Bay Ltd., with offices and operations throughout the U.S., Latin America, Canada, and other International locations,is a full-service multi-discipline construction, fabrication, and maintenance contractor. The company provides services to industries involved in refining, chemical and petrochemical manufacturing, gas processing and transmission, offshore exploration and production, power generation, and refined products storage and transmission. Bay is also involved with infrastructure services, such as building roads, highways, bridges, and marine facilities for local, state, and federal governments, as well as private industry. For over 60 years, Bay’s professionals have pooled their diversetalents to deliver solutions for their business partners’ most challenging construction projects.Several years ago, Bay Ltd.’s management and IT/IS teams decided to make transactional processing more strategic, less labor-intensive and less paperwork-centric. As part of this initiative, the organization selected Viewpoint for Content Management (VCM), the leading provider of enterprise content management (ECM) solutions to the construction industry. To take full advantage of the time and cost savings VCM can facilitate, the Bay Ltd. team realized that they would need to overcome the limitations of paper forms, which required time-consuming, error-prone manual processing.
After a thorough market evaluation, they selected Formatta online forms and workflow suite. Formatta enables users to complete online forms, add attachments, send documents via an automated workflow and automatically update ECM and business systems with accurate data.
“The ability of Formatta to seamlessly integrate with our ECM and ERP systems was key, we saw that it had the potential to transform any process thatinvolved forms and workflow.” Crissy Hinojosa, Director of Business Intelligence at Bay Ltd.
Termination Processing – From Weeks to Minutes
Bay Ltd. decided to first roll out Formatta for termination processing in the human resources (HR) department. Previously, this involved extracting information from the payroll, HR and accounting modules of the Computer Guidance (CGC) ERP system, applying this to paper forms and sending certain parts of a multi-page forms packet to the employee and staff members in multiple departments for review and authorization. The paperwork then came back to the HR department for input into the ERP system.
Now, Formatta pulls information from the various CGC modules – including benefits, payroll and employment history benefits – and automatically applies this to an online forms packet. The appropriate pages are then electronically routed to the appropriate parties, who apply secure digital signatures and then send the documents on through using automated workflow.
“Formatta has enabled us to take control of each step of the employee termination process, and to collect accurate, standardized data every time,” Hinojosa said. “If we re-hire someone, we can now also see exactly where they were upon termination.”
Once the appropriate approval has been obtained, Formatta triggers the CGC system to turn off the employee’s benefits, payroll and other functions, rather than this being completed manually. Replacing paper forms with Formatta online forms and workflow is saving time for the HR staff and approvers in other areas.
“Employee termination used to take weeks because of the high volume of employee turnover in the construction industry, but now it takes hours or even minutes – it’s just five clicks and we’re done,” Hinojosa said. “This used to be a slow, paper-heavy process with documents travelling between departments, but now it’s paperless, fast and electronic.”
Once forms are completed, they are integrated seamlessly into the CDM system for secure electronic archiving. This enables authorized staff members to retrieve forms instantly at a later date. “The tight integration between Formatta and our ECM system saves a lot of time, as we previously scanned and indexed every form,” Hinojosa said. “It also gives us a way to permanently store accurate data that is easily retrievable for auditing, and enables us to show who took action with forms, when, and what they did.”
Transforming New Employee Onboarding
Now that the success of Formatta is evident, Hinojosa and her colleagues plan to expand its use to other processes. Bay Ltd. is already using the solution to speed processing of request forms for help desk tickets, cell phones, computer equipment and company credit cards, and will next roll Formatta out to new hire onboarding.
Currently, a new employee completes tax and benefits forms, a W-4, and other onboarding paperwork manually, applies a traditional ink signature and submits to HR for processing. This involves completing redundant information (such as name, address and contact details) on multiple forms, and forms can be incorrectly filled in or left partially incomplete, making more work for the HR team.
To save time and effort, Bay Ltd. will set up a dual monitor system and a personnel manager will sit with the employee as they complete the form using Formatta. The onboarding forms packet will be displayed on the employee’s monitor, and Formatta will intelligently pre-populate demographics information by pulling it from the CGC system, saving time for the employee. Upon completing the packet, the employee will apply a digital signature. The forms will then be automatically routed to approvers and will then automatically update the HR module. Seamless integration between Formatta and CGC will trigger the start of payroll, benefits and deductions for this employee.
“We’re confident that Formatta will greatly improve our new hire onboarding processes by increasing the quality of data, speeding forms completion and triggering actions in our CGC system,” Hinojosa said.
Ease of Use and Administration
When Bay Ltd. selected Formatta, ease of use was one of the top factors, but a demo can only ever tell part of the story. Now that the organization has used the solution, the IT/IS team is seeing the full impact of the user-friendly Formatta interface.
“We’ve rolled out our electronic forms solution with very little instruction – for our employees it’s as simple as ordering something online,” Hinojosa said. “We’ve been taught how to use and administer the system so we’ve rarely needed to contact support. The training documents were very helpful.”
In addition to benefiting the HR team at Bay Ltd., the Formatta suite has had a significant impact on supervisors’ daily work.
“With Formatta, managers are focusing on being managers, instead of on processing paper and entering data,” Hinojosa said. “Formatta has also improved efficiency. We now have a single source for data, and we know it’s high quality, accurate data.”
