Ultimate Software (Nasdaq: ULTI), a leading provider of human capital management (HCM) solutions in the cloud, announced today that three non-profit organizations—VersAbility Resources, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and Anderson Center for Autism—are using Ultimate’s comprehensive HCM system, UltiPro®, to manage challenging reporting requirements, create more efficient HR and payroll operations, and keep administrative costs low.
VersAbility Resources has a proud history of more than 60 years of service to people with disabilities and their families. The organization’s activities include forming partnerships with regional businesses and the federal government to create jobs. VersAbility’s complicated payroll includes employees who work in a number of states, many of whom are subject to the requirements of union contracts, government contracts, or both. The organization went live on UltiPro in August 2009.
“VersAbility’s national workforce adds complexity to our already data-intensive reporting,” said John Coffren, chief human resources officer at VersAbility. “Before UltiPro, our HR team struggled with the OSHA 300 form, manually completing the paperwork for each employee location. Now, we are able to sort by location and achieve total government compliance with the click of a button. We can finish in five minutes what used to take us 50 hours.”
As a federal government contractor affiliated with the AbilityOne program, VersAbility is required to complete voluminous reports, such as the Employee Reporting System (ERS) and the Quarterly Employment Report (QER). According to Coffren, UltiPro is able to not only populate the necessary reports almost instantly, but also to provide VersAbility management with previously inaccessible information about the organization’s employees. This level of automation has also proven critical to VersAbility’s efforts to tackle reporting for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).
“UltiPro is indispensable for helping us manage ACA compliance,” said Coffren. “With our nationwide employment programs and the multitude of employment contracts that apply to our team, we could never stay on top of benefits eligibility or to quickly identify instances of mismatching employee information like we do with UltiPro. Having one report that measures the 30-hour threshold on a 12-month period is amazing.”
The Science Museum of Minnesota has its own workforce complexities with permanent employees and temporary staff supporting dynamic programs that include a computer education center, summer camp and classes, and the building and leasing or selling of exhibits. More than one million people engage with the museum each year through personal visits, school trips, museum-produced exhibitions installed at institutions across the country, and Omnitheater films. The museum sought a new HCM solution to overcome its previous system’s module-compatibility problems, reliability issues, and limited data storage space, going live with UltiPro in January 2016.
“We must be able to respond to the special reporting requirements of each of our funding entities, including federal, state, and local government, as well as private foundations and individual donors,” said Juliette Francis, vice president of human resources for the Science Museum of Minnesota. “Our previous solution made it prohibitively expensive to keep electronic data long term, so we had to purge our data on an annual basis and rely on spreadsheets and hard copies to complete multi-year reports. We are excited to use UltiPro to house all our data electronically, and as a result, create faster reports with fewer resources that provide greater detail and insight.”
The museum’s employee recordkeeping is complicated by the way the organization scales up for certain projects. According to Francis, UltiPro will enable the museum to maintain the profiles of temporary staff in their database, saving time and money.
“Previously, we would have to recreate the employee records for the hundreds of individuals who periodically support a specific exhibit or project,” said Francis. “UltiPro can save us the costs related to onboarding and offboarding our temporary staff, as well as the expenses involved in managing our fluctuating payroll. With UltiPro, our payroll administrator can focus on strategic tasks beyond general processing.”
In addition to improved reporting, Ultimate’s non-profit customers also report increased efficiencies and cost reductions as a result of switching to UltiPro. For example, Staatsburg, New York-based Anderson Center for Autism has been able to increase efficiency of its payroll team and also bring overtime costs for the organization down with UltiPro.
Anderson Center for Autism operates a school and residential campus comprising 19 facilities, as well as more than 20 adult houses and three day-habilitation programs, called LifeLong LearningSM Centers. A long-time customer, Anderson transitioned to cloud-based UltiPro in 2012, and has since completely automated its payroll, a process that once required every employee to submit weekly paper documents to the payroll department for manual verification and entry.
According to Gregg Paulk, director of information technologies at Anderson, UltiPro has cut paperwork by 95%, and the organization’s headcount has grown 60% without any increase in the number of staff used to support payroll and administration. Furthermore, improved visibility into overtime costs has helped the organization correct staffing levels and bring overall costs down.
“Training is essential for our highly-regulated organization,” said Paulk. “UltiPro has enabled Anderson to increase the amount of time staff spends on training and certifications by 30%.”
“We take great pride in helping people who are in the business of serving the community,” said Chris Phenicie, chief sales officer, mid-market/strategic, at Ultimate. “We are pleased that VersAbility, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and Anderson Center are leveraging our tools to respond quickly to detailed information requests and to streamline their HR operations, and that these savings are translating into greater community service.”
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