Vince’s Market finds the ingredients of success

The team at Vince’s Market believes food is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Walk through the doors of one of the independent grocer’s four Greater Toronto Area locations and that appreciation is the first thing you feel. From the gleaming produce and fresh-baked goods to the smiling staff and community events, Vince’s uses food to create joy and bring people together.

The family-owned and -operated chain has been in business since 1929, growing from one location to four over time. The world – and the grocery sector – has changed a lot since Vince’s first opened its doors. Today, it operates in a highly consolidated and low-margin environment that seems to get more competitive with each passing year.

To keep its business healthy and thriving, Vince’s needs to attract and retain a skilled workforce that can provide a refreshing customer experience. But retaining qualified staff isn’t easy.

“As a smaller enterprise, one of the biggest challenges we face is attracting and retaining high-quality team members who are willing to establish a career with us,” says Giancarlo Trimarchi, Owner and President. “There's a lot less opportunity for growth or to move into new roles and opportunities within our organisation, which often means that team members feel the need to leave to find those opportunities elsewhere.”

Trimarchi wants to do everything he can to enhance the employee experience and recruit the right people. He knew implementing a single HCM solution could go a long way, but he and his team didn’t have the time or resources to manage a lengthy and costly implementation process.

A catalyst for change

Vince’s Market had explored updating its HCM technology but decided at that time that its needs didn’t warrant a shift from its internal, legacy systems and payroll provider. 

In 2022, facing changes in the world of work and the grocery business, the team at Vince’s revisited the opportunity. Its workforce, which comprises 260 salaried, full-time, and part-time staff, wanted easier access to their information and more transparency into processes. In addition, management wanted to find efficiencies, support retention, and improve access to workforce insights.

“We were lacking proper systems and integration for different components of our employee experience, from payroll through to performance evaluation, recruiting, and onboarding,” says Trimarchi. “All of these things that we were doing were all very separate initiatives. We had to find a way to merge them together.”

The company decided it was time to invest in an integrated system and chose Dayforce.

Finding the right recipe

Vince’s Market decided to use the Dayforce Accelerate offering to help them achieve go-live quickly by implementing mission-critical functionality.

Dayforce Accelerate was developed based on Dayforce’s deep expertise and understanding of what functionality new customers most commonly need at go-live. In addition to rapid deployment timelines and a fast path to go-live, Dayforce Accelerate allows for clearer outcomes and more predictable price points. Contracts clearly define the package scope and project deliverables. The proven Dayforce Activate toolset and implementation methodology reduces risk, with 50% fewer support cases post go-live.

Following a trusted recipe and accelerated timelines aligned well with Vince’s goals. The company wanted to get set up in Dayforce, get core staff using the system, and then establish processes and protocols.

Vince’s implemented Dayforce for core capabilities – HR, Payroll, and Time and Attendance – following the Dayforce Accelerate project timeline. “If we're going to be investing in monthly fees, why not set some aggressive timelines and get things going,” says Trimarchi. “Often, if the timeline is a little too long, it just gives too much time for things to delay or fall off the wagon. With Dayforce Accelerate, we were engaged fully until we went live. It helped with the ROI to know that we'd only have a few months of non-active payroll costs versus several months of duplicating those payroll costs.”

A Dayforce project lead guided the implementation process from start to finish and ensured that implementation consultants were able to respond to Vince’s needs and requests. The grocer’s administrative staff received personalised, step-by-step training from the Dayforce team on Dayforce Payroll to ensure they were comfortable with the system. Trimarchi and team leveraged the information in Dayforce’s user guides to inform their own internal processes and support materials, saving both time and money. 

The proof is in the pudding

In Vince’s previous system, employees could access their pay statements and schedule, but couldn’t see any other information or access self-service options. The company monitored time and attendance using a third-party clock, in which errors were frequent and time-consuming to fix. Processing payroll took a day and a half every two weeks and involved payroll administrator Mallory Myers confirming that each employee worked their shift and manually adjusting for each discrepancy found.

With Dayforce, staff has far more information at their fingertips. They can access their employee data, pay stubs, view their scheduled shifts, put through shift-swap requests, and request time off directly in the Dayforce mobile app. Trimarchi and team said that employee adoption of the app has been high so far.

Dayforce also makes time and attendance tracking easier. The Dayforce biometric clock is designed with checkpoints in place to help prevent errors. And moving to a new system gave the team at Vince’s the opportunity to update punch policies and communicate with staff to create more clarity about expectations and reduce errors.

“I know for a fact that we are realising savings, as those punch policies are being enforced,” says Trimarchi.

Eliminating time-consuming manual checks and corrections has also cut payroll processing time in half. Now, all Myers has to do is authorise employee shifts and run payroll. “It's step-by-step, it's so easy to follow that it's hard to make mistakes,” she says. “Being able to recalculate and see everything is really nice. And even if you need to change one small thing, you can just recalculate quickly. That saves me a lot of time. I used to have to recalculate the entire company all over again.”

Myers saves almost five hours every two weeks in payroll processing and is using the time she’s gained back to analyse workforce data and generate insights that support employees and the business.

Stocking expanded capabilities

With core Dayforce capabilities now live, the team at Vince’s is working to implement Recruiting, Onboarding, and Performance Management.

Using Dayforce Recruiting, the team can create job descriptions and postings in the system and publish them on a high-quality landing page. Applicant data streams directly into the system, creating a seamless process that will help reduce time-to-hire and allow Vince’s to put its best foot forward to candidates.

Having all employee paperwork in the system makes onboarding easier and streamlines the performance management process. Trimarchi hopes simplifying the review process will support managers, increase engagement, and create more visibility on performance across the organisation.

“What we're finding right away is the transparency and the ability for the employee to engage with their supervisor and the management team is seamless, professional, and very efficient,” says Trimarchi. “Our supervisors have adopted it very quickly, much more than the paper and pen style that we used to use for reviews. It used to be like pulling teeth to get people to send in their documentation. They would complete the review and then it would sit in their folder, and they'd never send it in to us. Now, the level of completion is very quick and very high. The access to information across multiple levels is a huge benefit. It's just awesome.”

Cooking up business success

Trimarchi has a clear vision for the employee experience he wants to create at Vince’s Market. He wants modern technology that gives people easy access to their information, allows for open lines of communication, and helps employees feel in control of their employment experience.

Trimarchi knows Dayforce is a partner who is committed to supporting this vision and bringing innovative approaches and tools that will help his company continue to evolve to meet changing business needs and employee expectations.

“What I really love is that Dayforce is working on consistently improving and implementing new processes and plans. It doesn't have to be generated by us,” says Trimarchi. “We feel very confident that we have a partner who's going to have the information and programs that we need when we get to the next level.”