Crawford & Company® Capitalizes on Replicon for Global Project Time Tracking
After rigorous evaluation, the company chose Replicon as their preferred partner for project time tracking and costing to enable global standardization of time capture processes for all employees.
Benefits
Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Crawford & Company is the world’s largest independent provider of claims management to the risk management and insurance industry as well as self-insured entities, with clients in more than 70 countries. With over 9,000 employees and 50,000 field resources, the company is the largest publicly listed independent provider of claims management with more than $18B worth of claims managed annually. Crawford brings together experts from around the world to offer comprehensive, intelligent solutions to their customers.
Challenge
Crawford & Company’s services teams wanted to improve customer satisfaction by driving better employee experience. The company wanted to streamline time tracking for its global financial teams to reduce administrative overhead, while providing an improved customer experience for both project managers and project time entry resources.
The organization’s time tracking was spread across disparate systems including applications such as their global ITSM tool, a homegrown application in one region, and many more. Every team used a different application that did not integrate with other business critical software, creating data silos. Since the company has branches across the globe, they needed custom timesheets to meet the localization requirements including support for multi-currency. In order to solve this problem, Crawford & Company reached out to multiple vendors to meet their regional requirements.
The project management office (PMO) needed a unified time tracking platform to streamline processes and generate reports across the projects that were managed by different groups. They wanted a modern project time tracking platform with an intuitive user interface that can accommodate complex time tracking use cases.
“We wanted a robust time tracking platform to track employee work hours against various projects and tasks. For every project, we wanted to track associated costs - both CapEx and OpEx - for analysing project costs and optimizing budgets for global projects. We wanted the flexibility of date-to-date reporting. ”
Solution
Crawford & Company is a global company that is constantly working to improve the coordination and governance of global processes.
After rigorous evaluation, the company chose Replicon as their preferred partner for project time tracking and costing to enable global standardization of time capture processes for all employees. Replicon provides a single platform that can be easily configured to meet the unique needs of their global workforce.
“Replicon’s configurable platform provides us with an unified solution to track project time, forecast project costs and resource needs, and account for all project hours in real-time. This helped us modernize our process and procedures for project resources and financials in order to meet customer expectations and improve their satisfaction.”
Achieves Single Source of Truth for Project Time
Every time the project managers define tasks for team members, they need to track time spent on every stage of the project. For instance, they need to know how much time was spent on building, testing, and supporting production to categorize costs as either operating expenditure (OpEx) or capital expenditure (CapEx). Project managers approve these costs every week for further processing. A detailed report is generated every month for the Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) group to provide senior management with a forecast of the company’s profit and loss and operating performance for the upcoming quarter and year.
“Replicon is used by our global teams to set margins, deadlines, time & cost for all projects and tasks” says Brian. “This helps us to track costs associated with resource hours and projects to get visibility and control over project budgets and spend.”
Furthermore, Replicon has drastically reduced administrative overhead on the finance teams. Virginia Rizzo, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis explains, “Before switching to Replicon, we had to gather employee time data and clean it up for accuracy. But with Replicon in place, I’ve never had to review any data. My team extracts all of the time that has been logged by resources in the platform to create journal entries and pivot tables to send it to the finance team for further processing. This helped us reduce an eight hour process to less than 15 minutes.”
Ensures Compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley
Replicon’s cloud-based time tracking solution ensures compliance by providing custom approval flows, notifications, and historical records of all time and expense transactions for auditing purposes. Brian explains, “Our project managers have to build stronger ties to the financial operations to adhere to Sarbanes-Oxley and/or its equivalent in countries across the world. Replicon gives us greater accuracy and transparency to forecast cost and revenue on all projects, analyze and measure financial risk, maintain real-time data about where a project is against budget, and have traceability of the data to reinforce the decision making of our financial executives and comply with Sections of Sarbanes-Oxley.”
Connected Solution for Real-time Visibility
Before switching to Replicon, project management and financial teams had a hard time sharing data between the multiple systems they used. The manual processes increased administrative overhead along with the risk of manual errors. Brian said, “Replicon’s plug and play integration capabilities was a strong differentiator. Most of the solutions that we evaluated lacked tight integration with the other software we used.”
Excellent Customer Service Improves User Adoption
Replicon’s implementation and post-implementation support has encouraged faster user adoption. “Replicon is an easy to use, easy to set up, easy to configure application that we can use globally” Brian explains. “I’ve been very pleased with the Replicon platform, as well as the customer support. I’m impressed with the implementation and support team’s knowledge of what the system can do and their willingness to ask questions to provide out-of-the-box solutions. Working with Replicon’s teams – from sales down through implementation and customer support – has been a great experience”
“Replicon’s plug and play integration capabilities was a strong differentiator. Most of the solutions that we evaluated lacked tight integration with the other software we used ”
The Results
- Improved customer satisfaction with streamlined processes
- Reduced time taken for financial processing by 97%
"We wanted a robust time tracking platform to track employee work hours against various projects and tasks. For every project, we wanted to track associated costs - both CapEx and OpEx - for analysing project costs and optimizing budgets for global projects. We wanted the flexibility of date-to-date reporting."
Brian Lemmings
Director of IT Service Management
