About Four Pillars
Four Pillars Hotels offers three and four star accommodation in
Oxford, the Cotswolds, and Bristol. It was established in 1974,
experiencing a re-birth by Charles Holmes in 2004 that engendered
the development of further hotels. The chain currently employs over
800 staff, both full-time and part-time casual.
The case for HR software
Up until 2005, Four Pillars used Word to manage employee data,
whilst all payroll was administered through its head office. This
meant that the company had no central means of holding HR
information, resulting in duplicate files and phone calls to hotels
to locate information.
Additionally, the transient nature of the hospitality industry
means that staying on top of recruitment is essential to manage the
large numbers of applicants that must be processed each year, for
which a recruitment system, in particular online recruitment, is
imperative.
The HR team therefore recognised the need for a centralised HR,
Payroll and Recruitment system, to ensure the reliability of its
data, streamline its processes and prevent the level of unnecessary
work caused through data duplication.
The software
The HR team selected Sage as its HR
software supplier, due to its range of features and the closeness
of its location – Four Pillars and Sage are both situated in the
Oxfordshire town of Witney.
Four Pillars purchased a fully integrated suite of modules from
the SnowdropKCS suite, including: recruitment; online recruitment; personnel; payroll and
self-service. The software is used in
conjunction with Sage’s software tools:
workflow, an email information delivery tool and Sage reports.
The self-service system was rolled out first, providing online
access to personnel information for 25 users, including trainers,
administrators, payroll and general managers. After which the
Windows personnel and payroll modules were installed, followed by
windows recruitment and online recruitment modules, for capturing
candidate information via the Four Pillars website.