Overview

Fell Brewery is an independent craft brewery and hospitality business operating across Northern England. Alongside its brewery operations, Fell runs five bars across Manchester and Cumbria, employing approximately 45 staff across production, logistics, sales, and hospitality roles.

As the business grew, legacy processes built around spreadsheets, manual payroll administration, and disconnected systems became increasingly difficult to manage. Leadership needed greater visibility over labour costs, stronger operational controls, and a better experience for managers and employees alike.

By implementing Workforce.com, Fell Brewery centralised scheduling, payroll, employee management, and labour reporting into a single platform, helping reduce labour costs by an estimated 8–10% across its bar operations while significantly reducing administrative workload.

Challenge

Like many growing hospitality businesses, Fell Brewery's workforce processes had evolved organically over time.

Scheduling was managed locally by venue managers with limited oversight, payroll involved multiple manual steps and spreadsheets, and employee information was spread across different systems. As the business expanded across multiple locations and entities, visibility became increasingly difficult.

"We had a lot of manual processes, a lot of spreadsheets, and information was very siloed. We lacked integration and real-time insight across the business."

- Michael Dixey, Managing Director, Fell Brewery

Payroll was particularly time-consuming. Weekly pay runs required manual data entry and administration, while holiday requests and employee availability were difficult to track across multiple venues.

At the same time, rising labour costs and increasing pressure on hospitality margins meant the business needed better control over staffing levels and labour spend.

Solution

Workforce.com provided Fell Brewery with a single platform to manage scheduling, payroll, employee availability, leave management, and workforce reporting.

Managers gained real-time visibility over employee availability, leave balances, and staffing levels, while employees could access schedules, payslips, and holiday information from anywhere.

The business also integrated Workforce.com with its payroll and point-of-sale systems, allowing labour costs to be compared directly against revenue performance.

This gave venue managers and leadership teams the ability to make more informed staffing decisions while maintaining service standards.

"We've moved from looking at labour costs months after the fact to having real-time visibility into staffing, revenue, and performance."

- Michael Dixey

Workforce.com also introduced a more structured roster approval process, enabling greater oversight while still allowing managers flexibility to run their venues effectively.

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