Papaya – It’s the auditors dream
In this blog we speak to Karen Vaughan (Senior Document and Compliance Controller) at Dovecote Park one of our earliest clients. Dovecote Park supply the finest British Beef, Veal and Venison to a range of retail and foodservice customers across the UK including Waitrose, Hawksmoor and Burger King. Their technology brought the first fresh meatball to Waitrose’s stores and their more recent investment includes a robotic Dry Aged chiller. Like us, they have strong ethics around quality, sustainability and innovation. Karen shares more about her experience of working with us and why she’d recommend Papaya to other compliance and learning professionals.
Karen Vaughan:
“We were first introduced to Papaya by recommendation. From our first meeting it was pretty clear that their software would save us time and money. I’ve been working in compliance and learning for some time, but I started at Dovecote as a packer and then went onto train as a butcher. So, I have a 360 perspective of what’s needed in our business and could see how Papaya would really add value.
At Dovecote, we work to exceptionally high standards, regular audits and checks are just part of the day job. Before Papaya that meant manually updating a range of spreadsheets on a daily basis. Training was time intensive as each employee had their own skills passport which had to be constantly checked and updated. Today with the introduction of Papaya’s software everything is incorporated in to one system. Previously we used to walk around with training logs, now everything is done on one tablet. It’s made life so much easier for everyone.
“An auditors dream”
Our auditors love Papaya because it offers security and assurance. Whatever they require can be reviewed instantly as everything is recorded real time for them to see. This can be viewed either at a glance through the dashboard system, or in detail through reports and certificates.
There is such a wide range of reports available via the Papaya software to meet all our needs. Animal welfare, health and safety, training and environmental are just some of our regular audits. In fact, we’ve just completed an environmental audit where we used Papaya’s software.
Adaptability
As our business has expanded and grown over the years, with an increasing workforce, Papaya have been brilliant in adapting to meeting our ever changing needs – even developing specific functions for us. We started with compliance, then we added a food safety module. Historically our training was run across multiple different training platforms before Papaya introduced a single platform that covered all our training needs. This has resulted in an improvement in the quality of our training and delivered efficiencies in both time and money. Whatever our request I know we can trust them to deliver in a way that works for Dovecote.
Simplicity
I wouldn’t consider myself computer savvy – thankfully the Papaya software is so straightforward to use!! For our managers the system gives them a complete overview of compliance and training in a single glance. Moving to a paperless integrated dashboard system did raise concerns with some of our team, however they are all in agreement that the software is absolutely magnificent. With built in updates and alerts, it’s just so easy to stay on top of things.
Training and Learning
Seeing Dovecote’s training offer evolve has been amazing. Through Papaya’s learning modules we offer a strong range of high quality courses to our team of over 700 staff across 2 sites. A significant number of our employees come from Lithuania and Poland, so having the flexibility to offer training in their own language helps us to ensure a safe work place and reflects our values of treating our colleagues with dignity and respect.
As with many food manufacturers, agencies can be heavily involved in the recruitment of our employees. The beauty of the online training module is that we can get potential employees to complete much of the induction training through the agency before they even start working. This saves time and gives us a feel for how committed a new employee is.
Customer service
Papaya’s customer service is outstanding. We work very closely with them as they’re proactive and want to know if things are running properly. They take any comments on board and are constantly reviewing and updating the system to update or correct any problems.
Would I recommend Papaya to others working in compliance and learning?
Yes absolutely. Actually, I’ve recently hosted an international leisure company at one of our sites who were interested to find out more about how Papaya has helped Dovecote.
In my experience you can’t fault them.”
Thanks for the kind words Karen. You can find out more about Dovecote Park here https://www.dovecotepark.com/.
