The Eden Project

Sage HR software helps the Eden Project manage its seasonal employees, community projects and secure future investment.

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Our customer

The Eden Project is an educational charity that operates the world famous visitor attraction housing plants from all over the globe, near St Austell in Cornwall. Set up in 2001, it’s not only responsible for the world’s largest greenhouse, but also runs a variety of community projects. The site attracts over 1 million visitors and generates a turnover of around £20 million per year.

Their challenge

The Eden Project employs 400 core staff, rising to 700 at the peak of the tourist season. As Leah Brewer, People Development Manager explains, flexibility is key: “We have to create contractual arrangements we can change; we have to have a variety of ways of working because the business has peak times and quiet times. Our Sage system doesn’t only deal with our staff, it deals with our volunteers as well and our associates – all the people that have regular contact with us – they’re all on there”.

Our solution

The Eden Project’s People Development team uses software from Sage to help manage all their people, and employees and line managers use a self-service module to control all their own information. That flexibility brings huge advantages says Leah: “For me it’s about being creative in how you problem solve. The Sage system helps us tremendously with that. It helps us with statistics and facts and figures and information that we wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Having those facts and figures at their fingertips is important, as The Eden Project is a charity it relies on other organisations for capital funding as Leah explains: “Statistically we get asked for a lot of information from government offices and a lot of bids that we apply for, for our community projects, ask for lots of statistics, so all that information comes from the Sage system. As an organisation, we use it for absence stats and to look at turnover. From a more strategic element, we’re constantly producing reports and recommendations for future decisions.”

The future

Just as the Eden Project continues to grow, the People Development Team are always looking for ways to improve their processes and develop how they work with their software. Strategic decision making has become a key part of their function, thanks in part to the time and resources they save by using the self-service module as Leah explains: “If we didn’t have the self-service module, people would constantly be coming to the HR team to find that information and to make changes they can now do on the self-service system. That means the HR team can now spend their time doing things they didn’t have time to do before.”

And Leah notes, their Sage system has helped make some large time-savings: “I love the salary modelling. That is my favourite thing. It saves me so much time every year. I can now do in half a day, or even less than that to be honest – a couple of hours, what used to take me weeks to do.”