate and detailed recording system particularly in relation to actual hours worked and the rate paid.

This summer we were given two weeks to prepare for our first on-site two day audit at the height of the season, which was the catalyst for re-visiting the benefits of using Landmark’s KEY Casual program. We had investigated it a couple of times in the past year following recommendations by the “50 Club” and a friend who is also a fruit grower.

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Our previous recording was done using a Pickwise hand held computer in the field. Then I manually transferred the information onto a spreadsheet, this is sufficient, but on viewing KEY Casual again we could see that at a click of a button the hours worked and rate, including holiday pay, were clearly shown on any particular day. This would make life a great deal easier at audit so we ordered the software there and then!

Our master plan faltered twice. Firstly, at such short notice it was not possible to arrange an on-site training visit from one of the Landmark field team. Secondly we had engaged an agency ‘temp’ to help with the back dating of entries to the beginning of the picking season, and assumed that she was going to know more about the system than I did. She didn’t, so we were in it together.

The telephone support at Landmark was our only lifeline – we had things coming at us from all directions including the peak picking period with approximately 130 pickers and the impending audit.

We installed the KEY Casual program onto two computers after a few glitches, and worked backwards inputting the hours worked from our data, but we had a very ‘hairy’ couple of days. We were on the telephone a great deal and we were calmly guided through our problems until we were set up and could start preparing the data for the audit.

It was much easier when we were working on current data which could be entered straight into Casual from Pickwise. Without the spreadsheet we found that we were keeping a better more accessible record.

The audit came and went. The auditor had never seen KEY Casual before and she was impressed. She checked all our policies and records, inspected caravans, interviewed members of our picking squad and permanent staff, counted the number of Fire Hydrants and discussed a Risk Assessment for our computer and VDU which should have been in place! She liked the way the software presented the number of hours worked and the rate per hour – to be fair we had kept the information before but it would have been more difficult for her to work through it.

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The auditor’s recommendation is that we keep using KEY Casual, it makes sifting through, proving the wage rate and recording piece work much easier, she even recommended that all workers, for example the tunnel team, are put onto KEY Casual right from the start of the season.

My advice to anyone looking at casual labour software is to have a look at what a program can do compared with your current system. We proved that KEY Casual is simple, and supported by Landmark can perform under the most hideous of circumstances, but the timing was far from ideal. Put your software in place prior to the picking season and then you will be up and running and used to the system when the call comes from the auditor.

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