Brewing since the year of confederation in 1867, Moosehead Breweries is Canada’s oldest independent brewery. Founded in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, by the Oland family and their matriarch Susannah Oland, Moosehead was and proudly remains to this day a family-owned company. Today, operations for the only major brewery fully-owned by Canadians are based in Saint John, New Brunswick, where leadership has continued to be passed down throughout the generations of the Oland family.
Moosehead is committed to being Canada’s leading independent brewer of choice and expanding the reach of their premium brands coast to coast.
To achieve their grand mission, they depend on the power of their people with their shared passion for beer and their steadfast loyalty to the company. In fact, the majority of Moosehead’s employees retain an average tenure of 25+ years, with the company’s longest-standing team members having dedicated 40+ years of their careers to the organization.
The Moosehead team brings their cultural values of passion, respect, and courage to life through their active involvement in their community. Throughout the year, they volunteer with Habitat for Humanity to build houses for those in need and give back by participating in fundraising events and walks, such as their annual Movember giving campaign.
When the company entered a period of continuous improvement within their business’s five year plan, team members were tasked with finding ways to save time and money. Rise came into the picture in the midst of this journey for the organization.
Francine Grift has been the Benefits & Compensation Manager of Moosehead Breweries since 2012. In her role, she manages all aspects related to employee benefits and compensation for Moosehead’s entire workforce, which is distributed across Canada.
Ultimately, Moosehead was looking for a solution that was cost saving, time saving, and customer service oriented. Believing Rise to be the solution to check all of those boxes, the company took a leap of faith with Rise’s payroll services.
It’s instantaneous. What once took minutes now takes a matter of seconds.
Prior to switching to Rise, Grift noted that day-to-day payroll administration was time-consuming and non-efficient. Processing payroll runs and transmitting payroll information took about 10-15 minutes to complete, with even more waiting time to review the results. In the case of changes to payroll, the entire system had to be restarted in order for any resubmissions to be authorized, and they were charged additional costs for additional pay runs. Exporting information was not flexible either, coming only in view-only pdf format and not in editable Excel format, which meant that their team had to go through a manual process to find errors. Even more additional fees were charged for any reporting tasks, and requests would be pending for days until their team got a response back.
Since switching to Rise for their payroll administration, Grift could quickly see the benefits in terms of saving time and saving costs. Now, processing, reviewing, and making changes to payroll is instantaneous, with minutes saved through seconds spent. The solution allows for her team to have easy access to initiating and making their own reports without having to spend time contacting and waiting for support, which has proven to make a huge difference when trying to get payroll out on time. Grift praised Rise’s reporting tools, which allow for data to be exportable to Excel, allowing her team to find errors and handle remittances very quickly. The longer Grift and her team uses Rise, the more intuitive they find it becomes.
You can chat with someone right away from your desktop you’re already working on and have an answer within seconds.
Rise’s effective customer service enables Grift’s team at Moosehead to save even more valuable time. With the ease of being able to chat with someone immediately, they no longer have to wait in a long queue, instead getting an answer to their questions within seconds. When support is needed, Rise’s support agents are efficient and quick with responding.
To demonstrate her appreciation for Rise’s customer service, Grift recounts an experience from the beginning of their Rise payroll implementation process that proved Rise’s dedication to client support.
We never felt like an inconvenience. If anything, it felt like someone actually cared about our concerns and issues.
As Rise’s first client based in the Maritimes, Moosehead felt that they needed more buffer time from the Rise support team to manage their payroll tasks before their 2pm cut-off time. With that knowledge in mind, Rise was committed to increasing support hours to accommodate their client base in the Maritimes. During this transition period, the team at Rise made sure to keep Moosehead up to date with their progress on expanding support hours, providing transparent and timely communication from Rise support and even directly from Rise’s CEO to share next steps and listen to any feedback. As a result, Grift and her team were reassured and comforted, and felt like Rise were truly committed to making sure their Rise payroll experience had a positive start.
