“This app helps me have a day off knowing that procedures will be followed.”
Charles, Managing Director
Roots and Berries (formerly Park Life) is a London café group running eleven park and common cafés serving specialty coffee and brunch to the families and dog-walkers who pass through.
In hospitality, getting the daily procedures done is what keeps the business safe. Opening checks, fridge temperatures, allergen routines, closing cash-up. Each one has to run the same way, at every site, every day.
- Every shift at every site now runs against the same procedures
- The workflow guides each step on the phone every staff member already carries
- New starters do it right from day one, because the workflow is the training
- Every check, photo and signature lands in an audit trail ready for Environmental Health Officers
- Senior leadership can see procedures are being followed without being on site
Images courtesy of Roots and Berries
- across London's parks and commons
- 11cafés
- all working from one set of workflows
- 100+staff
- completed by staff each year, with guidance built in
- 300k+steps
- in the audit trail every year
- 15,000+images
The challenge
The old tools couldn't be set up the way they needed.
Roots and Berries had outgrown what Poppy calls their 'previous outdated systems'. The tools weren't flexible enough to configure the procedures the way the group actually ran them, so Roots and Berries kept having to bend to the software, instead of the other way around. The procedures on screen were never quite the procedures the team actually followed on shift.
The solution
“Pilla was super easy to set up, we use it across all of our sites and it's great for integrating training with all our teams! Transferring from our previous outdated systems seemed like a monumental task but the Pilla team made it feel seamless. Fast responses to any question and heaps of templates to help guide the set up told us what was needed for each task and we have been able to streamline our procedures, and overall our business.”
The challenge
100+ staff had to actually use the new system.
A hundred-plus shift workers across eleven cafés had to learn the new tool, in the middle of running cafés, and use it on every shift. Most of them weren't sat at a desk, and most of them were used to a different way of working. Tools that feel like extra work for the front line get quietly dropped, regardless of what head office decides.
The solution
“Like any new system being introduced to a team of people who are used to something else, there has been a changeover process but it's been a positive one because Pilla is easy to use, so people have taken to it quickly.”