Racing Association Back On the Fast Track
With Improved Time and Attendance Reporting.

When Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino tracked employee time and attendance and scheduling with past methods, managers spent more time manually making changes to scheduling and correcting time card errors than with more critical responsibilities. The organization even incurred avoidable expenses from overstaffing. Now, since switching to a fully integrated web-enabled Attendance Enterprise system from InfoTronics, supervisors attend to more meaningful tasks than sitting at a keyboard verifying time cards. Payroll is completed faster than before, and Attendance Enterprise enables management to analyze time and attendance data to make better-informed decisions. The organization is on the fast track to increased productivity, reduction of payroll errors and cost savings.

About Dubuque Greyhound Park
Dubuque Greyhound Park is the nation’s first nonprofit greyhound track. The facility is owned by the City of Dubuque, Iowa and is run under the guidance of the Dubuque Racing Association. Profits from the racetrack benefit the City and area charitable organizations, and the facility is one of the area’s top 25 employers with more than 350 employees.

In past years, the organization handled time and attendance with a mix of manual and automated methods. As the organization grew, tasks such as scheduling and time card adjustments were distributed to departmental supervisors, and were difficult to manage.

Too Much Time, Too Many Errors
Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino eventually purchased a different time and attendance system. It was a new system that promised to deliver exactly what they needed. However, the software fell short of the organization’s expectations. The product purchased could not accommodate the time and attendance tracking needs for Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino.

Manual interaction was required for the time and attendance data to be processed, which led to an increase in the amount of time required to process payroll. The system did not work well with Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino’s payroll and human resources system by ABRA.

Tresa Heber, Controller’s Assistant in charge of payroll, explains another shortcoming, “One of our main requirements was that a time and attendance system must handle changes to pay rates in the middle of a pay cycle. The previous package was not able to do this for us.”

The calculation of shift differentials was not included as well. Explains Joe Hilby, MIS Director at Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino, ”The ability to calculate shift differentials was not standard in the previous system. But rather it was a custom program which resulted in higher cost for implementation.”

Canned, Not Custom
Flexible time and attendance reporting was another important feature that Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino needed. However, there was no way to tailor reports to fit their needs without the purchase of another software module. “We wanted our own specialized reports. The system provided only “canned” standard reports. No customization could be done at all.” according to Hilby.

Training and support were also additional expenditures. The technical support representative of the previous system had no familiarity with the Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino system configuration. “I was going to have to deal with somebody who didn’t know anything about our company, how we operate or how our system was set up other than from notes by another person. That was concern of mine,” says Hilby.

In Search of a Better Way
Hilby looked to Midwest Automated Time Systems, an InfoTronics distributor located in Davenport, Iowa, for an improved software solution. Upon hearing the problems that Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino was having with their software system, Sales Manager Ken Rossmiller and Technical Services Manager Ted Neese from Midwest Automated Time Systems arranged a demonstration of the newly released time and attendance system from InfoTronics- Attendance Enterprise.

“We were pretty impressed with what we saw,” says Hilby, “It had all the functionality that we wanted. After seeing Attendance Enterprise, we knew we didn’t need to look at other products. This software met all of our requirements.”

Attendance Enterprise is a Web-enabled system designed to automate employee time tracking and scheduling. Attendance Enterprise meets the needs of diverse organizations and employee groups. And because it uses Microsoft SQL, it’s less expensive, scalable and easily deploys into existing Microsoft computing environments.

Seamless Transition
Since the casino already used Microsoft SQL, Attendance Enterprise fit seamlessly with the existing computing systems. No special software, hardware or custom programming was needed to achieve all the functionality required in time reporting. It has proven to be cost-effective, easy to maintain and most importantly, scalable. As Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino grows, Attendance Enterprise will handle the increasing workload.

Integration with the Abra payroll software was straightforward. The process used to migrate time tracking data to the payroll system proved to be familiar and intuitive for Heber and her group, “The payroll process is one that I am comfortable with.”

Attendance Enterprise also provides complete flexibility in reporting. Time and attendance data stored in Attendance Enterprise can be exported into any other Microsoft compatible software. Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino supervisors and payroll personnel now have the ability to customize any report to give them greater insight into labor trends.

Ease of Scheduling
One key element of Attendance Enterprise that makes time management easier for supervisors and department heads is the scheduling functionality. According to Bob Kaesbauer, Director of Maintenance, “The schedule patterns are great and make every supervisor’s job a lot easier in terms of scheduling.”

Midwest Automated Time Systems provides answers to any questions about Attendance Enterprise. Midwest Automated Time Systems answered questions the users had regarding Attendance Enterprise. According to Kaesbauer, “Their training was thorough. We were able to learn things very quickly.”

Midwest Automated Time Systems’ familiarity with the system configuration and their responsiveness in regard to resolving technical issues helps put Dubuque Greyhound and Casino’s minds at ease. They know that if a problem occurs, it will be fixed quickly.

Back on the Fast Track
Attendance Enterprise lets Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino’s supervisors and payroll personnel get back to being productive. Less time is spent scheduling and correcting time card errors. As Brian Southwood, General Manager of Operations explains, “The scheduling functionality frees up the supervisors and department heads to do other things instead of sitting at the keyboard. Payroll is completed faster than before. Attendance Enterprise is saving the payroll department time so they can do other things besides correcting errors.”

With the custom reporting capabilities, Attendance Enterprise enables management to analyze time and attendance data to make better-informed decisions. For example, one customized report enables Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino supervisors to identify redundancies in staffing so adjustment in the coverage of certain shifts can be made, reducing costs associated with overstaffing.

To make the organization even more efficient, Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino is looking to install Attendance Enterprise Self Service options. The Employee Self Service (ESS) option allows employees to enter time data and view personal benefit information via the Web. Manager Self Service (MSS) allows managers to use Attendance Enterprise features such as reporting and time card editing on the Web as well. These Attendance Enterprise features will allow supervisors and the payroll and human resources departments to continue to increase productivity and improve payroll accuracy even more.

With Attendance Enterprise, Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino is finally back on the fast track to increased productivity, reduction of payroll errors and cost savings.