Retailers often invest substantial resources in new HR, payroll, and workforce management systems, yet these technologies frequently fail to address operational challenges. The key to success lies in aligning these systems with the complexities of managing a multi-site workforce and ensuring their adoption across the organization. Founded in 2019 by CEO Andy Simpson, Team Wheel consultancy helps retailers bridge this gap by working with various teams to select, implement, optimize, and rescue people systems, ultimately delivering tangible business value.
The gap Simpson identified was a pattern of failed implementations. A retailer would buy a good HR or payroll system, the implementation partner would leave at go-live, and the people left running it had a system that was not set up around how the business worked. Hourly paid, multi-site workforces often had the worst experience imaginable. The big consultancies priced and designed for head office and what the juniors knew about the industry, while smaller ones did not know the systems well enough to fix what was wrong. Simpson started Team Wheel to sit in the middle: people who know the systems and understand what a Friday payroll run means to a store on a Saturday.
Planning over product
Design before product
The problem rarely lies with the technology itself but with the choices made before selecting it—or the absence of any clear strategy. Simpson emphasizes planning over product selection. The most common failure he observes is digitizing flawed processes without fixing them first. For example, shift schedules might still copy last week’s data instead of adjusting for customer traffic, approvals could remain stuck with the same bottlenecks, and payroll corrections might get manually re-entered. The result? A shiny new system that replicates old inefficiencies—just on a better interface—while wasting six figures and making future changes harder than ever.
To prevent this, Team Wheel begins with what they call ‘phase zero’: a quick but essential step before any technical work starts. They collaborate directly with those who use the systems daily, store managers, regional leaders, payroll staff, and HR, to document how work actually gets done, not how policies claim it should. They ask practical questions: How does a store handle Sunday sickness coverage? What happens when a seasonal worker’s contract ends in January? Who tracks labor costs against sales, and when? Only after mapping these realities do they design the system to support, not replace, them. This phase typically takes a few weeks, costs less than the rest of the project, and is the step most implementations overlook.
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For hourly-wage teams, getting the fundamentals right on day one is critical: rotas must work, time tracking must be accurate, and payroll must be flawless. If these fail, trust erodes immediately, and recovery is difficult. Launching the system is just the beginning; real value comes from the months that follow. Simpson advises retailers to listen more than they speak, noting that store managers often spot process breakdowns; yet no one has asked for their input.
Team Wheel operates with 24 full-time employees, no contractors, ensuring the same team handles planning and execution. They specialize in systems like Dayforce, Workday, HiBob, and Factorial, with a focus on hourly-paid, multi-location operations, a niche expertise that’s harder to find than it should be. Their approach starts with identifying the business problem, not the software. Sometimes the solution is improving an existing system rather than replacing it. Much of their work involves pre-selection consulting or reviving poorly implemented systems. Clients frequently retain them post-launch, a sign of their effectiveness. The company has also been a finalist in the British HR Awards for three consecutive years.
Adoption over automation
Adoption over automation
Team Wheel focuses on tangible outcomes. Payroll needs to be right first time, every week, through peak. Managers should build rotas and approve time in the system rather than on WhatsApp and spreadsheets. Labour cost should be visible against sales while there is still time to do something about it, not in a report a fortnight later. There should be one record for each employee that HR, payroll and operations all trust, so right to work, under-18 hours and minimum wage are checked by the system rather than by someone remembering. There should be fewer queries landing on store managers and the payroll team on a Monday morning. And there should be a plan the business can run itself.
The key to long-term success is adoption, and without it, no investment delivers a return. In retail, this is especially critical because most HR work is handled by store managers with no formal training, supported by small central teams. If employees bypass the system, doing the work manually instead, the central team ends up firefighting. Change management, communication, and training aren’t afterthoughts; they’re the core of the project. Process improvements and manager engagement run parallel to system setup, not as an add-on.
