How Goodstart claimed back time to give Aussie children a better start in life
I think the most important thing for me is the time saved by utilising the Woolworths at Work platform; it’s allowed our staff to better invest this time into the children we care for.
Meet Goodstart, a social enterprise providing care for Australia’s children
Goodstart is a not-for-profit social enterprise providing access to high quality learning and care for all children — particularly those living with vulnerability and disadvantage. With more than 60,000 children across 660 centres nation-wide, Goodstart is Australia’s largest provider of early learning and care and largest non-government provider of preschool and kindergarten programs.
Having driven positive social change for more than thirteen years, Goodstart’s vision is simple: to give Australia’s children the best possible start in life.
Head of Centre Procurement, Brent Douglas, is responsible for overseeing the purchase of all consumables across the Goodstart centre network. He shared his story of the organisation’s partnership with Woolworths at Work, one which he notes is founded on shared values.
“Every cent Goodstart earns from its centres is redirected back into improving the quality of early learning and supporting disadvantaged and vulnerable children and their families,” explains Brent.
“One of the things I really like about the Goodstart and Woolworth’s at Work relationship is the value alignment, because part of our vision is to ensure children have the learning, development and wellbeing outcomes they need for school and life – so providing the children with the best quality produce for their meal-times is a really big part of that.”
A dispersed network of Goodstart centres meant a lack of centralised spend visibility
With a large geographical footprint, having a centralised view of grocery spend across a vast network of centres has not always been an easy ride for Goodstart.
Brent explains, “[The centres] are all treating themselves as individual business managers, and as business managers tend to do, they all operate differently. As we have centres across every state and territory, it can be really challenging to monitor our grocery spend and assist our centres to purchase through our preferred suppliers such as Woolworths at Work.”
Like many organisations in the not-for-profit sector, resources are often scarce at Goodstart and staff retention is an ongoing challenge. As a result, Centre staff were taking time out of their workday to purchase groceries for their centre, impacting productivity.
“Many of our people were spending a lot of time going to different stores and doing the grocery shop themselves, which could take up to an hour,” he explains.
“Every time you have a staff member leaving a service to run errands, that’s valuable time away from programming, developing educational activities or supporting and educating children. So being able to keep staff in our centres was a high priority.”
In addition to being labour-intensive, having staff shop for groceries posed health and safety risks, so finding a grocery partner who could safely deliver fresh food and reduce manual handling became an important priority for Goodstart.
“Woolworths deliver from their temperature-controlled vans, so it’s better than our centre staff going down to a store and transporting groceries in the boot of their car then potentially travelling upwards of 20 minutes back to their centre.
“It also meant our staff didn’t have to physically go to a store or pick up any heavy bags because their groceries can be delivered directly to the centre,” he adds. Goodstart’s former grocery procurement processes were an administrative headache for teams. Bringing Woolworths at Work on board helped to alleviate this workload for centre directors, while streamlining manual processes for procurement and finance employees.
“I think we have just streamlined touchpoints. Buying groceries in a store meant staff would have to firstly get their invoice or their tax receipt, they would then have to scan it in, put it into the system, code it, submit it, and seek the appropriate approvals to reconcile,” Brent adds.
A need for accurate spending data
Error-prone reconciliation processes at Goodstart were burdensome for both employees and finance teams.
“Our people were going into stores, and they would code everything to groceries, when not all products should be coded there. When we looked at our spending, it always looked like we were overspending the groceries allocation, but it was more the case that people were not coding items like hygiene and kitchen items into the correct categories.” Brent says.
The Woolworths at Work solution was a welcome tool for Goodstart, allowing staff to automate GL (General Ledger) coding to the correct category and creating a more accurate picture of where money was being spent.
“I think that’s allowed us to then ‘buy more’ as products are automatically coded to their appropriate consumable’s allocation, freeing up the groceries category for actual groceries,” Brent explains.
Managing grocery purchasing compliance was also a concern for the organisation, with little to no controls to prevent staff from purchasing outside of Goodstart’s expense policy.
“We faced some compliance concerns in terms of making sure we could manage people buying what we prefer them to purchase. The Woolworths at Work platform allows us to tailor our requirements and turn certain categories on and off,” he says.
From thousands of invoices to 12 invoices
In addition to cutting down on staff’s own admin time, Brent shares how both he and the Goodstart’s accounts payable teams have benefited from more streamlined invoicing, helping to reduce processing times.
“What has been key is the visibility from a backend perspective and having consolidated invoices. We’ve averaged over 27,000 transactions per year, and we’re now able to consolidate that into 12 monthly invoices – so that’s a win.”
Understanding the buying habits of each of the centres in the Goodstart network has provided the team with actionable insights that they use to educate staff members on how to shop smarter amid tightening budgets and rising inflation.
“Having that ability to understand buying patterns helps our team to provide more tailored communications and education around ways staff can improve efficiencies in their grocery purchasing and make smarter purchasing decisions.”
When it comes to forecasting, Brent shares how the fixed prices of Woolworths at Work’s products help Goodstart’s teams to better predict spend and to budget accordingly:
“Since it is fixed price, it gives more certainty to how centres purchase. So, in terms of an allocation in any given period, the price is going to be the same. I think that gives them more certainty about how to best spend their allocation, instead of having to spend too much time trying to find every special available to them.”
But the real benefit of partnering with Woolworths at Work — in addition to giving management and finance teams at-a-glance spending data and insights — has been the time saved for centre staff, who can now dedicate that time to what matters most: providing Australian children with the best possible start in life.
“I think the most important thing for me is the time saved by utilising the Woolworths at Work platform. It’s allowed our staff to better invest this time into the children we care for,” Brent says.
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