Case Studies - McCorkle Nurseries Inc.

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Steve Palmer CIO

McCorkle Nurseries has been a family, owned and operated business since 1942. Although the business began as a one stop growing, landscape, and retail business, McCorkle today is one of the largest growers and providers of plants in the United States. Each year, more than 4 million plants are marketed from McCorkle Nurseries' growing operation to over 1800 customers in the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states. Stewardship of natural resources is a top priority for McCorkle. In one growing location alone, 3 to 4 million gallons of water is required per day. The majority of this water is reclaimed run-off from production areas which is re-used. The McCorkle motto is "Quality First, Service Always." All of McCorkles' 300+ employees are expected to exemplify this motto on a daily basis. One of the positive results of the McCorkle "can do" attitude and service orientation to its customers was a large contract with the Home Depot stores. And this is when some challenges arose.

The Challenge:

The biggest customers can be the most demanding, and Home Depot is no exception. McCorkle won a contract to provide plants to over 250 Home Depot stores. One of the requirements that Home Depot makes to all its vendors is that the vendors must merchandize their own products at the store locations. This meant that McCorkle had to provide personnel at every location to unload trucks, move the plants into the stores, arrange them on shelves or on the floors, etc. And to help defray this expense, McCorkle came up with the idea of outsourcing their merchandizing services to ten other Home Depot vendors. The net of all this is that, McCorkle faced a sudden ramp up of 250 to 275 employees in over 250 different locations. All of these employees were hourly employees. So, McCorkle faced problem of finding a way to accurately record hours worked for all these remotely located workers.

At that time the Home Depot contract had been awarded and all the time and attendance functions at McCorkle were manual. Workers were mostly faxing, and some were emailing their hours to the McCorkle HR department which was manually entered into their payroll system. In addition, McCorkle was unable to manage their overtime hours because by the time they received the manual hour’s inputs, it was too late to balance the workloads by redistributing workers from stores with lower workloads to stores who were overloaded. Steve quickly realized that this was an extremely inefficient way of doing business, and he immediately began searching for an automated time and attendance system.

The first thing on Steve Palmer’s mind was to find a system which was tightly integrated with the Sage Abra HR and Payroll system which had been in place for years at McCorkle. Although the systems he looked at had plenty of functionality, he could not find one that had an interface with Abra that was clean and automated.

"We looked at several of the big outsourced payroll companies as well as some Web based in-house systems. We found that Employee Based Systems had the best integration with Sage Abra" - Steve Palmer, CIO

Steve finally settled on Employee Based Systems and the EBSTime Suite for Time and Labor Management. In addition to EBSTime, McCorkle also acquired the EBSTimesheet module.

Solutions:

All the hourly workers at the 250 Home Depot locations enter their hours worked via the EBSTimesheet application. According to Steve Palmer, "The EBSTimesheet provides supervisors to see, at glance, which workers are coming up against overtime so that other workers can be deployed. This has allowed us to manage our overtime much more effectively. In addition, Employee Based Systems provided several customizations for us. One of these was enabling the EBSTimesheet module so that it allows us to track miles driven by workers, to calculate the mileage expenses, and export them to Abra in an automated fashion.” This last feature has enabled McCorkle to eliminate the issuing of a second separate check for expenses. According to Palmer, they have eliminated over 80% of the manual time sheets, so the entire process of getting time into the payroll system as well as the expense reimbursement process are more streamlined and less costly. Another big reason that Palmer chose Employee Based Systems was the architecture of the EBSTime products.

"Employee Based Systems showed us that their product was flexible enough to meet all of our needs by quickly adding customizations which were effective, timely, and which did not cause any degradation in product performance. And Employee Based Systems insures that our customizations are always moved forward into future upgrades and releases of the product.- Steve Palmer, CIO

Responsiveness:

McCorkle was under the gun to get the time and attendance application up and running as quickly as possible. Employee Based Systems completed the entire installation, implementation, and training process in 6 weeks. This included training for over 250 employees on the EBSTimesheet application.

The EBSTime Suite is now firmly embedded at McCorkle and has met all the challenges faced by Steve Palmer and McCorkle Nurseries.

This is just one case where Employee Based Systems helped a customer. You could be our next success story.

For more information, contact our sales department at: Employee Based Systems 7991 Shaffer Parkway Suite 202 Littleton, CO 80127 Phone: 303-991-3500 Fax: 303-991-3501 Website: www.ebstime.com email: