McLeod

McLeod USA is an Iowa-based telecommunications company that was experiencing significant and rapid growth in their industry. Due to acquisitions, their employee base diversified and is composed of thousands of individuals working from a variety of locations. Labor costs increased dramatically with employees ramping up so quickly. McLeod had a paper time reporting system in place for all employees, regardless of their location. All payroll information was processed using Cyborg and Lawson Financials. As McLeod USA began their significant growth spurt, their paper time reporting system became a severe bottleneck during payroll processing. Their Payroll Department had grown to 7 individuals whose full time job was processing payroll. McLeod had a choice: hire more payroll clerks, go to a salary instead of an hourly-based compensation structure, or automate the entire payroll process.

The Solution

McLeod had Lotus Notes installed in an AS400 environment, and used it for E-mail and some minor applications. McLeod decided to leverage this investment and automate their time reporting processes using a Notes-based solution. After extensively researching a variety of potential solutions, they selected Time Tracker by Automation Centre.

During the implementation process, Automation Centre integrated Time Tracker with Cyborg to extract data from on-line time sheets. Further, this new application drew data directly from McLeod's current chart of accounts stored in Lawson's Financials, a sophisticated suite of applications providing finance and activity management. Thus, the solution integrated with their current systems along with providing an easy-to-use solution that had no impact on the desktop.

Time Tracker provided a total solution that fulfilled all of McLeod's requirements for automating time reporting. The customer service provided by Automation Centre throughout the sales cycle was clearly the best McLeod had experienced during the search process. Automation Centre provided a fully functional pilot version of Time Tracker for McLeod to use prior to the sale, deploying an Automation Centre team to respond to questions and concerns throughout the sales cycle.

The Benefits

As a result of this investment in Tracker, the market leading time reporting solution, McLeod is reaping a variety of benefits. In the short term, they do not have to hire more individuals to manage payroll processes and have alleviated their payroll bottleneck. Further, through automating their time reporting and payroll processes, they are not only saving time, but also securing their processes by sharing key project data across the enterprise. In the long term, this system will not only help McLeod to reduce the number of payroll clerks required, but will save approximately $140,000 in salaries in the first year alone, with the potential for another $100,000 that was lost previously simply due to time spent processing paper time sheets.