United Staffing Associates, based in San Luis Obispo, California, helps clients fill full-time, part-time, and temp-to-hire positions from its 17 locations in California and one location in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Challenges
United Staffing Associates had been using a combination of paper timesheets and a recruiting and staffing solution to track the time of people working at client sites. One major client requires time and labor costing by department, as employees move among departments daily to work on different products as needed. This client also has complex incentive-pay rules.
A United Staffing senior payroll person spent about 80% of her week collecting time for this single client's 150-plus employees, calculating incentive pay and the weighted average for overtime hours, and invoicing the client. She spent 12 to 16 hours each week calculating just the incentive pay and weighted average for overtime hours.
New California meal and rest period law regulations added more complexity to the process and made compliance even more challenging.
United Staffing realized that to meet the demands of this client's planned growth, the company would need to ask the client to move to a single automated solution that would make the timekeeping and payroll process more efficient and accurate.
"We knew that we needed better technology and resources, especially if we wanted to be competitive on pricing," said William Hills, Vice President and General Counsel at United Staffing. Otherwise, as the client continued to dramatically increase headcount, United Staffing would have needed to add additional staff to review data line by line and manually calculate incentive pay and overtime, adding potentially prohibitive costs.
Solutions
United Staffing recommended its client implement the UKG Ready® solution at the client’s facility to accurately capture the time of employees working daily in multiple departments, streamline the application of complex incentive-pay rules, improve efficiency and productivity, and mitigate compliance risks. The client recognized the benefits and implemented the UKG® solution.
For United Staffing, UKG Ready gives it the capability to manage the workforce management needs of a single client as well as hundreds of clients, including automatically exporting real-time data directly to its clients.
“The UKG Ready solution is extremely robust and customizable, allowing us to adapt to client requests. We haven't had to increase internal payroll headcount in any way to handle a client with more than 600 employees. With the processes we had before, we would have had to hire at least another two payroll people and an administrator.”
William Hills
Vice President and General Counsel
Results
"The UKG Ready solution is extremely robust and customizable, allowing us to adapt to client requests," said Hills.
As an example, he noted that even though United Staffing's client significantly increased its workforce to more than 650 employees — including doubling the number of employees who qualify for incentive pay to 300 — inputting incentive-pay rules, exporting employee hours, calculating incentive pay, and processing payroll in UKG Ready takes just 30 minutes now, a 97% reduction in time devoted to these tasks.
"We haven't had to increase internal payroll headcount in any way to handle a client with more than 600 employees," said Hills. "With the processes we had before, we would have had to hire at least another two payroll people and an administrator."
Client employees punch in and out and track their meal and rest breaks at timeclocks, where they can view their punch history and check their attendance points. They also clock in and out in individual departments to track their time working on specific products as each is a different revenue center.
"This client wants lots of labor-costing data, and that's why we went to UKG," explained Hills. "It can really drill down and has the ability to capture transfers between operational duties, so they can get really granular with the data and pull reports to better understand what they're doing."
When payroll is processed, the UKG Ready solution automatically adjusts employee pay for overtime and any other premium pay owed. With labor costs reported by department, United Staffing is able to support the client in improving its labor cost management.
In the staffing industry in California, companies have only a week to process payroll. During the few times that United Staffing has had a payroll question, Hills has been grateful for UKG's responsive support services to ensure the company can easily meet the weekly payroll requirement.
During the payroll process, Hills performs a quick review to ensure payroll matches what United Staffing is invoicing the client. He said UKG Ready delivers the invoicing transparency the company wants to provide to the client.
He also noted that the client feels more confident about compliance now, with required meal and rest periods configured and tracked in UKG Ready. This functionality is especially important in meeting California's complex and changing compliance requirements. "To have this peace of mind is worth something to us as well," he said.
Hills added that the solution's configurability has been especially beneficial in meeting the needs of a variety of clients, including developing a piece rate application for its major client.
"UKG Ready was robust enough to be able to take that specification, and I'm thankful for that," he said. "We could make it exactly the way we wanted it to be."
