Swimwear manufacturer makes much-needed change to automated system, sees improvements in costs, efficiencies
It was definitely time for Christina America to upgrade its Datatrac payroll system. Not only had the Montreal-based swimwear manufacturer been advised the workforce management software would no longer be supported as of September 2009, but the system wasn’t really working anyway.
The system started causing problems as far back as 2005 and when its physical location was moved in 2006, it hardly worked at all, so everything was done manually, says Dianne Girouard, HR director at Christina America.
“The old system we had was so archaic, basically it just did (the) very minimal of what we needed,” she says. “There was a lot of stuff done that was manual on different reports that other people had to do, so we were trying to find also a report writer that could give us all sorts of things.”
The organization approached three payroll providers, eventually settling on ITR as the vendor that was the best fit.
“(Christina America) should be congratulated because, unlike many of the customers that were in the same boat, they didn’t procrastinate and wait until the last minute,” says Mario Furino, eastern regional manager for ITR and branch manager for the Montreal office. “They avoided a crisis.”
At the time, Christina America had several different work sites and information was communicated through phone lines by modem. (The company now has two work sites, having cut back its workforce from 300 to 166 because of the recession.) So ITR converted the company to newer technology through its TimeZone software, making payroll less costly and more reliable, says Furino.
“They were able to collect their time and attendance information much more efficiently, with less grief, because it wouldn’t break down, and without any human intervention,” he says. “They were able to get their transactions on time, every time, so that made their life a lot easier.”
The changeover to the new system took a few weeks, with a parallel implementation running the old and new systems at the same time, to check for discrepancies between the two, says Furino.
“That way they felt at ease because if TimeZone wasn’t configured properly or there were changes they wanted to make to it, they could still rely on their old system because they were running parallel.”
On-site training was provided around the system and processes and, once the wrinkles were ironed out, the company moved over to TimeZone exclusively in the spring of 2009.
The implementation went fairly smoothly, though help was needed around the first statutory holiday as it wasn’t uploading into the system, says Girouard. And the company requested ITR change how the calculations for overtime were made, for example, so they were not configured right down to a quarter of a penny.
The system tracks the date and time of employee entries and exits and then manipulates that data to calculate the number of hours worked, based on pre-defined rules and regulations (such as a statutory holiday, overtime or tardiness policies).
“It makes it a lot more efficient because it eliminates the manual calculation of time and it’s a lot more accurate because it eliminates the human error,” says Furino.
Studies suggest a human error margin in the manual intervention of payroll can add up to one-half of one per cent to three per cent, which can add up to $75,000 for a company with 300 employees, he says.
Given the increased reporting, Christina America now has a better handle on labour costs — and it knows about issues such as absenteeism levels and sick days.
“Before, although the system did some of it, they couldn’t rely on all the information because it wasn’t entirely accurate, so then you’re forced to check things manually, which is counter-productive,” says Furino.
All the reports are greatly appreciated, says Girouard, such as overtime reports for salaried employees — who previously had claimed many hours of overtime without accurate records. And supervisors no longer have to take the time to check records.
“It’s a lot of proof that we never had before,” she says. “You can build a report any which way — by department, by employee, by sick days.”
The system is modular in design, so companies can add modules as needed, such as job costing. It’s a scalable product, so a customer doesn’t have to pay 100 per cent of the product cost if it’s only using 30 per cent, says Furino.
