A Healthy Bottom Line:
Medical Equipment Services Company Improves Time and Attendance Process;
Improves Productivity
When a medical equipment service
company assembled employee time and attendance with an outdated
solution, they were unable to maintain electronic archives of employee
data. This was a critical liability issue, since the company could not
efficiently access time card history should inquiries arise. The company
experienced critical technical flaws with the system, and was also
forced to manually track paid time off balances — a cumbersome and time
consuming challenge. Now, Attendance Enterprise from InfoTronics
addresses these issues, offers greater functionality, and helps the
company streamline the entire time and attendance process.
About The Scope Exchange
The Scope Exchange (Greensboro, NC) is an independent service company
dedicated to the sales, purchase, maintenance, repair and refurbishment
of medical instrumentation. The company’s expertise is with flexible and
rigid endoscope systems, power systems and specialty/surgical
instruments. The Scope Exchange currently serves more than 750
healthcare institutions, supporting these organizations in their efforts
to effectively manage and maintain medical equipment inventory while
reducing expenditures.
Limitations of Past Methods
In past years the medical equipment service company assembled employee
time and attendance data with an automated solution that did not offer
full capabilities or timely vendor support. As an example, the company
was unable to fix a major system glitch in which the time and attendance
program simply did not run on several PCs or poll clocks correctly.
Calls to the vendor were often not returned for 3 to 4 days, and even
when a support rep called back they were unable to fix the issue.
Nor could the older solution handle the
volume of employee records. Even with a small number of hourly
employees, The Scope Exchange was forced to print hardcopy time cards
for archival and purge electronic records every six weeks when the
system generated insufficient memory warnings. This meant that the
company could not easily access archives of employee labor data. The
Scope Exchange considered this a critical liability issue, and began
searching for a more robust and capable time and attendance system.
Selecting Attendance
Enterprise™
The Scope Exchange turned to their payroll provider, Paychex, for
assistance in locating a time and attendance solution that would address
the past challenges, and offer the company much needed reporting and
labor management. The payroll provider suggested Labor Strategy
(Greensboro, NC) and InfoTronics industry leading time and attendance
systems. The experts at Labor Strategy worked with the medical equipment
company to implement Attendance Enterprise, a scalable time and
attendance system offering flexible pay rules, scheduling, labor
budgeting, benefit accruals and a variety of data collection.
Based on The Scope Exchange’s structure
and pay rules, Labor Strategy configured and integrated the system in a
few weeks, and once implemented in late 2005, helped the company achieve
key improvements.
Most importantly, Labor Strategy offers
immediate, responsive support and service. With the intuitively designed
system, training was effortless and users were up and running in a
manner of days. Attendance Enterprise is based on a SQL database, and
easily handles the volume of employee labor data archives without any
issues. This solves the archive problems faced by the company in
previous years.
A Streamlined Process
Aaron Cope, IT Operations Manager at The Scope Exchange, notes further
improvements, “Switching over to Attendance Enterprise streamlined the
entire process – starting when employees begin their shifts at the
proximity clocks located at the entrances into the building. Labor
Strategy helped us integrate time and attendance tracking with the
existing security scan readers, so employees now only carry one badge
for both time and attendance and security access.“
Another stand-out benefit is the
reporting of paid time off. In the past, employees interrupted the
payroll clerk each day to inquire about their remaining paid time off
benefits. The clerk tracked these balances separately in a spreadsheet,
which necessitated double data entry and accuracy checks. Now, employees
have this information right at their fingertips. Attendance Enterprise
uploads employee balances directly into the clocks at the end of each
pay period, so employees can simply push a function button right on the
clocks and see paid time off balances. States Cope, “Employees like this
feature and trust that these balances are accurate and up to date. The
payroll clerk is more productive as well, no longer hand-calculating
balances, or stopping what she was doing to respond to employee
inquiries each day. ”
Productivity Improves
Other productivity improvements include automatic tracking of
exceptions, showing employee tardies, absences, and missed punches. With
the previous system, there was no way to track such reports in a timely
manner, thus problems were only addressed weeks after they happened.
Now, the payroll and HR administrators automatically run reports on a
daily basis, and monitor exceptions in real time in order to catch
attendance issues as they happen.
Pay period totals export much easier
than in the past, and the payroll clerk is able to transfer the data to
a text file without pausing for accuracy checks as she did in the past.
Top management has also benefited from the new system, with the
availability of real time overtime reports for better allocation of
labor.
Cope concludes, “Labor Strategy and
Attendance Enterprise have worked to increase our employees trust that
their labor data is being tracked accurately. Plus, we were able to
totally eliminate the error-prone and faulty methods of the past. We are
in a better position with the archived time and attendance history, and
have eliminated the past bottlenecks.” |
