Australia [change]

Bulla Dairy Foods Makes Complex Payroll Smooth as Cream with Kronos^® Workforce Timekeeper™

Bulla Dairy Foods is an Australian-owned family company that has manufactured premium dairy products since 1910. Combining dairy skills passed on over five generations with award-winning production and technological innovation, Bulla produces market-leading cottage cheese, cream, ice cream and fruit, frozen and gourmet yoghurt products. It sells these products all over Australia and exports throughout Asia and the Pacific region.

With limited automation and a complicated series of pay rules, the company's line managers and payroll staff spent too long manually adjusting staff pay and dealing with a large number of errors. Using Kronos Workforce Timekeeper and Kronos 4500 Badge Terminals, the company has almost completely automated the process of recording and calculating staff pay. This has reduced the workload on managers and the pay office, practically eliminated errors and allowed the company to analyse broad trends and employee-specific behaviour.

Complex rules caused payroll headaches

The technology of dairy production has advanced a great deal since Thomas Sloan founded Bulla Dairy Foods in 1910, when milk was pasteurised by standing open cream cans in wood-fired coppers. In recent years, Bulla has been recognised across the Australian dairy industry and by customers throughout the Asia-Pacific region for its quality and innovation.

By early 2005, it was apparent an innovative approach was also required to address the way Bulla handled time and attendance for 450 staff across three locations. Although the company had an automated time-clock system, it could not provide information about staff attendance in real time.

"We had a time and attendance system running on a standalone PC that aggregated the hours from the time clocks, but only the payroll staff could access it and it only gave us the data from the previous day," said Lee Allan, Human Resources Systems Coordinator, Bulla Dairy Foods. "At the end of the week, managers would mark up changes to employee hours on paper printouts and we would manually enter these into the payroll system."

The inability to access real-time data made it difficult to make informed decisions about staff performance.

The company operates under a complicated enterprise bargaining agreement, which specifies different rates for the late-night shift, weekends, public holidays and has exceptions for staff, less than a 10-hour break between shifts and casuals working more than 25 hours per pay period.

"Even though the hours were measured automatically, there were a lot of exceptions that needed to be entered manually," said Allen. "Wherever there is manual data entry, there is the chance for errors. Staff used to get very unhappy if they weren’t paid what they were entitled to."

Bulla started to look for a new time and attendance system that would allow it to reduce the inefficiency of these manual payroll processes, provide real-time data on staff hours and attendance and promptly identify workforce issues so they could be resolved proactively.

Kronos Workforce Timekeeper rises to the top

After evaluating a number of options, Bulla selected Kronos Workforce Timekeeper, a powerful web-based application that automates the error-prone time and attendance process and allows companies to accurately apply complex pay policies.

"We decided to go with Kronos because it was a top-tier product that we knew would provide the best value for money," said Allan.

Bulla implemented the Kronos package in three stages: first a pilot deployment at its smallest site, with only 30 employees, then its two larger locations. By July 2006, the system was live across the entire company.

"We did a lot of work mapping out all the pay rules and ran the two systems in parallel for a while," said Allan. "We also provided a lot of training, explaining to people how to use the system and what they would get out of it. That helped us make sure staff had confidence in the new system before we switched over."

Bulla replaced its existing time clocks with Kronos 4500 Badge Terminals, which staff use whenever they start or finish work. Line managers can access live data to make sure rostered staff have arrived at work. At the end of each shift, managers can approve staff hours or correct any discrepancies. Bulla also created its own Genies – customised reports – to aggregate information in a format useful for managers.

"We built a Genie for each line manager called ‘my team information' that let them see the status of everyone on their team – full time, part time and casual – and their contact details in a single view," said Allan.

Time savings for managers and payroll staff

By automating the processes around calculating pay and approving overtime, Bulla has reduced the amount of time managers spend on pay issues by 83 per cent.

"Supervisors used to spend half an hour a day managing their employees' pay issues," said Allan. "Since we introduced Kronos Workforce Timekeeper, this has been reduced to five minutes a day; just checking exceptions, monitoring excessive hours and lost time. "Some of the managers were hesitant at first because they thought it would increase their workloads, but now they love the amount of time it saves them and appreciate the increased access to information."

The company has also automated the process of calculating and applying for annual leave and supervisors have access to employees' current leave balances, enabling them to make informed decisions. In total, the pay office has reduced its workload by 75 per cent, now taking half a day each week to process payroll instead of two days or more.

"We used to have to check every individual's pay packet manually and it would take us until Wednesday morning," said Allan. "Now we're finished by Monday afternoon and that includes distributing weekly performance and wages reports to all areas of the business."

Easily identifying workforce trends

With real-time reporting tools, Bulla can identify workforce trends and issues such as habitual late arrivals, extended meal breaks and early departures.

"It wasn't something we set out to do originally, but the line managers asked us to start analysing which employees weren’t working as productively as they could," said Allan.

"Now we can provide a calendar view for an individual employee that accurately shows all the hours they worked. If you're having a performance management conversation with someone, you can show them graphically exactly where the problems are."

The Kronos time and attendance system also allows Bulla management to calculate total costs for weekends, public holidays or special projects.

"We have generated special pay codes for weekends and public holidays, so we know exactly how much extra it costs us to manufacture over the weekend," said Allan. "If we had a big order from a customer, we could track increased cost just for that particular period."

Automated pay rules mean fewer errors

Kronos worked with Allan and the Bulla payroll team to configure the pay rules for staff under the enterprise bargaining agreement. These calculations are now automatic, reducing the potential for payroll errors.

"Kronos really helped us by setting the rules up, but they also trained me so I can make changes myself from now on," said Allan. "We used to have an error rate of up to 30 per cent but now we might only have two queries per pay run for 450 people."

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