Category Archives: BusyBeeManager

The Copenhagen based Tea Salon Tante-T (Tante T translates to Auntie Tea) has been a long time customer for BusyBeeManager – we interviewed owner Mette-Maria Viscor on how they use the application for their employee scheduling.

Owner of Tante-T, Mette Marie

Can you briefly describe your business?

Sure, we’re in the cafe business. We run a small Tea Salon were we sell organic tea as well as home baked cakes and cookies. We also have an online shop were sell organic tea and accessories (Tea Pots, Tea Bags etc.)

What’s the URL to your website?

www.tante-t.dk

How does BusyBeeManager help you in your job? (i.e. how did you do Employee Scheduling before?)

BusyBeeManager is no doubt a great help. It’s not like employee scheduling is a really big thing for us – we are busy doing the real business – baking cakes, making tea, serving customers – hence employee scheduling shouldn’t take up much time – thanks to BusyBeeManager – it doesn’t. It is really simple now just choosing a template and then hitting that auto assign button – then after a few adjustments the shift schedule is in the inbox of the employees.

We used to have employees email their “minus days” and then on the background of this and our needs for staffing we’d put together the work schedules. Since most of our employees only work part time, they used to write really long emails on when, why and how they could and couldn’t work. It was quite a big thing to figure out how to put the work schedule together without compromising either our business or the expectations of the employees. We had this monster of a spreadsheet that we used to keep track of it – I’m so happy those days are gone now.

What is your favorite feature of BusyBeeManager?

I’m not sure – either it’s the autoassign in combination with the weekly shift templates – or else it is the ability for employees to login and submit their availability – we haven’t used that last feature for very long so I’m not quite sure – it shows great potential however. Time will tell I guess.

How much time approximately does BusyBeeManager save you monthly?

That’s an easy question – because we used to pay someone by the hours to do the schedules – it took around 8 full hours that we had to pay for every month – and that was only for doing the schedules – then there is all the time we had to answer people because they couldn’t remember their shifts etc. That’s also in the past now. Employees can login themselves and print their schedules.

How is your impression of Value for Money in BusyBeeManager?

I’d have to say that it is immense. We save around $200 every month in salary costs alone just by using BusyBeeManager as our shift scheduling tool. I don’t mind paying the $15 a month – I guess paying will also make it easier to fund the development of new features for you guys

What do you think about the template and the auto assign features?

Great! I always had the feeling when I was fiddling with Excel that there must be an easier way – now I see that there is.

What could we do better?

One of the things that we miss in the application is the detailed availability – some of our employees think that it is a shame they can only select full days as either available or unavailable. I would be nice if it was possible to submit i.e. Football from 6-8 PM every wednesday- that would mean improved flexibility for the employees. We have sort of found a way to work around it though so it is not a big issue – we solved it by using the roles feature in a creative way. We created a Full Time employee role and a Part Time employee role. The Full Time role normally covers shifts in the daytime whereas Part Time covers shifts in the evening and night time. Since employees can have multiple roles – it is actually okay for us – but the employees still ask for it.

Another feature that would be nice to have is shift trading – employees generally have the opportunity to trade the shifts between themselves. It would be cool if that was supported online.

(Note from BusyBeeManager – these features are in the roadmap for this summer 2010)

Thanks to Mette-Marie for doing this interview! We hope you’ll also take advantage of our shift scheduling software or read this other case story from the retail industry!