Playing the Field: Replicon Helps Emergency Response Company Track Field Employees’ Hours with Automation
It’s never an easy conversation to have with an employee when you need them to verify their hours on a job. With companies that have remote employees constantly jumping from one client site to another, it’s often too easy to get hours and locations mixed up. Karen Berry, a pay and benefits specialist at BC Preferred Restoration saw this problem first hand.
BC Preferred is an emergency restoration company that aims to help people who have experienced a flood or sewer back up, in a timely and cost effective manner.
In order to do so, they work with an extensive team of plumbers, drain professionals, flood technicians, and other important types of skilled tradesmen. While this diverse workforce helps them be a more versatile company, it poses a challenge when it comes to tracking time and attendance for payroll.
Each of these workers are paid hourly and have different pay rates. All of them work remote at different client locations that they are assigned that morning.
Prior to adopting an automated solution, employees would send an email with time and location. All these emails would then be input to an excel spreadsheet to track time. It was an extremely onerous process that left the company open to errors. This raised questions during payroll and risked liability if the company did not comply with the British Columbia pay rules.
Karen decided that they needed a solution that could help them track their field employees and automate the pay calculations. She narrowed in on Replicon’s Time & Attendance solution to automate her company’s processes. Each remote employee now uses their phones to enter in time data on-the-go. The managers then use the platform to schedule staff and accurately track job completion.
Karen estimates that the new automated solution has cut payroll overhead time in half. It allows supervisors to see the status of an employee in real-time, which has improved customer satisfaction by keeping them informed.
“A customer might call and might be expecting employees to be on site at a certain time. Thanks to the GPS tracking in our system, I can look and say, ‘okay, Carlos hasn’t left his last job yet, so he might be there in an hour,’” says Karen. “We’re able to integrate that whole flow from customer to staff and then back to the customer.”
Karen believes that the reason for the solution’s success at her company is due to the following reasons:
Excellent Support: To Karen this was a distinguishing factor. As the company had never used an automated system before there were plenty of questions and changes that had to be made internally. So, having an experienced and robust support team really helped move things forward quickly.
User Friendly: As many of the employees & supervisors had never used an automated system before, it was imperative that the system be intuitive to avoid any friction and ensure quick onboarding.
Built for the Mobile Workers: The geolocation was a strong favorite of Karen’s. Client sites were no longer a question as the Replicon mobile app automatically picked up employees’ location when they punched in their time. This shifted the accountability directly to the employees.
Hassle-free Compliance: Fully automating the pay rules specific to British Columbia and the company specific pay codes reduced errors and headaches for the business.
“We now have a better relationship with our employees as a result,” says Karen. “We started out with a few, and have been adding more since. I’m excited to increase the number of employees we have using it and decrease the excel spreadsheet work.”
