Abbeyfield

Abbeyfield cares for around 1,700 people across 100 sheltered houses and 15 care homes, with a mix of full-time, part-time and agency staff. Its central and operational teams needed an HCM, workforce-management and payroll system that met both tactical and strategic needs.

Team Wheel was brought in around eighteen months after Abbeyfield implemented Dayforce, when the expected benefits weren’t materialising. Adoption was low and automation non-existent; some users were still running spreadsheets in parallel, which undermined reporting, invalidated data and created compliance risk. Abbeyfield wanted to realise the value proposition it had originally been sold, and needed help to get there.

We began by managing expectations, being straight about what the software could realistically do, then worked with the client, not around them.

1. Understood the starting pointTalked with management and subject-matter experts to map the current state of Dayforce and how they’d reached it, then set it against their short, medium and long-term goals.
2. Ran detailed discoveryExplored configuration preferences (forms, workflows, payroll) across HR, workforce management, time and attendance, and scheduling, and crafted a solution tailored to Abbeyfield.
3. Tested it with a change networkDefined test cases, guided people through user-acceptance testing, and stood up a change network of 27 representatives from across the organisation to pilot the rollout.
4. Produced a costed roadmapDelivered a maturity report, resource estimates and costings: a practical plan to realise the original value proposition.

Abbeyfield gained a clear, prioritised path to return on investment: controlling agency spend, reducing payroll cost and administration, improving self-service time recording, and automating payroll, scheduling and time-and-attendance.

The plan delivered substantial direct payroll savings alongside better operational efficiency and agency-staff management, and tackled compliance head-on: when staff are scheduled, managers can verify qualifications and credentials against regulatory requirements.

• Payroll automation projected to cut payroll operating costs by around 66%.
• A structured scheduling framework, letting staff manage their own schedules, which is better for employees and managers alike.
• Compliance reporting that once took significant time now generated in minutes, with spreadsheets no longer used for HR.