Travelex on the money with Positive

Foreign exchange and cross-border payment provider, Travelex, has reduced its overtime expenses by 50 per cent and overall staff costs by 10 per cent since implementing workforce management software from Positive Workforce Solutions (Positive).

Since 2005, Travelex has deployed Positive’s flagship product, e-tivity, at 170 of its retail stores across Australia and New Zealand, gaining complete transparency of its payroll costs and allowing for better decision-making and expenditure control.

Travelex’s retail division is the world’s largest foreign exchange specialist, with more than 700 branches globally. Predominantly located in airports and tourist locations, Travelex sells banknotes and other foreign exchange and travel-related products to personal and business travellers.

Adam Koch, General Manager, Asia Pacific, Retail Division, Travelex,

says the long trading hours of the company’s stores and the high number of employees meant it needed a product which could easily generate and manage a complex roster.

“The nature of our business – exchanging currency – means many of our stores operate in airports, with some of those open 24 hours a day and housing upwards of six tills,” Koch explains. “To create a roster manually for this volume of trading hours and employees would be a nightmare; we need a tool which makes it easy to put together a roster and see it on one report.”

Previously, Travelex had no way to manage its payroll costs because there was zero visibility until the system had closed off each month. This meant the company was forced to take a reactive approach to cost management, making it extremely difficult to conduct decisions around payroll.

“From a business management point of view, it’s incredibly hard to make the right decisions without having the information you need right there in front of you,” says Koch. “With e-tivity, we can get a snapshot of the current roster at any time which means we can actually make decisions before incurring costs.

“We run reports two weeks in advance so if payroll costs are looking too high, we can make the necessary adjustments,” he continues. “Before we introduced e-tivity, there was no way we could take that sort of proactive approach – we’d have to wait a fortnight after the costs came through on the profit and loss statement and, if we’d missed budget, there was nothing we could do.”

According to Koch, the biggest saving for Travelex has been in overtime, which he says has halved since the company implemented e-tivity.

“In many cases, overtime usually comes down to ineffective rostering techniques – for example, putting an employee on for six days in a row or for shifts of more than 10 hours,” he says. “E-tivity, however, allows you to look at overtime and actually flags where you’re incurring costs so you can make the necessary changes before it’s too late.

“In the two years since introducing e-tivity, we’ve probably made a 10 per cent saving in staff costs which, when you’re talking about 650 employees, is actually quite a significant reduction.”

Having deployed the software in both Australia and New Zealand, it was important for Travelex to have one platform which could manage both countries and the individual characteristics of the different IR laws. In e-tivity’s case, it is able to calculate pays according to the relevant IR laws, regardless of the country in which staff are located. This is calculated through Positive’s Work Rule Interpreter module, which Koch says makes the payroll process far easier to manage.

Travelex is also using a number of other e-tivity modules including Time and Attendance (which collects employee data and calculates pays accordingly), Paid Rate (which establishes the base hourly rate to be applied to an employee’s shift) and Kiosk and Reporting (allows employees and managers to access rosters and timesheets from a web-based browser).

Koch says while Travelex is able to operate fairly independently within its self-hosted environment, Positive is always available when needed for new deployments, upgrades or support.

“The accessibility which comes with a local vendor is always an advantage,” he states. “You’d be pretty nave to think you’d get the same service from a company operating on the other side of the world, so this factor remains important to us.”

Koch, who introduced e-tivity to Travelex after using the product at a previous employer, speaks so highly of the software that he encouraged a Positive prospect to also implement the technology. That customer, Michael Hill, has since predicted savings of $3 million per year after deploying e-tivity at 200 of its sites across Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

“For me, it’s about the ability to take proactive steps in managing staff costs,” Koch concludes. “And that’s a huge advantage to any business.”

About Positive Workforce Solutions
Positive Workforce Solutions is an Australian developer and supplier of easy-to-use workforce management software. We specialise in scheduling, time and attendance and work rule interpretation. Our award winning flagship product, e-tivity interfaces to most human resources and payroll software. Positive’s workforce management solutions are successfully running in over 15,000 sites worldwide in various vertical markets, including the retail, manufacturing, hospitality and events industries. 

For further information:

Phil Jones

Positive Workforce Solutions

Tel: 02 8838 2200

Email: phil.jones@positive.com.au

Sarah Corris

Positive Workforce Solutions

Tel: 02 8838 2200

Email: sarah.corris@positive.com.au

  e-tivity is a registered trademark of Positive Group Holdings Pty.Ltd.