Henllan Bakery will open a new facility for cakes and biscuits this month. 

 

Their pre-Christmas period was exceedingly busy, producing ten thousand mince pies a day and shipping fifty thousand of them to the USA. 

Production director Tom Moore said: "We have grown massively and we had to make a decision to move and get bigger premises.

 

"The opening of the new bakery has meant lots of planning and the creation of new jobs and lots of apprenticeships aimed at bringing the next generation of bakers through."

 

Henllan Bakery has hired 20 members of staff to work at their new site, and has bought four 20ft shipping containers from Lock Stock Self-Storage to store their cardboard cake boxes. 

 

Tom Moore continued: "We have used containers from Lock Stock for a long time now and have bought six in the last 18 months and having Lock Stock on our doorstep been wonderful for us because we can just pick up the phone and they react quickly.

 

"They have been a massive help for us in expanding and because the first factory was virtually landlocked there was a shortage of space for us there and using containers for storage has been the best option.

 

"Cakes and desserts are very much on trend now, we’re also starting to do biscuits here and we’ve invested in this bakery so we can continue to grow."

Lock Stock director Shon Powell said: "We go back a long way with Henllan Bakery – I used to go to scouts in Henllan and the old bakery was next door.

 

"We’ve known them for years and they’ve been using our containers for ten years and now that we have our own delivery service with our own lorry we can react even more quickly.

 

"Containers make a lot of sense for businesses because they offer a flexible solution, they aren’t liable for business rates, they’re very secure and because they’re built to withstand long sea voyages in the open air they’re tough and durable.

 

"We’re also happy to help a local business prosper and expand because Henllan Bakery has been brilliant for the area and for the town."

 

Source: Insider Media – Wales

 

_______________

 

 

An influx of new staff is the perfect opportunity to check whether or not your time and attendance system is as efficient as it should be. 

 

Many companies are still using paper timesheets to record their employees’ hours and calculate their weekly or monthly payslips. There are many disadvantages for using these still in 2018. For example, if your timesheets are submitted monthly it is unlikely that employees will be able to remember their exact hours for the whole month. 

 

This would then lead to incorrect payslips, which could cause problems with the employees, or even with outside authorities if you don’t realise that unreported overtime has put your employee over the Working Time Regulations. 

 

Our time and attendance system records everyone’s entrance and exit from controlled doors, using either smartcards or the more expensive but more secure biometric measurements of hands or fingerprints. So there’s no more chance for employees to forget timings.

 

All the entrance/exit data from our system is exportable into a format suitable for all major payroll programmes. 

 

The software automatically calculates whether employees’ shifts and hours would make them breach the Working Time Regulations. One less thing to worry about. 

 

We also have the Self Service Module, which can be accessed from a browser or from your mobile via the app (available on Android and iOS). This enables employees to sign in and out, and request holiday amongst other features.