How to Ditch Construction HR Pitfalls

Rummel Construction Inc. has been a long-time user of Viewpoint’s Vista ERP software and was an early adopter of Viewpoint’s HR Management solution to manage its construction HR processes. Rummel’s information systems specialist, Andy Gagliardi, recently spoke with Viewpoint about how digitization has helped improve HR and payroll workflows throughout the company. Here's a segment of that discussion:

Gagliardi: Rummel performs in many facets of heavy civil construction with our markets ranging from aviation, landfill, public works, mining, residential, commercial, energy, flood control, parks and recreation — the list goes on. The majority of what we do is centered around our self-performing expertise in earthwork. The company got its start in residential, but the economic downturn (mid-2000s) forced us to diversify in order to maintain our business. We currently have more than 650 employees that we assign to our projects with the ability to adjust depending on the request of our clients and specific jobs needs.

Gagliardi: Two of our biggest issues were employees not being able to see their pay stubs and our internal process for requesting time off was all manual. Time off requests were all done via emails and stored in an Excel spreadsheet. This process wasn’t conducive to get out to supervision to let them know, “hey, this person is going to be off,” so that they can plan accordingly.

Another thing we liked when we saw HR Management was the idea of putting the power back in the hands of the employee in terms of updating their personal information. Our payroll folks were constantly being inundated with emails and phone calls to change their W2s and A4s, or address and phone number changes, it was a nightmare.

Another pain point was with our HR staff, which is essentially two employees. They were trying to handle all of the regular tasks while trying to onboard new employees and projects. Without (Viewpoint HR Management), the process as a whole was very cumbersome — dealing with paper forms, ensuring they’re properly filled out, confirming you have all the forms back, etc. Then taking that information and manually regurgitating it back into Vista to create the employee records was monotonous. HR was really bogged down with these processes and the backlog of trying to get employees onboarded. We can mass hire for a new project and that could mean 20 people or more in two days. That’s a lot of paperwork to try and sift through, type data in from, scan in documents and let the right people know that there are new employees starting.

Gagliardi: It’s been huge. Prior to the employee portal, we’d give new employees a packet of forms to fill out. When you’re trying to scan these over to make sure you’ve got everything you need, there’s almost always an area the employee skipped over or didn’t have the information, and that’s information we need.

With the portal now, onboarding is so much easier because the employee only has to fill out their name once and it auto populates onto all of these other forms, and automated workflows ensure we’re getting all of the right information. New employees are not filling out their names or information 12 times on 12 different pieces of paper. This is where numbers can get transposed or a key area is missed. It took these errors out of the process and saved a huge amount of time — for me as well — trying to compare and contrast what went wrong when we got an error message. Everything is digital now and I can pull their digital copy of their application and see exactly what was put on there.

Gagliardi: It’s an extremely helpful tool. There are times where you quickly need information, like when you’re buying a house or car and need quick access to paystubs. If they didn’t want to or couldn’t talk to HR, they’d have to go into our email and find that weekly notification and pull together that information. HR Management puts all of your information in one place, with one login. You can download multiple items at once. With this, easier onboarding, easier time entry and time-off processes and more, it’s a morale booster for our workforce. There is a lot less blame cast on departments or individuals when information wasn’t available or mistakes with time or pay were made due to erroneous information and manual processes.