Manufacturing Retail Timesheets Success story

Instrumentarium Optika moves towards easier and more efficient time tracking

Instrumentarium logo

Most people know the clean and welcoming Instrumentarium optics shops (43 in Estonia), but few realise that Instrumentarium also manufactures glasses. Product and work quality has always been on top of Instrumentaarium’s priorities, but the latter was falling below satisfactory. They have been using a key-card-based time registration system for a while, but were also forced to rely on a variety of Excels to do actual calculations.

“We were simply not getting enough data from our old system” , tells Intrumentaarium Optika HR Manager Katrin Peets an continues with a smile “It felt like those key-card devices were in a bad mood all the time and did not want to cooperate with us, making us spend a lot of time in Excel. But then, we discovered Begin and immediately enjoyed the proper level of cooperation”.

Intrumentaarium employs over 200 employees on schedules plus admin staff, so making their time routines more transparent and helping reduce time spent on Excel was a serious priority. Since Katrin already had a lot of previous experience with HRMS solutions, she had a very clear idea of what the company needed. Unfortunately, most of the solutions simply wouldn’t provide the required functionality at acceptable cost.

But then, they tried Begin, which allowed for flexible time tracking from different access points, including biometric scanners installed on manufacturing floor and in office. This simple setup meant that Instrumentaarium solved their entire time tracking problem, while also becoming much more efficient at doing salary calculations.

“This system is very transparent and gives us full overview real-time overview of all our departments and stores,” says Katrin.

Clear communication and easy to work with

“I really appreciate the fact that Begin is ready to work with us, finding the best solutions for our business needs and is quick to suggest ideas. We are now in a much better shape to manage our workforce planning, thanks to various system reports. And our managers spend significantly less time on administration, as manual input is minimal due to the excellent schedule planning module. We really missed that in other solutions,” explains Katrin Peets.

According to our own timesheet excellence expert Riin: “Instrumentaarium Optika is a true pleasure to work with. They are such a dynamic manufacturing and service company, dedicated to both their employees and customers. It’s really a shame that they had to waste so much time on Excel and old inefficient time-cards. But now, we are here to support them.”