How PBD Biotech reduced their leave approval time by 80% with Breathe

“Breathe are absolutely helping us on our mission to eradicate Tuberculosis and alleviate poverty” 

Who are PBD Biotech?

PBD Biotech are on a mission like no other: to help eradicate tuberculosis (TB) across the globe. 

And given that a quarter of the world’s population still suffer from this catastrophic disease – with direct links to poverty in the developing world – their mission is certainly a very important one.

So, how are they doing it? In short, their talented team specialise in creating diagnostic kits that detect active TB at an early stage, allowing health professionals to detect infectious cases and minimise spread.

Leading the company as CEO is Jane, who chose Breathe to help her team save valuable time on managing holiday, training, and other documentation .

The challenge:

PBD Biotech’s HR-struggles

When she joined the company in late-2021, Jane immediately realised she had some work to do when it came to HR operations.

Holiday requests were 100% manual and involved 3 different people in the business. The employee would need to locate and complete the holiday form before submitting their request to the office manager, who would then forward it to their line manager for sign off. This whole process, combined, took up around 30 minutes of valuable time which could be better spent on other important tasks.

"Holiday requests were 100% manual, involved 3 different people & took up around 30 minutes of valuable time"

Jane also had concerns around general management of employee contracts. Contracts were stored in a personal folder without a robust system in place. She often struggled to keep her team’s contracts up to date and her employees didn’t have easy access to their own contracts either.

PBD Biotech’s work is highly regulated, with a quality-management system in place, so keeping on top of training records is a complicated but crucial process. Important training is managed using a central spreadsheet which lists all training records, which are ticked off once completed. These records were often hard to locate, which can prove challenging at the best of the times, but especially when compliance checks from the auditors are required. 

The solution:

Holiday requests automated, documents consolidated

Having used Breathe at her previous company, Jane knew it would ease the friction they were experiencing at PBD. In fact, she got Breathe up and running within just months of stepping in as CEO.

Now, holiday requests are completely automated and approved by the line manager directly – the office manager doesn’t need to be involved at all. Paper forms are a thing of the past, with no risk of them getting lost. Everything is stored in the cloud with Breathe.

Contracts are now consolidated within the Documents area of Breathe, and it’s now super-easy for Jane to see which contracts are up to date. Her employees now have easy access to their contracts, too.

“Breathe has been hugely helpful and has allowed us to administer contracts in an equitable way and keep track of them.

Now, we’ve made sure that everyone has access to their own contracts and our HR team have visibility of them too – maintaining security & integrity”

Switching to Breathe has also meant that training has become a breeze. Jane and the team are now able to send out training documents quickly and easily, and track who’s read & acknowledged them. This is particularly useful when it comes to inspections; they can simply pull a report from Breathe and quickly provide them with training records. The system allows training records to be consolidated within one easy-to-use platform.

‘Everyone is rowing together’

Jane is also utilising the Company Goals area to ensure everyone in the company is working towards the same vision & goals.

Goals are set & stored within Breathe, which are then communicated & fed down to individuals in appraisals and 1-to-1s.

“Rather than everybody rowing in different directions in the boat, we’ve now got everyone rowing together”

The result:

Leave approval time reduced by 80%, £1000s saved

Now, Jane & her team aren’t spending nearly as much time on holiday management as they were previously. In fact, Breathe has reduced the total time it takes to approve a holiday request from around 30 mins down to just 5 – sometimes even less.

Jane is also finding it 10-times easier to stay on top of contracts. She no longer has any issues locating them when she needs to, whether it’s to update them or to dig out a copy for an employee.

When it comes to training, Breathe is saving around half a working day by streamlining document management & making it easy to keep track of who’s read what. In fact, without Breathe, Jane would have likely needed to hire a dedicated training manager to look after this side of things, so this part of the system is saving the company thousands of pounds per year.

"Without Breathe, we'd have likely needed to hire a dedicated training manager, so this is saving us a lot of money"

Put simply, Jane is now able to focus more on what’s important – their mission to eradicate TB – thanks to Breathe’s time-saving features.