How a Fortune 500 IT Services Modernized Their Time Tracking to a Single Unified Time Intelligence® Platform
The 21st-century large IT services firms are re-imaging their ecosystem with digitization. They are embedding new technologies to drive innovation and digital architectures. As a result, IT Organizations are preparing for competitive bids to win projects, reduce margins, be more operationally responsive to gain higher profitability, and remain pertinent. Today’s interlinked digital landscape is the main reason for IT services firms’ significant shift. And the same was the case with one of our clients.
One of the leading and large end-to-end IT services providers, and a Fortune 500 MNC struggled with a fragmented technology landscape. They realized that the tightly controlled and multiple legacy systems that once ran are no longer working as they should, and the shift is crucial to get ahead in this new open marketplace. This large IT enterprise needed a platform that would give them a single source of time and align seamlessly with their cloud transformation strategy.
The organization was suffering from zero flexibility as they captured time for over 100K employees using multiple, inconsistent methods, which not only delayed the process, but also harmed their customer interaction. They had over 20+ time tracking systems that were causing data silos. By capturing time on an outdated system, they also experienced:
- Bad employee experience and productivity
- Limited enterprise reporting capabilities and obscured decision-making
- Restricted global view of employee time information
- Delayed timesheet approvals which further impacted client billing and caused revenue leakages
- Difficulty in managing resources
To uncouple their multiple and legacy systems from their ERP systems, they started evaluating a centralized global time tracking platform. Shifting to a cloud-based platform was their first step towards the transformation journey as they wanted a scalable and flexible platform that could unify time tracking for consolidating multiple ERPs that they were using. In addition, consolidating their time tracking was imperative because they wanted to switch to cloud-based ERP – SAP S/4 HANA. Therefore, they wanted a system that could eliminate siloed systems and gain them access to a more automated, intelligent process to capture and process time. This would help the organization focus on its customer engagements while also driving operational costs down.
Designing and building a system from scratch that could meet all these requirements would have taken them over two years and require a large number of resources and efforts. Therefore, the organization started its search to find the right technology partner to help them achieve its goals. And their search ended with Replicon. The large IT enterprise selected Replicon as their intelligent time partner to meet all their needs for local customization and compliance across the whole organization globally. They found that Replicon’s platform is a scalable and global platform that could align their organizational goals and help them achieve:
- Single Source of Truth for Time: With Replicon, they gained a global view of employee information, real-time visibility into projects, employee time, compliance, and resources. This helped them accelerate operational excellence and bring profitability across the organization.
- Data Standardization: Implementing an integrated platform across multiple systems which met local business requirements around payroll, leave, and compliance brought consistency into the data. Using mobile time capture, employees can now submit timesheets on the go leading to a more engaged and productive workforce. Replicon has proven significant value to the organization with a friction-free time entry and an integrated landscape for tracking employee time across projects, costing, billing, leaves, and payroll.
- Flexibility with Built-in Compliance Rules: The built-in compliance rules engine automates pay calculations and ensures compliance across multiple collective bargaining agreements across every location. There is also multi-currency and multi-language support where the organization has a presence with global governance capabilities. The configurability of the platform with flexible workflows allowed the organization to accommodate all the varying local business practices related to payroll and compliance.
- Seamless Integrations: The integrated platform with plug-and-play integrations to multiple SAP environments and Workday offered speed of delivery and seamless integrations within the entire ecosystem. In addition, the new integrated landscape enabled the large IT enterprise to optimize its business processes, minimize inefficiencies and eliminate error-prone manual operations. It also automated global payroll in 80+ countries and replaced multiple homegrown systems used for payroll.
Significant Benefits
Replicon’s unified enterprise-ready time intelligence® platform empowered the IT organization to implement their forward-thinking processes and view their global employee time in a centralized manner. As a result, Replicon got them significant savings in terms of time and cost and helped them gain:
- Streamlined Billing with Accurate Project Time Data: The first thing everyone considers when it comes to project time tracking is accurate billing. Any error in billing affects the client’s trust, but it means you spend more resources on the project to redo all the work. Sending an invoice to the client that is not 100% correct also leads to under or overpaying at times.
Therefore, with Replicon, the large enterprise was able to measure how much precisely an employee is spending on a particular project. They are able to accurately estimate the project completion time and determine the anticipated time and budget of other projects in the pipeline. Business leaders and senior executives also find it easier to get real-time visibility into their employee time using the comprehensive dashboard and custom reports with better decision-making for the leadership team. The finance team is able to instantly receive the approved timesheets and quickly raise invoices. - Improved Employee Experience: Because of multiple systems, employees spent countless hours managing and resolving the data. This further created siloed databases and limited their ability to share or access the relevant information. An increase in the intensity of error-loaded data and working on different systems to track and view data led to more frustrated employees.
As compared to before, where an employee used two to three systems to track time, a single system with a modern UI became a big differentiator. The preconfigured templates, automated approval workflows resulted in a friction-free experience for employees to capture time, making it simpler to concentrate on billable tasks. This also simplified the organization’s ability to strengthen resource allocation and maximize resource utilization through accurate time tracking. As a result, the workforce is now more engaged and productive. - Increased Transparency, Lowered Operational Cost, and Better Governance: Use of multiple systems led to overlapping functionalities and an increase in costs. With a single source of truth for time for the entire organization, they were able to reduce the burden of the systems, which automatically lowered the cost. The organization also reduced audit costs by providing evidence of continuous compliance. They also gained transparency around all time data, which resulted in simplified compliance and governance concerns. Every entry and edit is now automatically documented and verified through approval workflows and validation rules. Pay rules and labor laws are readily applied across the global workforce with minimum hassle, resulting in compliance with federal, state, and local regulations.
Getting Future-Ready with Replicon
For thriving in the ecosystem of large enterprises, the cloud has established itself as a game-changer and agility is the innovative currency of business. Companies that are adopting cloud-based solutions are getting an edge over their competitors. It is allowing enterprises to run their business with flexibility, higher productivity, and lower costs.
Like partnering with Replicon enabled the path to the brand-new course that unified the large enterprises global time tracking and significantly simplified their technology infrastructure. You can also bring in the standardization to data, modernization to UX, eliminate pain points of employees, and bring in significant value to your organization. Implementation of a single platform dramatically improves the quality of data, better managing billing & profitability.
Do you want to learn more about the advantages of unifying enterprise time tracking for your IT organization?
