Nice-Pak International
How Nice-Pak unified HR, Time and Attendance, Scheduling and Payroll with ShopWorks
Nice-Pak International is one of the world’s leading wet wipe manufacturers, producing baby wipes, cosmetic wipes, moist toilet tissue, household cleaning wipes and personal care wipes for major retailers and brand owners across the UK and Europe. The business operates two UK manufacturing sites, Flint including Head Office in North Wales and Wigan in the North West, with a UK workforce of around 550 people. Nice-Pak’s parent business originated the disposable pre-moistened wipe more than 65 years ago, and the company has continued to lead the category since. Today, over 93% of its UK private-label wipes are plastic-free from plant-based fibres meeting consumer value and sustainability goals.
That combination of large-scale, continuous manufacturing operations across multiple sites, blended with warehouse and distribution and head office functions, with a deep commitment to operational quality, is exactly the kind of environment where Time and Attendance, Payroll
accuracy, Working Time Directive and ethical compliance carry real operational consequence.
Location
Flint including Head Office, and Wigan, UK
Industry
Manufacturing (wet wipes and personal care)
The Challenges
Nice-Pak set out a clear position at the start of the project: the existing software solution whilst coming to end-of-life did not meet the needs of the business. The day-to-day reality reflected that.
The business needed to manage:
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- A mixed workforce of salaried and hourly staff spread across three sites, with approximately 90% of the operational population requiring scheduled rotas and clock-in compliance.
- Six different contract classifications, each with its own working pattern, including 40-hour weekly contracts with OT at 1.4, 42-hour fixed-week 10.5-hour days, 21-hour averaged-hours arrangements, and 42-hour averaged weekly rotating and day-only operational rotas.
- Enhanced overtime rules with both flat-rate and 1.4 premiums applied above contracted basic hours.
- A bespoke payroll output for SPD, requiring an accurate, repeatable file rather than collated spreadsheets.
- Working Time Directive compliance across multiple shift patterns and sites.
- Leave management that needed to span both salaried entitlements (managed in CIPHR) and hourly entitlements managed on the workforce platform itself.
- Absence of real-time visibility into demand versus actual hours worked for budgeting and operational planning.
The operational complexity was high, the manual administrative cost was high, and the existing tooling could not give site managers, HR, payroll or finance a single, accurate view of the workforce
The Solution
Nice-Pak partnered with ShopWorks to deliver a structured implementation covering Scheduling, Time and Attendance, Compliance, Budgeting and Payroll output, supported by direct API integration into the existing CIPHR HR platform. The platform is live across approximately 90% of the workforce, covering Flint including Head office and Wigan.
The implementation was built around the following modules:
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- Staff Scheduling – Site managers build rotas directly in ShopWorks for each location, rota and sub-team, replacing manual schedule building.
- Actual Hours Recording and Worklog – Captures real-time clock-in and clock-out data against the planned schedule, flagging variances and exceptions for manager confirmation.
- Workforce Budgeting Hours and Cost Module – Gives finance and operations a per-cost-centre view of planned and actual labour cost, supporting real-time budget tracking.
- Dynamic Team Planning – Measures demand against scheduled shifts so that staffing levels can be aligned to operational requirements rather than fixed by habit.
- Compliance Module – Enforces Working Time Directive rules across the workforce.
- Payroll Export Manager – A bespoke payroll file configured to Nice Pak’s pay rules and the SPD payroll format, removing the manual collation step from the payroll process.
- Staff Portal and Native Apps – Gives employees direct visibility of their planned schedules and actual hours worked, including the ability to check accruals and shift data on the go.
- CIPHR Integration via API – A daily data feed into ShopWorks covering new joiners, contractual changes for existing staff, leavers and absences, managed via ShopWorks’ Integration Hub with built-in error visibility for prompt correction.
- Full Reporting Suite – Operational reports across hours, attendance, compliance and labour cost.
A four-level organisational structure built around how the business actually runs
The ShopWorks platform was structured to mirror the way Nice-Pak runs day-to-day: Head Office at the top, locations beneath, individual rotas within each location, and sub-teams within those rotas. That hierarchy means rota building, reporting and budget tracking all roll up the same way the business itself does. Site managers see their patch, location leadership sees the site, and head office sees the whole estate.
A flexible, contactless clock-in model
Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, Nice-Pak deployed a combination of clock-in methods designed to fit the operational realities of each role and location:
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- SpeedFace-V5L biometric readers. Supporting palm and facial verification with high-capacity, fast recognition, with fingerprint and RFID card fall-back for resilience.
- NFC posters where biometric readers did not suit. Staff with compatible smartphones clock in and out by hovering their device on the touchpad of a poster, using the ShopWorks app authenticated against their client and staff codes.
- ShopWorks Punch App. A web-based clock-in tool for staff without a compatible smartphone, using a unique staff ID.
This multi-method approach removed the assumption that every employee can clock in the same way, a recurring weakness of legacy time and attendance systems in mixed industrial environments.
“Bringing ShopWorks in was a significant change for us. We’re a complex manufacturing business with multiple sites, a mix of salaried and hourly contracts, and very specific pay rules that needed to be respected, not compromised. The ShopWorks team worked closely with us through the pilot period and beyond to make sure the platform reflected how we actually run the business. We now have one accurate, repeatable view of scheduled and actual hours across our sites, the CIPHR integration is feeding ShopWorks daily and vice-versa, and the payroll file does what it needs to do for SPD without manual rework. It’s a real step forward for the way we manage our people.”
Natalie Moulton, HR Manager, Nice-Pak International
A structured implementation, delivered through a paid pilot
The project was managed through a structured paid pilot of ShopWorks time and attendance and workforce management, designed to lock in pay rules, compliance and the CIPHR integration before broader rollout. The pilot operated against a clear set of must-have, should-have and could-have requirements agreed with the business, and was used to evidence that the system performed against each of them in live operational use.
The must-have criteria were deliberately operational rather than cosmetic:
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- Pay rules and contracts in place and producing correct output.
- A tested, accurate payroll file delivered to SPD.
- A working manual process for joiners and leavers ahead of full CIPHR integration.
- All time and attendance methods tested and in active use across the workforce population.
- 97.5 percent staff compliance with ShopWorks processes (rota build and worklog completion).
- Compliance module live.
- CIPHR integration live and feeding ShopWorks daily.
With those criteria met, Nice-Pak transitioned from pilot phase into business as usual. ShopWorks is now the operational system of record for scheduled and actual hours, compliance, and payroll output across the in-scope workforce.
Results – project objectives delivered
The project was framed around a defined set of business objectives, taking Nice-Pak from a manual, fragmented operating model to a single digital platform for time and attendance, scheduling, compliance and payroll output. Those objectives have been delivered:
Digital transformation of the payroll and time and attendance process.
Manual collation and spreadsheet-based payroll preparation has been replaced with a configured, repeatable SPD-format file produced directly from ShopWorks.
Improvement in offering to employees through better processes.
Visibility of schedules, accruals and actual hours via the staff portal and native app, removing the friction of paper rotas and informal hours tracking.
Improved central view of staffing data allowing for improved analysis and planning.
Analysis, planning and decision-making now run off the same dataset that operational teams clock in against.
Modernisation of processes around HR.
CIPHR feeds ShopWorks directly via API for joiners, leavers, contractual changes and absences, with managed error handling through the ShopWorks Integration Hub rather than manual reconciliation.
Measurement of demand against actual offering real-time data for budgeting purposes.
The Dynamic Team Planning and Workforce Budgeting modules give finance and operations a per-cost-centre view of planned and actual labour cost in live time.
Why a multi-site manufacturer chose ShopWorks
Nice-Pak’s environment is the kind of operating model where generic, off-the-shelf workforce management tools tend to struggle: multiple manufacturing sites with different operational profiles, six concurrent contract types, enhanced overtime rules, a pre-existing HR system that needed to be respected rather than replaced, and a payroll provider with a specific file format. The platform needed to flex around all of that, not the other way around.
ShopWorks was chosen because it can hold that complexity without compromising the things that matter most to the business: accuracy of pay, clarity of compliance, and giving managers a workforce platform that reflects how their teams actually work. The implementation was managed as a partnership, with ShopWorks providing build, configuration, integration, training, testing and bespoke development support, and Nice Pak’s HR, payroll, operations and finance teams shaping the configuration through the pilot phase and into BAU.
With ShopWorks now embedded across the business, Nice-Pak has moved from a manual, fragmented workforce management model to a single, integrated digital platform that the business can build on as its operational requirements continue to evolve.
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