Challenging Budget Decisions in Government
The City of St. John's, NL metropolitan area has a population of 101,000 as the
capital of Newfoundland and Labrador. St. John's economy has been continuously connected
both to its role as a regional/national/provincial capital and to the ocean. Today,
its continued growth is as much tied to what lies beneath the ocean – oil and gas
– as what swims in or travels across the ocean.
Figure 1:
City Hall, City of St. John's, NL, Canada
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The economy is growing quickly, and the city has been identified as having one of
the highest proportion of scientists and engineers per capita of any city under
one million population in North America. Economic forecasts suggest that the city
will continue its strong economic growth in the coming years not only in the "oceanic"
industries mentioned above, but also in tourism and new home construction as the
population continues to grow. As the city grows, so does its need for increased
staffing within government and more sophisticated HR Information Systems software
that can deal with payroll complexities.
The Challenge
Figure 1:
St. John's, NL, Canada
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Every two years, St. John’s conducts a needs analysis for their information technology
needs. The 2005-2007 strategic plan indicated that the city needed new financial
software. They selected Great Plains and hoped that their payroll vendor would be
able to give them the self upgrade they were looking for. Great Plains’, (now known
as Microsoft Dynamics GP) has a standard payroll module that is not able to handle
complex payroll calculations.
When the current payroll vendor was unable to provide an upgrade path, the city
of St. John’s went in search of an HRIS system that could provide a suite of features
that would complement Great Plains. Bonnie Arns, the HRIS manager undertook a review
of 22 software systems that could be compatible with Great Plains and then selected
three candidates that might be able to give them the full functionality they were
looking for.
“We selected StarGarden because they were the only Great Plains/Microsoft partner
that could handle the complex calculations we have to do just to get a payroll out
the door because of the variety of contracts we pay under.” Notes Neil Martin, City
Clerk. “StarGarden has a great reputation for service and upgrading which we will
need as we grow. The fact that they have employee self service and a great web-based
user interface got them in the door. Their ability to understand our integration
challenges is what got them the contract.”
St. John’s wanted to reduce the time, errors and redundant entries involved in payroll
processing and find an HR/Payroll and Scheduling solution that would accommodate
complete integration with Great Plains as well as ROE web. The finance director
wanted managers to be able to calculate job costing by dollars and by percentage,
track dollars to Scheduling and use the workflows to generate more employee and
manager self-service. These changes will result in better reporting and budgeting.
“Most importantly, we wanted to ensure we are paying accurately without a ton of
manual intervention.
We want real-time information for reporting and budgeting purposes.” Says Bonnie
Arns, head of the project implementation team. “It has been a time consuming and
frustrating exercise where we have to use spread sheets to determine calculations.
It will be a relief to finally have StarGarden to do the thinking for us. We put
in the rules, it does the calculations. We will be able to budget with the new automatic
feed from payroll and most importantly, accurately and efficiently pay employees.”
Adds Martin, “We are looking forward to being able to schedule our resources and
accurately track employee costs by role, not just by the person. StarGarden will
also be able to provide us with workflows to track recruitment, who has had training
and who hasn’t as well as statistics and reporting on employees that our old vendor
could not deliver on. My life will be a lot easier when it comes to tracking how
we are spending our resources.”
The Solution:
StarGarden 4.1 Enterprise Solution is an ‘industrial strength, web-based HR/Payroll
product designed for government. It is not your garden variety standard payroll
program. “It’s payroll on jetfuel.” Says Microsoft’s Dynamics GP partner, Tectura.
StarGarden provides the robust dependability required by demanding government payroll
and HR environments.
Rules Set the Structure
St. John’s will be able to rely on the fact that the core system maintains their
entire history of all roles, not just individuals. The table based system keeps
the rules straight about the organization and its structure, compensation and benefit
plans, accruals/balances, employees and, of course, the complex relationships between
these elements. StarGarden’s database goes further; it will effectively simulate
St. John’s actual structure and processes with start and end dates for every piece
of information.
This system design protocol provides a necessary foundation for effective reporting
and forecasting demanded by St. John’s municipal executive while at the same time
providing the accuracy required for payroll and accounting functions.
Historical and Trend Reporting
St. John’s will be able to customize over 150 standard reports designed specifically
for Canadian government reporting in StarGarden’s HR/Pay which will deliver multiple
options for selecting and sorting information.
Reports output to PDF and Excel formats. In addition, there is an embedded ad-hoc
report writer to create on-demand reports.
The StarGarden system has been designed to deliver critical government management
information as a by-product of the day to day administrative functions.
The system is event-driven, recording and managing data for each event that takes
place in the organization. As events occur, they are classified by category so they
can be viewed as a time-series for trend analysis. Trends in compensation, turnover,
employment equity, labor costs, job-related injuries and other data can be easily
accessed for executive reporting which will be vital for Bob Bishop, the Director
of Finance & City Treasurer.
Bonnie Arns was impressed with StarGarden’s management of paycodes. The need for
hundreds of pay codes is dramatically reduced by the position-based method used
by StarGarden which gives it the versatility and industrial strength needed by a
growing city like St. John’s.
The ‘Position’ and the ‘Employee’ are separate. Each has their own attributes, which
are then ‘married’ within the data and called “Employee in the Position.” The result
of this methodology is the ability to schedule and plan the right resources with
the right budgets. When employee #1 works as a welder in shop #2 – the system will
automatically pay him $X and give him certain benefits associated with this position.
When the same employee works as a Laborer in shop #1, the system will automatically
pay him $Y and give him another set of benefits as determined by the union agreement
and role responsibilities. “Having this capability will give us incredible savings
of time and decrease errors as we won’t be running and updating these calculations
in spreadsheets, paper and the payroll system.”
About StarGarden
The StarGarden Group has been supplying public sector clients with a fully integrated
Human Resource, Payroll, and Scheduling system for over 20 years. Prince William
County of Virginia rated StarGarden their best vendor for the company’s ability
to service the government effectively 24/7.
The StarGarden solution is designed to meet the needs of governments with less than
5000 employees. Governments are structured, position-based organizations. U.S. and
Canadian municipal and county governments select StarGarden because they have complex
pay and benefit issues that no other payroll program can manage. This powerful system
can be installed with little or no customization which shortens the implementation
time and reduces the cost so that functionality does not have to cost a fortune.
At StarGarden, our implementers know government, know payroll and know how to help
make the transition from legacy to employee self service painlessly. See and hear
a demo by visiting www.stargarden.com.
Contact Information
StarGarden Group
300 - 3665 Kingsway
Vancouver, Canada
V5R 5W2
voice: 604 451 0500
fax: 604 451 0578
sales: +1 (800) 809 2880