Noel Squires
Info. Systems Mgr
- Goulburn Valley Water
- Country
- Australia
- State
- VIC
- Industry
- Utility Provider - Water
- Employees
- 210+
Key Benefits for Goulburn Valley Water
- Full award rates interpretation
- Cost savings on timesheet data entry
- Staff freed up from time consuming processes
Background
Goulburn Valley Water was formed in early 1994 and is Victoria’s largest manager of urban water supply and wastewater treatment. Located in the state’s food bowl heartland, it provides urban water and wastewater (sewerage) services to a population of over 126,000 in 54 towns and cities from the outskirts of Melbourne to the Murray River in an area of 20,000 square kilometres. Its infrastructure includes many water and wastewater treatment plants and around 2,400 kilometres of water and sewer mains.
Goulburn Valley Water directly employs around 210 people. This workforce is complemented by partnerships with consultants and contractors to undertake a range of business, technical and operational functions.
Challenges and Goals
After using a Payroll system for six years that had no real improvements in the product, no upgrades and no support for Windows XP, a decision was made to start looking for a new system. Manager of Information Systems Noel Squires says the company was impressed by the rich functionality of PayGlobal and the fact that it was the only provider on its shortlist that had award interpretation. Award interpretation allows PayGlobal to automatically calculate employee payments in Payroll based on the award rules, eliminating the need for time consuming data entry and error correction. “We need to capture activity time costing in a lot of detail and previously had extensive manual procedures, making the whole process very time consuming with a lot of double-handling. As our business is spread over a very large area, having the ability for employees to enter their own activity-based time costing in directly was very important to us. PayGlobal’s powerful award interpreter allows us to do this effectively.”
Process and Solution
Goulburn Valley Water was recommended to try PayGlobal by a Microsoft Reseller. After doing their research and narrowing their options to a shortlist of four potential providers, PayGlobal was eventually chosen.
Goulburn Valley Water found PayGlobal to be price competitive, flexible, and a product they felt would grow with them in the long term as they develop their HR strategies. “We looked at more expensive and less expensive products and found that PayGlobal stacked up well as a value proposition. Some of the more expensive products actually had less functionality than PayGlobal.” Goulburn Valley Water was very happy with what was a fairly complex installation of PayGlobal in 2003. “We did go slightly over the expected timeframe but this was because we expanded the scope of what we were doing”, says Noel Squires. ”We were originally only looking for timesheet entry and payroll and hadn’t planned on automating our timesheets, but with the Time and Attendance software we couldn’t use our old timesheets. We needed to have a start and finish time which we didn’t have with our old paper system so decided to do the whole thing at once,” he says.
“We are not very typical in that we let our employees input directly into a limited part of the PayGlobal system, rather than through a web-based browser. Allowing employees to enter their time directly into Daily View saves any double handling by administrative staff.”
Business Results and Return
After the implementation of PayGlobal, conservative estimates show the company is saving around $70,000 annually on timesheet entry alone. Time spent processing payroll has been reduced by more than 50%. Feedback from payroll staff has been very positive. Noel says the PayGlobal support desk has easily answered any day-to-day payroll queries. Now that Payroll and Time and Attendance are up and running successfully and have freed up staff from previously time-consuming processes, Goulburn Valley Water hopes to implement the HR modules more fully.
Get in touch
- Customer Call Centre Australia
- 1800 129 181
- Customer Call Centre New Zealand
- 0508 104 357
“We like the development pathway that PayGlobal is on and hope that we will continue to benefit from the company’s continual development and refining of its products.”
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