PinnoHome of Japan Home Centre uses Deputy to keep hands on deck and away from admin

Established in 2013, PinnoHome Co., Ltd is a Cambodia-based franchise of the leading discount homewares chain, Japan Home Centre. Well known to the region’s homemakers and young adults, Japan Home Centre operates more than 300 stores, predominantly in Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore, selling a vast array of affordable household goods.

PinnoHome is the first Japan Home Centre franchise to open in Cambodia and has quickly amassed a large and devoted customer base at its Phnom Penh store. The franchise’s inventory runs to more than 1300 SKUs – selling everything from kitchen gadgets to hardware tools, school supplies, craft, and art supplies, plastic organizers, as well as bath and beauty products. Since opening its first Cambodian store in 2014, they have just recently opened their fourth, using Deputy to scale along the way. To manage its fledgling stores and fast-growing business, PinnoHome employs a team of over 25 employees in addition to two company directors who run the stores from 9:00am – 8:00pm each day. As a startup business, PinnoHome runs on an all hands on deck mentality. This means everyone is trained to manage all aspects of the store – everything from creating purchase orders to managing stock inventory and wholesale orders, to working on the shop floor.

When Calvin Tse, Director of PinnoHome first opened the doors of his exciting new store in, he managed the operations side of the business on an Excel spreadsheet. “While it’s certainly a step up from using a pen and paper”, reflects Tse, “It was still very time consuming, especially for creating staff rosters. While all our team members are trained in the various roles required to run the store, we open from 10:00am to 8:00pm each day, so we still needed to roster around availability and have full coverage for our busiest times which are usually between 5pm to 8pm on most weekdays. In addition, two of our original four hires have university commitments, so we had to roster around their university schedules. It was a real headache.”

But as Tse and his fellow director had first-hand experience working in developed markets, they knew there was a better way. Tse explains, “We had both worked in large corporations with large HR departments that had fully automated scheduling and rostering systems that ran like clockwork. I knew there was a better, more efficient way for us to handle rostering at PinnoHome.”

So Tse set about finding a cloud-based solution that could simplify rostering admin in a small, growing business. “I wanted a solution to streamline employee management, generate reports, as well as work on the iPad”, adds Tse.

To evaluate suitable platforms, Tse signed up for a number of free trials with various time and attendance systems. “After signing up for a free trial of Deputy, we knew from day one that it was the perfect solution for us.”

“We use Deputy primarily to track attendance and punctuality,” says Tse. “The clock in and clock out functions are simple enough for all employees to use. We can also run Deputy without having to hire an IT professional to run or manage the system. As business owners, this allows us to focus on our core business strategy, and not be distracted by having to learn, teach, and deploy a complicated software system. As the platform is cloud-based, Deputy allows us to have a snapshot of all of our employees all at once, wherever we are, whatever the time – whether we are out of the office or in between meetings. As we open more outlets, this will allow us to have an accurate picture of who’s working and available, as well as the shifts required to be filled in multiple locations – so we never get caught short. With Deputy, we can see how early or late employees show up to work on a daily basis, prompting us to address this with the particular employee before it becomes a problem. This helps promote good workplace practices by showing our employees that we value punctuality.”

“In addition, Deputy also helps us manage contracted resources. For instance, our junior staff members had repeatedly mentioned that our security guard service was not up to par as the assigned guard for our outlet never showed up to work on time. For our managers, however, it was very difficult for them to quantify and report on the guard’s tardiness until we started using Deputy. Now we have a full reading of when they show up. Not surprisingly, their timekeeping has improved quite considerably.”

Tse loves the reporting functionality on Deputy. “We generate reports to calculate hours worked on a monthly basis, and leave accrued, at the click of a button. We did not have any HR reporting functionality prior to deploying Deputy, and this sort of admin used to consume hours and hours of my time. Now it’s available whenever we need it.

“When we started using the Deputy Kiosk on iPad, with biometric facial recognition instead of browser log in our team members will really got a buzz out of starting and ending their shifts by taking a quick snap of themselves from the Kiosk which automatically populates their timesheets. The offline capabilities of the Deputy Kiosk are also a big deal for us as the Internet in Cambodia is not yet as reliable as it is in developed nations because of the unstable nature of our electricity supply. Allowing us to collect data without an internet connection and then sync it with the platform as soon as an internet connection is restored is a big bonus for our business.”

“In addition, Deputy also helps us manage contracted resources. For instance, our junior staff members had repeatedly mentioned that our security guard service was not up to par as the assigned guard for our outlet never showed up to work on time. For our managers, however, it was very difficult for them to quantify and report on the guard’s tardiness until we started using Deputy. Now we have a full reading of when they show up. Not surprisingly, their timekeeping has improved quite considerably.”