How Unilever cut labour costs | Crown Workforce Management

The challenge

The workforce management
challenge at Unilever

At Unilever’s Gloucester site, home of the Wall’s ice cream factory, around 500 employees produce up
to three million products daily across ten production lines.

Before working with Crown, the site relied on an outdated, barcode-driven time recording system that was over a decade old. It was heavily manual and only produced paper-based reports showing whether staff had attended work. Labour cost allocation required four full-time clerks and an HR administrator, making the process slow, costly and prone to inefficiencies.

The company needed a smarter, more detailed way to manage time, attendance, and activity data, one that would:

• Simplify administration for managers and HR
• Move toward activity-based costing
• Capture time accurately for every employee
• Provide visibility of labour costs by activity and production line

The solution

Crown’s activity-based time and attendance solution

Unilever chose Crown Workforce Management after reviewing several options. The Crown system stood out for its simplicity, adaptability, and powerful activity management features.

By switching from basic time recording to activity-based analysis, Unilever gained detailed insight into how time was spent across production lines and departments. The system allows every employee, including site managers, to clock in using proximity ID cards that integrate access control and attendance tracking.

Managers can now:

• Review attendance and activity exceptions in real time
• Adjust schedules quickly to meet production demands
• Allocate hours to tasks and analyse costs by product line

Implementation was completed in just four months, supported by Crown consultants who provided full configuration, training, and an activity-mapping framework tailored to Unilever’s operations.

“A Crown Computing consultant helped us to manage the whole of the project, implementing what we’d designed on paper and showing us how to configure the rules so the system accurately reflected our requirements.”
– Unilever HR Manager

The results

The results – Greater control,
lower costs

Since introducing Crown’s system, Unilever has achieved significant savings and productivity gains.

The company no longer needs dedicated administrators for time recording, and absence rates have fallen thanks to immediate access to attendance and activity data. Payroll is now consistently accurate, and production managers can make faster, better-informed decisions.

“Crown’s advanced Time and Attendance has enabled us to get a grip on our activities and to manage absence in a more consistent way. We’ve used it to drive down costs significantly in the business.” 
– Unilever HR Manager

Unilever’s HR team also credits Crown’s support and customer service as key to the project’s success. “Crown has built up a good understanding of our business. The system is easy to use and does exactly what it says it does. The help desk is extremely friendly and helpful too.”