Silverton Aggregates: Empowering employees to take responsibility for absence

Silverton Aggregates is a large building and landscaping materials supplier, based in East Anglia. Founded in 1996, Silverton has evolved from a sand and gravel merchant to a fully-fledged builders’ merchant. Silverton was using manually updating a spreadsheet to manage their absences. The spreadsheet had numerous issues, with many staff booking more holidays than they had.

Silverton required a system that would allow their employees to book holidays from anywhere at any time. HR was also wasting time with lots of requests around employee’s holiday allowance.

edays was the preferred choice of absence management systems, providing Silverton with a modern, cloud-based, self-service platform. Staff felt empowered as they could finally book annual leave and check their entitlement whether in the office or out on sight.

Interestingly, edays were approached by Silverton due to their IT Manager’s involvement with a previous company that used edays. The IT Manager used to offer IT support to an organization using edays and felt it was the perfect tool for managing absence.

Silverton previously used a manual, paper, and spreadsheet, based process. It allowed staff members to often overbook holiday, causing issues with payroll and leading to them having to reconcile entitlement used towards the end of the year, and in some cases try to recoup lost funds from staff who had an overbooked holiday.

One of the main drivers for sourcing a new absence management solution was the need to be able to book absences from anywhere at any time, due to the out-of-office nature of Silverton’s work.

Silverton also had a problem whereby towards the end of the year, HR would be inundated with requests around how much holiday allowance individual members of staff had remaining, leading to a real loss of productivity and unnecessarily increased workload.

edays implementation meant holiday allowances were visible to every employee all year round, eliminating the need to ask HR for an update on the allowance remaining.

Silverton has made its entire absence management process more efficient by switching from labor-intensive manual paper and spreadsheet processes to a more modern, cloud-based, self-service approach.

Staff now feel empowered and can track and request their own holiday, whether they’re in the office or considering booking a holiday straight after dropping off a large amount of building supplies!

With staff now able to track their own allowances, and also unable to overbook holidays, unnecessary workload and pressure on both Payroll and HR have reduced, allowing those departments to focus on business-critical tasks.