Photobox was started 11 years ago by two friends who recognised people’s desire to print and share photos in a digital age where images were increasingly left trapped behind computer screens.
The business has gone from strength to strength and now has 11 million members as well as key partnerships with organisations such as Boots, Orange and the NSPCC. In addition to a photo printing service, it also offers customers the opportunity to reproduce images on personalised gifts and keepsakes ranging from mugs and mouse-mats to bags and T-shirts.
The business has 180 employees working in a range of functions from marketing and IT to production, customer service and admin. Photobox has staff located in the UK, although there are also sites across Europe.
Photobox has a four-strong HR team, who until last year were recording and managing staff data on a series of Excel spreadsheets. As the business continued to grow, however, it became apparent that a more sophisticated method of managing data was needed.
The business needed the ability to use its data to provide better HR intelligence to inform planning and decision-making and was also keen to streamline the admin so that the HR team could focus on more strategic priorities. Absence management in particular was becoming a real issue and was taking up at least a third of one of the team’s time.
“We wanted to cut down on the admin around holiday requests and to implement a self-service system that would devolve responsibility back to the employee and manager,” says UK HR Director Karine Moncéré.
Cezanne OnDemand is provided on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis. This means that it is hosted and delivered online via a secure server, eliminating the need for small businesses to continually invest in their own hardware and software or support services, such as backing up data. They simply log on via the internet and have immediate access to the system.
For Photobox this is a considerable benefit. Karine says: “As a company that relies on the internet for our own business, we were already comfortable that it is a robust platform for business applications. Having Cezanne take care of all the IT and software maintenance frees up our internal resources and gives us a lot more flexibility.”
