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| Since 1914, California Casualty Group (CCG) has provided insurance services with an emphasis on efficiency and customer satisfaction. California Casualty Management Company (CCMC), as manager and attorney-in-fact for CCG, wanted to automate a laborious timesheet process, so it developed a Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 solution to reduce timesheet data-processing time. CCMC improved the productivity of two staffers in the Payroll department and estimates that it will save 40 days a year for one payroll representative. CCMC expects to reduce operating costs through lower overtime and allowing both payroll employees to work on more productive projects. It also expects that more efficient, accurate payroll processing will allow cost center managers to focus more on their core business.
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To meet its long-term goal of reducing fixed costs, California Casualty Management Company (CCMC) is always looking for ways to improve the efficiency of its business processes. For example, in an effort to reduce paper and streamline the submission of employee timesheet data, CCMC introduced online timesheets two years ago. In this process, non-exempt employees would download a blank Microsoft® Excel timesheet template from the corporate intranet, save it to their desktop, and fill it out every two weeks. Exempt employees only filled out and submitted timesheets if they have to report any holidays or paid or unpaid absences.
Although the Excel template solution made the time submission process much easier for CCMC employees, the back-end process of collecting, validating, consolidating, and importing the submitted timesheet data into CCMC’s ProBusiness payroll system remained largely manual. Currently, the Payroll department at CCMC processes approximately 490 timesheets during a normal biweekly payroll cycle. The iterative nature of this multistep process, which involves many participants, provided opportunities for data entry error and wasted a significant amount of time.
In step one of the payroll process, each employee entered timesheet data into the correct timesheet. The three Excel timesheets (one for California non-exempts, one for out-of-state non-exempts, and one for exempts) allowed for scant data validation, so an employee might forget to fill in his or her ID number or job classification, might fill in the wrong number of sick days, or use a word instead of a number. Step two required that each employee submit the completed timesheet to his or her supervisor, who looked over each timesheet and checked certain discretional fields, such as paid overtime or make-up hours, again without any automated data validation. The supervisor then sent the forms in e-mail to a folder in the Microsoft Outlook® messaging and collaboration client for authorized payroll representatives to access.
“Approximately 3 to 4 percent of submitted timesheets had some sort of error,” says Mary Jo Louie, Payroll Supervisor. “The payroll specialist had to compare each employee’s ID number against a written report, and verify that each timesheet was filled out correctly.”
Once the data was entered into ProBusiness, the payroll representative ran a report to find the timesheets that needed to be adjusted because employees entered more vacation or sick time than they had available.
“Usually, 40 to 45 timesheets per payroll cycle needed to be adjusted,” says Louie. “Since the check is done after loading the data into the payroll system, employees were not aware of this adjustment, and were not informed by Payroll. As a result, they usually found out when they received their check, leading to unnecessary stress for everybody involved.”
Overall, the validation of timesheet data took one person two full days
to complete for each cycle, or approximately 52 days per year. “Clearly, we needed an information-gathering and management solution that would make it easy to streamline the process of collecting and reusing payroll information,” says Mike Ray, Vice President and Controller. “At the same time, we wanted a solution that would be easy to implement and use for all our employees. This is a key business process that cannot be disrupted.”
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Figure 1: CCMC employees use one of three InfoPath-based timesheet forms (for California non-exempts, out-of-state non-exempts, and exempt employees) that validate data on entry, eliminating the need for a payroll representative to open and check 490 timesheets every two weeks.
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California Casualty Management Company partnered with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Allin Consulting to automate key portions of the payroll cycle by implementing a solution based on forms in the Microsoft Office InfoPath™ 2003 information-gathering program, Web services that use Microsoft ASP.NET, and a Microsoft SQL Server™–based repository.
“Working with Allin Consulting has been a pleasure,” says Ray. “They are professional, courteous, and responsive.”
Allin consultants spent on-site time conferring with Louie about the business payroll process and the requisite state overtime laws, as well as corporate policies regarding employee eligibility for sick and vacation time, jury duty, and bereavement leave. “I found the consultants to be efficient and careful in understanding our business needs,” says Louie. “I appreciated the fact that after spending time here, they would call and confirm that what they were doing on the project was what we had talked about.”
“Here was a manual process where people were doing what computers do best, which is checking a lot of data for accuracy,” says Eric Hansen, Project Manager at Allin Consulting. “InfoPath takes this number-crunching capability even further by allowing us to customize an information-gathering and management process to match a customer’s process exactly. InfoPath integrates with CCMC’s back-end system, ProBusiness, because it supports any defined XML schema and integrates with Web services. And we benefit as a technology partner because InfoPath provides a robust, flexible development environment that allowed us to create and design rich, dynamic forms using business rules, built-in validation, and conditional formatting to replicate and automate CCMC’s timesheet submission process.”
In the new system, employees fill out InfoPath-based timesheets that have extensive validation built in and send those timesheets to their supervisors as e mail attachments (see Figure 1). Once the supervisors approve the timesheets, they submit the summary data required for payroll processing to a central SQL Server database using a Submit button on the form. The InfoPath-based form itself is automatically sent to the SQL Server repository for archiving (see Figure 2). Once the timesheets have been submitted, all the payroll representative has to do is execute a process that will make any checks needed on the consolidated data for any errors or omissions, and report all those found through a Web page. This way, the payroll representative only has to open and fix those timesheets that have been reported as containing errors.
Once these errors have been corrected, the payroll representative clicks a button to automatically create an Excel worksheet with data in the tabular format required by the ProBusiness load routine.
California Casualty Management Company is seeing immediate benefits from its Microsoft Office System solution. “Our vision for this engagement was to automate the collection, validation, and loading of our employees’ timesheets. Using Microsoft Office System technologies, we have accomplished this goal,” says Ray. “The Microsoft Office System will lower operating costs by improving our payroll process’s performance, reliability, and data accuracy. The new InfoPath-based solution’s data-validation capabilities will reduce the time spent correcting mistakes by up to 40 working days a year for one payroll representative.”
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Figure 2: CCMC employees use one of three InfoPath-based timesheet forms (for California non-exempts, out-of-state non-exempts, and exempt employees) that validate data on entry, eliminating the need for a payroll representative to open and check 490 timesheets every two weeks.
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Reducing the time it takes to validate timesheet data by approximately 80 percent means that CCMC can reduce operating costs. It also ensures that the payroll representatives charged with this tedious task are free to work more productively on other jobs; however, they are not the only people that will benefit from the solution. All employees filling out timesheets can be sure that they will be sending the correct data to their supervisors and that there will be no more unpleasant surprises when their checks arrive. The built-in validation ensures that data is correct at every stage of the process, and everyone can be confident that the data is coming straight from the payroll system, with limited opportunities for human error.
“InfoPath allows for an additional layer of internal control, which gives comfort to our 60 cost center managers, who look at reports and try to control costs,” says Ray. “Previously, we’ve had experiences where employees have taken extra vacation days, and then terminated their employment, and we have had to absorb that loss. Now we can monitor that situation more carefully to reduce those costs.”
Correct timesheet information affects the general ledger and also goes into labor distribution for month-end reports for management. “This illustrates the global implications of automating a single business process,” says Vasu Kadambi, Chief Information Officer. “InfoPath-based forms present a familiar interface and map perfectly to our payroll process, so users don’t have to train or get used to a new way of doing things. And because our Microsoft Office System solution integrates with our payroll system, we can be sure cost center managers have accurate data to make better business decisions and cut costs. We have found InfoPath 2003 to be an extremely useful tool to streamline and improve operational efficiency in the company.”
Microsoft Office is the business world's chosen environment for information work that provides the software, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about Microsoft Office System, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/
For more information about Allin Consulting products and services, call (408) 441-6900 or visit the Web site:
http://www.allinconsulting.com/
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