North Bend Medical Center

Enjoys Seamless HR and Payroll Information Flow With Sage 300 ERP

North Bend Medical Center (NBMC) is a medical cooperative based in Coos Bay, Oregon, with four clinic locations, 43 physicians, and over 300 employees. NBMC offers a wide variety of specializations, including acupuncture, hematology, oncology, pediatrics, obstetrics, and general surgery, among others.

For many years, the company endured the limitations of a manual, spreadsheet-based system in its attempt to track ever-changing employee HR- and payroll-related data. Management sought a long-term solution and determined that Sage 300 ERP* would provide seamless information flow between their HR and Payroll modules. San Diego-based EQUation Technologies provided expert implementation of the solution, leading NBMC to enjoy tremendous increases in efficiency and accuracy in tracking all HR and payroll activity, plus greatly enhanced ability to generate reports of any type instantly and accurately.

“I’ll Get Back to You on That . . .”
For years, NBMC’s bookkeeper, Cheryl Hodkinson, had attempted to track all the HR and payroll data for the company’s 300 employees with a manual spreadsheet system. With no way to tie HR and payroll data together, Hodkinson struggled mightily to stay up with a vast array of ever-changing employee information.
“I would have to print up massive reports with all of the information on a particular employee, not the specific data I wanted,” explained Hodkinson. “We had to manually input the required data from the printed report to an Excel ® spreadsheet that was easy for managers to read. This process increased the odds for input errors and slowed down our ability to process requests. When management would ask, ‘How many sick days does employee X have left?’ or if an employee wanted to know, ‘How much have I contributed to my 401(k) plan?’ the response usually was, ‘I’ll have to find out and get back to you.’ This was not satisfactory, and we urgently needed a better system so that we could process these requests in a timely fashion.”

Challenge
NBMC struggled to track its HR and payroll data with a manual spreadsheet system, making it difficult to process requests in a timely fashion.

Solution
Sage 300 Premium ERP delivers a comprehensive business management and HR solution that helps NBMC effectively manage employee data.

Results
Sage 300 ERP provides NBMC with dramatic time-savings and much faster processing of requests for employee information.

Say Yes to Information Requests and No to Rekeying of Data With Sage 300 ERP
Since NBMC already had the Sage 300 Premium ERP General Ledger, Accounts Payable, and Accounts Receivables modules, management decided to add the U.S. Payroll module and its EFT Direct Payroll add-in program, which provided tight integration with the system’s General Ledger.

Senior consultant Erica Burles of Sage partner EQUation Technologies performed a flawless implementation of the new system in only three days, and the results were instantaneous. All of NBMC’s HR data automatically updated the Sage 300 ERP Payroll module with all the applicable payroll data. According to Burles, “Sage 300 ERP has a very intuitive built-in Import Wizard that makes it a breeze to import practically any HR- related data you need. Also, [it] automatically provides reminders for other data such as employee birthdays, employee benefits information, assorted payroll and I-9 notifications, performance review, and vacation accrual.”

With Sage 300 ERP, creation of user-defined reports has never been easier. The user simply queries the system for the desired report and immediately prints it out. Also, the multilevel security features are very important to NBMC due to the confidential nature of much of the employee information. Hodkinson can set up the security features so that managers have specified limits as to what they can see about their staff. Read-only access can be set in areas where the employee record shouldn’t be changed.

“We have finally come into the twenty-first century with the addition of Sage 300 ERP,” said Hodkinson. “Now, when a manager calls me with a request, I say, ‘I’ll have that for you momentarily.’ And when I make changes, the applicable fields for that employee are automatically updated in Sage 300 ERP Payroll. This saves me countless hours of work since I never have to rekey data. It feels great that I can deliver a much higher level of service to all of my colleagues and that everyone receives their benefits exactly when they are supposed to.”