An HR System people actually want to use: St Luke’s Hospice and Cezanne
TLWR? Here’s a summary:
- Implementation completed in ~3 months
- Key processes reduced to a “five-minute jobs”
- Ability to build custom reports in minutes
- A newfound confidence in running critical HR processes.
St. Luke’s Hospice provides essential end-of-life care, supporting patients and families with compassion and dignity. As a charity operating under constant funding pressure, the organisation needed an HR system that reduced admin, worked seamlessly for frontline staff, and freed teams up to focus on patient care.
After a frustrating experience with a slow, unintuitive legacy system, St. Luke’s chose Cezanne for its ease of use, flexibility and strong reporting capabilities. Since implementation, the HR team has reduced reliance on spreadsheets, automated key processes, and gained confidence in day-to-day operations, from absence management to pay review communications.
The result is a simpler, more efficient HR experience for employees, managers and the HR team alike.
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St. Luke’s Hospice provides vital end-of-life palliative care, supporting patients and their families with compassion, dignity and reassurance at one of the most difficult times in their lives.
As a charity, St. Luke’s operates in a challenging environment, balancing limited funding with growing demand, while ensuring clinical and frontline teams can focus on what matters most: patient care.
When their previous HR system became slow, unintuitive and difficult to integrate with other platforms, the HR team knew it was time for a change. They needed an HR system that was easy to use for everyone, flexible enough to adapt as the organisation evolved, and powerful enough to reduce manual processes and reliance on spreadsheets.
After a thorough selection process, St. Luke’s chose Cezanne HR software for its usability, configurability, strong reporting and ability to integrate with existing systems. Since implementation, the HR team has saved significant time, improved data quality, increased confidence in key processes, and created a more efficient, stress-free experience for managers and employees alike. In this case study, we sat down for a chat with their HR Manager Caroline Bellamy, to find out how…
Hi Caroline! Thanks for joining us today. Could you tell us a little bit more about you and your role with St. Luke’s Hospice?
I’m the HR Manager at St. Luke’s Hospice, reporting to our Head of HR, and working closely with our HR team consisting of an HR advisor and two administrators. But, about a year ago, I stepped away from my usual role to focus on our HR software implementation – which is where Cezanne came in.
I’ve always enjoyed working with systems, so it made sense for me to lead on it! I really like getting into the detail and making sure systems are set up properly to suit how we work. So, being able to tailor Cezanne specifically for St. Luke’s was something I really value.
And can you tell us a little more about St. Luke’s?
St. Luke’s Hospice provides end-of-life palliative care, with the simple but incredibly important aim of making sure no one dies alone or in pain. We support both patients and their families, offering care, compassion and reassurance at what can be an incredibly difficult time.
Our priority is always keeping our teams out there supporting patients and families. We’re fortunate to have some truly amazing people working for us, particularly our clinicians who are providing care day in, day out. It’s a really amazing place to work, with some brilliantly compassionate and caring people.
What are the main challenges St. Luke’s has to contend with from an HR perspective?
One of the biggest challenges is successfully managing sickness absence, particularly in a clinical environment. Of course, if people are unwell, they need time off, but it’s about managing absence in a supportive way and making sure managers have the right tools and information to handle it well.
Another key challenge is supporting managers who aren’t particularly systems-minded. We use HR systems for things like recruitment and people management, so it’s important that managers feel confident using them and can easily access the data they need.
What were the main reasons for you looking to invest in a new HR system?
When I joined St. Luke’s, we were using an HR system that had recently been through a very poorly managed upgrade. The upgrade itself took over a year because of various issues, and once it was finally completed, the system had become incredibly slow. At one point we even had to resort to using spreadsheets!
Something as basic as booking annual leave, which was the main thing people used the system for, could take around 30 seconds just to load a page. That simply wasn’t acceptable and led to a really poor user experience across the organisation.
That’s really not good! Were there any other issues?
Yes. Over time, the relationship with the supplier also broke down and we lost confidence in the level of support we were receiving. The system also didn’t have an open API, so it couldn’t easily connect with other systems. As we looked ahead, we knew we wanted our systems to work together and support better use of data.
While the system probably had more capability than we were using, we’d lost the motivation to invest any more time or energy into it. We felt that if we were going to automate processes and move things forward, we wanted to do that with a system we genuinely wanted to use and could trust to support us properly.
Obviously you had a very poor experience with your previous system. But what were the main reasons for choosing Cezanne to replace it?
A lot of our existing systems simply weren’t intuitive. You couldn’t sit down and work things out for yourself, you had to be shown how to use them. For frontline staff or shop assistants with limited time, spending ten minutes trying to work out how to book annual leave just isn’t realistic.
We wanted something genuinely straightforward, and we got that with Cezanne. The aim was to show people how to use the system once and then trust that they could go away and use it confidently, without needing constant follow-up support because it didn’t make sense. That ease of use was is really important for us.
We were also looking for efficiencies across the organisation. The system needed to work well not just for HR, but for managers and employees too, because everyone interacts with it in some way, and Cezanne really helped us achieve that.
Reporting was another important factor for me personally. I wanted the ability to create custom reports and tailor them to what we actually needed. I’ve learned over time that systems don’t always like being “customised”, but being able to configure reporting and adapt it to suit our organisation was really important, and something Cezanne allowed us to do.
Integrations were another key consideration. Like most organisations, we use a learning management system, recruitment systems and several other platforms, and we wanted data to flow between them. We were keen to move away from downloading spreadsheets, manipulating data and re-uploading it, or having to re-enter information manually. Reducing duplication and improving data accuracy were big priorities for us.
Alongside all that, we needed strong and reliable equality, diversity and inclusion reporting, as well as compliance with Cyber Essentials, which we achieved this year. Single sign-on was also important from an IT perspective, and Cezanne met the core technical requirements our IT team had identified. So, quite a lot!
Did the initial sales process help you see how the system & integrations could all work together?
Yes, it did. We initially worked with an external consultant who helped with the shortlisting and sourcing of systems. Once that phase of the project finished, it was handed over to me, and by that point we’d already seen quite a few options.
Alongside that, I did my own research and turned to the HR Ninjas community. Questions like “What HR system are you using?” or “What works well for this?” come up all the time there. You tend to see the same names mentioned repeatedly, and usually there’s a mix of positive and negative feedback for most systems.
There were two HR systems that really stood out to me because they were consistently getting positive comments and very little negative feedback. One of those was Cezanne. I said that even though we’d already reviewed a lot of systems, I’d regret it if we didn’t properly look at those two, so we brought them into the process.
Both of them ended up on the final shortlist, which really validated that approach. Sometimes the HR community knows best.
How did the implementation and launch process go?
The implementation process itself was brilliant. It genuinely couldn’t have gone better, to the point where I actually thought I’d happily do it all over again.
We signed with Cezanne at the end of February and went live in mid-May, so we had a three-month window to get everything up and running. By mid-May, we needed to be live with employee self-service for things like holiday requests, sickness logging and employee data. Once that was in place, we could then start exploring and rolling out the wider functionality.
The training was also very straightforward, and the fact that sessions were recorded meant I could easily go back and rewatch them if I needed a refresher. People were excited about the system even before launch, saying it looked intuitive. And once we went live, the feedback was exactly that: intuitive and easy to use, which is pretty unheard of when it comes to our systems. Overall, the launch went brilliantly.
Is there anything in particular about the Cezanne system which really stands out to you?
The flexibility really stands out for me. The way we work does change over time, and we needed a system that could change with us. It was important to know that if we decided to do things differently in the future, the system would still be able to support that.
I particularly like how adaptable Cezanne is, especially the ability to repurpose fields and hold the data that’s actually relevant to us. We’re able to capture far more useful information than we could before.
Now, when someone says, “We really need to be able to report on this,” I can usually say, “Yes, we can do that.” I can find a suitable field, set it up, and then report on it. Quite often, within a few minutes, they’ve got exactly the report they need and the data to go with it. That flexibility has been a real game changer for us.
What effects has Cezanne made to your day-to-day operations?
We’re able to capture and manage far more information than we could before. In the past, there were things we’d have to store on spreadsheets for other departments, but now we’re comfortable holding that information directly in the system. It’s reassuring to be able to say, “Yes, that’s fine, we can manage that within Cezanne,” rather than creating workarounds elsewhere.
The notifications have made a big difference too. We can trigger alerts for different scenarios, such as if someone is off sick with stress or moves into long-term sickness absence, so it’s immediately on our radar. It’s all very straightforward to set up, and it helps us be more proactive rather than reactive.
One of the biggest wins for me was during our pay review process. This year, I managed all the communications through Cezanne for the first time. I built my templates, set up groups based on the data, and scheduled the communications. I was actually on annual leave at the time, but I was completely confident it would work.
Normally, that process would take a lot of careful checking and rechecking, but this time, it was genuinely a five-minute job. I could simply select the right template for each group and send it, without worrying about whether a spreadsheet had been updated correctly or if the wrong data was being used. That confidence and simplicity has been huge. It’s saved us time and removed a lot of stress from processes that used to feel quite manual.
We’re also now looking at what else we can automate. We’ve recently reviewed our sickness absence process, and I’ve got a list of things we can improve, like automating reminders to managers so we’re not manually chasing actions. All of that automation saves us a significant amount of time and frees the team up to focus on more valuable and strategic work.
And finally, could you sum up Cezanne in a few words or a sentence?
I love Cezanne! My colleagues are probably sick of hearing me say it, but it’s genuinely easy to use for both HR and employees, and it does exactly what we need it to do. It feels like it’s been built by people who really understand HR, and it’s the first system I’ve worked with that truly covers everything I need. I honestly wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.
