The Bordine Nursery, headquartered in Rochester Hills, MI, is one of the largest family-owned plant nurseries in the state. Starting as a roadside stand in 1939, the nursery has grown to include five new permanent locations and several seasonal locations. The business keeps approximately 100 year-round staff members, adding approximately 600 temporary employees during their peak season during the warmer months of the year.
Due to the seasonal nature of their many employees, Bordine’s found that their manual, unconnected systems for managing time and attendance, payroll and HR were unsustainable as the company continued to grow.
Mounting Process Challenges
Their greatest workforce management struggles were process redundancies and inefficiencies across time and attendance, employee management and payroll processing.
Payroll Efficiency & Accuracy
Their process for time card management was incredibly centralized, with only one person in their company able to access time card information. The employee was responsible for individually printing, faxing or emailing the appropriate time cards to management at various locations, which could be incredibly time consuming during peak growing season.
Because employees move between production and retail, they struggled to manage different labor code transfers and associated rate changes. In conjunction with their pen-and-paper method of making time card edits, employee paycheck accuracy became an increasing pain-point.
Workforce Management Challenges
Despite keeping a weathered eye on their overtime, their old system limited their ability to make informed scheduling decisions to prevent excess overtime. They also struggled to manage time-off and PTO requests, especially last-minute requests. With several layers of approvers and no cohesion between management systems, managing these requests became time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Because of the seasonal nature of their work, their staff numbers fluctuate depending on season and company needs. With limited integration between their payroll, HR and time and attendance systems, they constantly dealt with employee data entry redundancies, needing to re-input the same employee data across their management platforms.
New System Needs
Bodine’s entered their search for a new system with a specific list of desired capabilities. Foremost, the new system needed to integrate with their existing HR and payroll systems, providing two-way communication between all systems. They also wanted real-time access to employee time card information to help them better manage overtime costs, as well as a system that could streamline their seasonal fluctuations in staff numbers. Lastly, the new system needed to support their efforts to decentralize attendance management, divvying up workforce management responsibilities more evenly across the company’s managers and supervisors.
The Right Solution for Them
After doing their research, Bodine’s decided to partner with Advanced Time to integrate Attendance on Demand™, a cloud-based time and attendance solution that would allow them to meet the business’s growing workforce management needs.
Their new system requires no additional software or technical infrastructure investment on their end. Their monthly subscription provides the flexibility they need to manage their fluctuating seasonal workforce, meeting their integration requirements and providing the workforce management support that their business needs.
A System That Grows With Them
Since partnering with Advanced Time and integrating Attendance on Demand™, Bodine’s has achieved dramatic improvements in timekeeping, payroll and workforce management.
With their new overtime analytics, they were able to reduce employee overtime by 40% and eliminate redundant employee information entry across their payroll, HR, and time and attendance systems. They decentralized employee time keeping, granting supervisors and department managers the responsibility of managing employee time-off requests. Their new system capabilities allowed them to streamline the once-lengthy attendance tracking and payroll process to less than an hour.
In addition to all of this, they’ve come to rely upon the incredible customer service that we offer to each of our clients. Through their partnership with Advanced Time and their use of Attendance on Demand™, Bordine’s staff are better able to focus on growing and managing their business.
