Success story: The Doctors Laboratory

The Doctors Laboratory (TDL) is a medically-led laboratory that was established in 1987. The company employs over 2,000 staff and has a very complex intercompany structure with ten pay groups. The team had an overdue need for transformative technology for the HR function.

There was no mobile functionality for staff to check the hours they were working or update their data, and everything was paper or email-based which meant the margins for error and overpayments were substantial. Staff requisitions were all completed on email, leading to mistakes and time delays due to the amount of administration involved.

Workforce Management solutions were undertaken on legacy Excel spreadsheets, making the completion of timesheets a very manual process. Only 40% of staff have a work email address so the overall paper trail within the company for HR practices was overwhelming.

Recruitment was also a process which needed automation, as without an ATS system all applications were received by email and processed manually. Requests for the advertisement of posts were recorded manually and sent weekly for approval.

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Access People worked with TDL to successfully implement a broad suite of digital HR solutions in a three-month time frame, reconciling ten different pay groups in 11 days on our Payroll module.

“With the current state of the HR tech space, Access PeopleXD stood out as the outstanding candidate to meet our requirements. It contains all the modules as a fully integrated package that not only simplifies deployment but is also more efficient to maintain,” says Matt Gibbins, HR Director at TDL.

Digitising a function can be a challenge, but with Access People’s Customer Success team and the commitment from TDL to implement the system on time and in full, our Workforce Management, Payroll, People Management and Talent modules were rolled out to the entire team - this included the introduction of our mobile app.

With careful planning and methodical communications, along with the consideration for training 150 company managers, TDL yielded a 98% engagement rate from staff with the system, within the first three weeks of launch.

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With information at their fingertips, not only has TDL achieved a number of significant savings through data accuracy, the time taken to complete tasks has been optimised saving over 500 manager hours in processing timesheets alone.

The digitisation of HR processes such as leave requests and paperless rostering has saved managers four hours a week, with 150 managers within the organisation this equates to 25,000 hours saved in the first year.

“Commercially we will achieve the return on investment in two years. However, in real terms the hours saved for each manager are significant,” says Matt.

Looking to the future, TDL is implementing the Access PeopleXD Recruitment solution to streamline its recruitment process following a proven and successful launch of the initial modules and is very excited to introduce this to the business very soon.

The Access Group's HCM division, Access People, offer an unrivalled suite of solutions for businesses, including HR and Payroll, Absence Management, Workforce Management, Compliance, Recruitment, Talent, Learning, Employee Benefits and Engagement, Health & Safety, all of which are underpinned by the powerful Access Workspace platform. 

The Access Group is one of the leading providers of business management software to small and mid-sized organisations in the UK, Ireland, and Asia Pacific. We help over 100,000 customers across commercial and not-for-profit sectors become more productive and efficient.