How JemX helped Excellerate Services cut overtime by 30% in two months
Customer
Excellerate Services
Industry
Security & Cleaning
Size
5,000+ active guards
The challenge
Large-scale security operations sit on top of one of the most complex rostering problems in the workforce world. Multi-grade guards, multi-site rotations, statutory overtime thresholds, and payroll cycles that lag operational decisions by weeks. Most operators only see the cost of a rostering decision once it's already in payroll — too late to act, too late to redirect capacity, too late to prevent.
Excellerate, as one of South Africa's largest security groups, wanted to set a new bar for rostering intelligence:
Forward-looking visibility into the economics of every rotation — not retrospective payroll reports
Real-time decision support for operations teams managing thousands of guard posts
A single source of truth that connects roster design to overtime exposure across the entire workforce
The solution
JemX partnered with Excellerate's leadership and operations teams to design and deliver a custom roster intelligence platform from the data up. Rather than starting from assumptions, the team mapped over a million roster shifts and integrated directly with Excellerate's time and attendance system.
JemX deployed a 2-week AI-powered consulting sprint with the following components:
Data discovery and domain mapping
Codifying rotation patterns, pay cycles, grade hierarchies, and attendance workflows into a shared operational model
Real-time dashboard development
A live, hosted view of overtime exposure at every level of the organisation, sorted by severity so the highest-priority items always surface first
Simulation engine
Letting managers model "what-if" rotation changes, see the projected hour impact across all affected guards, and save proposals as trackable actions
Smart candidate matching
An intelligence layer that recommends replacement guards based on available capacity, grade eligibility, geographic proximity, and site familiarity
Within 10 working days, JemX delivered a production platform that:
Flags every rotation pattern at risk of generating overtime, split between structural drivers and ad-hoc exceptions, colour-coded for instant triage
Provides a full 30-day rotation calendar per post with shift assignments, grade allocations, and threshold markers
Surfaces a candidate finder that ranks available guards by spare capacity, grade match, and distance
Embeds an action workflow so operations teams can simulate fixes, assign them, track completion, and maintain a full audit trail with threaded comments
The impact
30% reduction
in overtime within 2 months of deployment
Beyond the headline number, the platform gave Excellerate's leadership a category of visibility that didn't exist before:
Real-time overtime intelligence
Leadership and operations teams now see the full picture of overtime exposure across the workforce in real time, drillable from group level down to the individual guard
Targeted intervention
Every overtime risk is ranked by severity, so action starts where it has the highest impact
Capacity unlock
The platform surfaces redistribution opportunities across the workforce that were previously invisible, giving operations teams a new lever to balance load
Operational control
Managers can simulate rotation changes, see projected hour impact before committing, and assign corrective actions with full traceability
The result: a roster intelligence platform built in 10 working days that gives Excellerate's operations team decision tools no off-the-shelf product offers.
"What's been achieved with minimal spec and just throwing the data at them is awesome. This already helps massively."
Adriaan Otto
Managing Director, Excellerate Services
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