O.P. Chocolate is a part of the French Cemoi group of companies. It manufactures and distributes chocolate and candy worldwide. The factory specializes in making chocolate wafers, teacakes and snowballs for the own brand market.

They wanted to find a software solution that fulfilled the employee management requirements for their 500 employees based in Merthyr Tydfil, and allowed them to integrate existing architecture into the solution to minimize expenses.

So, they began to find a partner company who could provide them with a total solution that was flexible enough to allow for future growth and account for new working methods whilst solving their immediate requirements. Nevertheless, there was a central factor in O.P. Chocolate's decision to use some system and that was the systems ability to deal with Annualized Hours. They decided to choose Crown.

Crown's FM&C/400 solution met all the requirements for O.P.Chocolate. Having a strategically scaleable suite of products, it runs on an IBM AS400 system. It is rich in functionality and provides a wealth of management information.

O.P. Chocolate could even integrate the existing Feedback clocks from a previous system reducing the cost of the project.

"Crown's FM&C 400 solution has given us the ability to put the attendance and control information on every screen, whether dumb terminal or a PC using emulation, across a mix of twinax and token ring cabling, without the need for re-investment in new networks and hardware," said Gareth Thomas, O.P. Chocolate's Information Systems Manager. 

He also added that by linking the system to their JBA Payroll system they had reduced the administrative effort needed to prepare their weekly payroll, and removed the need for maintaining the specially written interface to their old T&A system.