Breyer Group

Headquartered on the outskirts of Romford, Breyer Group is one of the UK’s leading contractors specialising in roofing, construction and building maintenance.

Established in 1956 by Fred Breyer, the company’s history spans generations and to this day, is still family-owned.

With over 400 employees, the company’s HR Director, Anne Dyer oversees the day-to-day management of the company’s HR team. Managing everything from recruitment and on-boarding to general staff enquiries, she is always looking for ways to add value to the business – whether the employees themselves or the company directors.

Having inherited an HR system upon joining the HR team at Breyer Group, Anne was particularly underwhelmed with it. “It just wasn’t scoped properly to meet our requirements and when we brought it up with the company, they failed to address the many issues adequately. For example, any system changes to fix anomalies and training required to accommodate any changes in staff came at an additional cost.

Unsurprisingly, Breyer Group parted ways with their incumbent provider and started to look elsewhere.

In late 2018, Anne and the HR team at Breyer Group began their search for a new system: “When we looked into a new solution, we wanted a basic system that you could pretty much buy off-the-shelf and use straightaway. When we were looking in the marketplace, we found massive differences in offerings between the different systems available with regards to what you get: what’s included, what isn’t, what training you get.

“Natural HR ticked all the boxes. The cost was favourable and the fact that we could implement it in a short space of time.”

Breyer Group went live with Natural HR in January 2019 and have progressively been introducing the capabilities of the system to its employees since. “The last system we had was too complex for our needs. There was too much information and people simply didn’t get on with it. So, this time around, we’re doing things slowly but surely.

“From an HR perspective, it has everything we need. We still have some work to do with transferring all of our forms and paper-based processes into the system but I can see it has the potential to transform how we do things. The processes that we currently have in place on Natural HR are already saving us time.

“For the staff that use it day-to-day for absence management and their managers; the feedback we’ve had has been positive. It’s an easy system to use and that’s what we wanted.”

In her position as HRD, Anne has found the analytics capabilities within Natural HR to be invaluable when creating reports for her board of directors. “It allows us more insight into the business through data analysis. The analytics help us to drill down into the data and gives us a better perspective than we had before in regard to diversity stats, absence, promotions and more. If we have board meetings or management meetings, the charts and diagrams are presented a lot better too!”

With the business already using Natural HR for its on-boarding, annual leave, absence management and performance reviews; the team is in the process of moving their entire recruitment process onto Natural HR with the help and guidance from our implementation and training teams. “It will save a lot of time; the process is slicker and we can implement online approval saving managers and Directors a lot of time.”

When it comes to the future of Natural HR within Breyer Group, Anne is very aware that there is a lot more the system can do that they’re not using yet.

“Once we set up all of our processes, workflows and triggers onto Natural HR, we will really start to see the impact. We’ve got a bit more work to do on aligning Natural HR with the job boards we use via the iFrame and once we’ve got that up and running as we want it to, this will transform recruitment across the business.

“Natural HR is great, but we know we’ve got a long way to go with it because it can do a lot. It’s going to be an ongoing process but we’ve always had the support from Natural HR when we’ve needed it so we can’t really ask for more than that,” Anne concludes.

To find out more about Breyer Group, please visit www.breyergoup.co.uk