Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Dental Laboratory Eliminates Manual Payroll Inefficiencies with Integrated Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Life sciences—Medical devices
Customer Profile
Glidewell Laboratories serves more than 10,000 dental offices across the United States with high-quality restorative and cosmetic dental products, and employs 2,500 staff in four states.
Business Situation
Because the company’s Sage Abra payroll solution could not accommodate Glidewell’s complex payroll requirements, employees compiled weekly reports by hand, which required additional levels of quality control and additional staff.
Solution
With help from Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Systematica, Glidewell implemented an integrated payroll, human resources, and financial management solution based on Microsoft Dynamics® GP.
Benefits
More than half a million dollars annually in savings
Better-informed decision making
Greater employee satisfaction
Reduced payroll processing from three days to one day / “Once we implemented the HRand Payroll modules for Microsoft Dynamics GP, we were able to instantly redeploy 80 percent of our payroll department employees from processing tasks to financial planning and analysis.”
Glenn Sasaki, CFO, Glidewell Laboratories
Glidewell Laboratories is well known in dental offices for its high-quality bridges, crowns, dentures, and other dental products. The company relies on a piecework compensation model for 1,500 technicians, but could not accommodate that complexity in its Sage Abra payroll software. Glidewell replaced Sage Abra with Microsoft Dynamics® GP to tie together and automate its payroll and financial accounting processes. Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Systematica helped Glidewell implement an integrated solution so that all employee time and production information is captured and processed digitally, saving more than half a million dollars annually and providing managers with deeper insight into labor and production costs. In addition, the company will be able to provide employees with self-service access to benefits and paycheck information online.
Situation
More than 10,000 dentist offices across the United States trust Glidewell Laboratories to provide high-quality restorative and cosmetic dental products, such as bridges, crowns, and dentures. Established in 1970, Glidewell has risen to the top of the dental laboratory industry by employing state-of-the-art technology and an incentive-based compensation model whereby more than 1,500 manufacturing technicians are paid for the quantity and quality of their work. Altogether, Glidewell employs 2,500 employees in California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, Costa Rica, and Mexico.
Although the piecework approach to compensation helps Glidewell provide high-quality products at good value, it creates an extremely complicated payroll model. The company calculates technicians’ pay based on the quality and quantity of pieces finished. In addition, because technicians work from different states and in three countries, they are subject to varying requirements for minimum pay as well as local taxes. The company’s payroll department spent an inordinate amount of time collecting timesheet information from the 1,500 technicians and 1,000 other employees, and then calculating pay based on their individual locations and circumstances.
The Sage Abra system that Glidewell used for payroll processing was too inflexible to account for the idiosyncrasies of the piecework compensation model and different state minimum-pay requirements. Instead, payroll department employees compiled information and performed the complex calculations in a spreadsheet maintained outside of the payroll system. When they were finished calculating information, payroll employees converted the spreadsheet into specially prepared tables and uploaded the data into the payroll system.
“Our payroll department manually entered timesheet information and reports from our production system into a massive spreadsheet that had hundreds of tabs,” says Stephenie Goddard, Vice President of Human Resources at Glidewell. “This was done every week for 2,500 employees.”
Glidewell wanted to automate its payroll process—including time spent compiling information and resolving errors—and eliminate the waste caused by manual data entry and calculations. In addition, the company needed greater flexibility from its payroll system to more easily account for labor regulations in different states where Glidewell employs technicians. Sage Abra also limited how Glidewell could account for mixed pay rates in the same pay period—this meant that payroll employees had to manually calculate pay for employees who took paid vacation and worked during the same week.
In addition, the company wanted to integrate its payroll system with Microsoft Dynamics® GP, which Glidewell used for financial management. “It’s very important for us to have good communication between our payroll and accounting departments. When we calculated departmental profit and loss statements, for example, we needed to make sure that all the costs associated with transferred employees would move with them,” says Goddard.
Solution
After considering its options, including building customizations and integrations to its existing Sage Abra system, Glidewell decided to add the Advanced Payroll and Advanced Human Resources modules to its implementation of Microsoft Dynamics GP. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Systematica, Glidewell estimated that the new integrated system would reduce inefficiencies, leading to more than half a million dollars in savings in the first year alone.
“With help from Systematica, we were able to configure Microsoft Dynamics GP to account for our unique compensation model and payroll requirements, including accounting for the employment laws in the states that we operate in,” says Goddard. “Now, time and production information is captured digitally and flows through the company from the timecard and production systems, to payroll, and to accounting. It has dramatically increased efficiencies in our payroll department and enabled our management to get a real-time view of our operations.”
Integrated System for Payroll
Keeping in mind its goal of eliminating waste, Glidewell worked with Systematica to plan a more efficient paperless process for tracking employee production and time worked. Systematica assisted with the installation of a new timecard system that ensures more accurate information through biometric identification. Instead of producing paper forms like the old system, the new timecard system automatically routes information to managers for approval. Once approved, the data moves into the payroll system through an integration solution from Scribe Software.
Systematica configured Microsoft Dynamics GP to calculate compensation for Glidewell technicians based on the quality and quantity of units produced and time worked. In addition, Systematica added payroll rules to automatically handle overtime calculations, various state employment laws, and mixed pay-rate calculations. Because Glidewell now handles payroll and accounting in the same system, the payroll department can post payroll and accruals immediately for review by the accounting department. This eliminates potential misallocation of costs across departments when employees transfer and provides management with a real-time view of the impact of payroll on the company’s financials.
Glidewell takes advantage of the flexibility in the new payroll solution to cater to employee requests. “Sage Abra did not let us disburse payments to multiple employee bank accounts, but now we can do that with payroll in Microsoft Dynamics GP,” says Goddard. “Even though it’s a small detail from our end, it means a lot to some of our employees who want to put money into an education fund, for example.”
Employee Self-Service
Glidewell is implementing a portal based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server where employees can go to view their benefit details, print paystubs, and submit forms for time-off requests and departmental transfers. Managers can also submit pay changes through the same portal. By moving these processes online, Glidewell human resources staff can spend more of their time helping employees and managers with more complex issues. “Employee self-service will make us much more strategic in how we operate,” says Goddard. Glidewell will use the portal to improve employee communications. “We used to print important announcements and include them with employees’ paper paystubs, but now we can offer much more detailed information online, and in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean,” says Goddard.
Daily View of Production and Labor
With integrated production, timekeeping, payroll, and financial management systems, Glidewell managers can analyze production and labor data more frequently and in more detail. Previously, the payroll department provided static reports every week—and then only at a very high level. Systematica set up dynamic reports that pull the latest information from Microsoft Dynamics GP so that managers can easily conduct as-needed analysis for entire departments, subdepartments, individual employees, types of employees, or product types. “We were able to mirror our organizational structure in the payroll and financial system so that managers could dig much deeper into labor and production costs than ever before,” says Goddard.
Benefits
Glidewell aims to transform the dental laboratory industry, and now the company has the systems in place to optimize its innovative piecework compensation model. With Microsoft Dynamics GP bridging payroll, human resources, and financial accounting, Glidewell improves insight into business performance, the efficiency of its business processes, and employee satisfaction. In addition, by adopting a more flexible and integrated payroll system, Glidewell saves more than half a million dollars in payroll processingannually and can assign its payroll department to more strategic tasks.
“Once we implemented the HR and Payroll modules for Microsoft Dynamics GP, we were able to instantly redeploy 80 percent of our payroll department employees from processing tasks to financial planning and analysis,” says Glenn Sasaki, CFO at Glidewell. “By automating piece-pay computations, we also reduced the number of days required to process weekly payroll from three days to a little more than one day.”
More Than Half a Million
Dollars Annually in Savings
By automating payroll, Glidewell saves more than half a million dollars each year. “Our technicians check in with biometric identification and scan their finished pieces into the production system, so the data is captured automatically,” says Goddard.
Glidewell will save an additional U.S.$30,000 annually by moving the distribution of paystubs, technician compensation reports, and various human resources forms to itsonline employee self-service portal, dramatically streamlining workflows in the human resources department and reducing the amount of paperwork.
Glidewell was also able to reallocate 80 percent of its payroll department employees to more strategic tasks, essentially boosting the return on investment of the new system by the cost of employing the redeployed payroll staff. “We’ve transformed our payroll department from data-entry workers into business analysts,” says Goddard. “It’s soft cost savings as opposed to hard cost savings, but it’s still very significant nonetheless because we are adding much more value to the company.”
Better-Informed Decision Making
Equipped with real-time information into labor and production, departmental and human resources managers at Glidewell can make better decisions about how to best deploy their employees. “The human resources department is now much better positioned to help management with their strategic hiring needs,” says Goddard. “We have the insight to discuss with them about possibly transferring people from another department instead of recruiting from outside, for example.”
The integrated payroll and financial accounting system enables managers to analyze departmental profit and loss so that they can take any necessary corrective actions sooner. For example, employee overtime is highlighted so that managers can identify and prevent potential cost overruns.
Greater Employee Satisfaction
Glidewell now offers an even more transparent process to its technicians who are paid on a piecework basis; this helps Glidewell treat its employees fairly across the company. “With our new automated payroll system, employees have more information regarding their compensation because they can run reports on a daily basis and calculate their daily piece-rate,” says Goddard. “And, when we implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP for our payroll process, we uncovered some slight inconsistencies in our work shift and benefit accrual policies across departments that were difficult to see before.”
Employees also will have improved access to benefits information and human resources through the online portal. Similarly, the interface for Microsoft Dynamics GP makes it easier for human resources staff to view employee profiles by consolidating that information in one place. Says Goddard, “From a human resources administrator’s point of view, I appreciate how Microsoft Dynamics GP tracks an employee’s entire history with the company, from their application on through their career at Glidewell.”
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systemsthat your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.
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