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Case Study: United Way and SoftTime Online

Who is United Way of the Greater Dayton Area?

United Way of the Greater Dayton Area is part of a national movement of more than 1,300 locally governed organizations. They are a non-profit organization that helps people maintain and/or improve the quality of their lives. United Way’s local roots trace back to 1913. Based on the successful community-wide campaign to raise money for relief efforts following the Great Dayton Flood, civic leaders decided to apply the same concept of federated fund raising to meet the ongoing health and human service needs of the community.

Today they continue to serve their community by working towards their mission: To meet human service needs and find long-term solutions in the Dayton region by engaging the greatest number of donors, leaders, and volunteers and partnering to advance the common good.

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The Challenge: Automation

Vicki Hahn Director, Human Resources United Way of the Greater Dayton Area
Vicki Hahn
Director, Human Resources
United Way of the Greater Dayton Area

Vicki Hahn has been with the organization for 29 years in the Human Resource Department and has seen many changes over the years. Originally, their entire attendance tracking system was a completely manual process. “I had a printed calendar page for every person. Hourly employees would submit weekly timesheets with vacation and sick pay included on it. Monthly and salaried employees would give me utilization amounts. I had to record each and every occurrence on a notebook page for each individual. It was a completely manual process,” Hahn stated.

Even outside of the manual recording process, the calculations were done by hand as well, “Every month I would have to send them a monthly tally that I calculated … we had to find a way to make this process not as time consuming.”

An HR working on it's time in attendance with SoftTime Online

The Solution

Hahn and her staff researched and interviewed several organizations before selecting SoftTime back in 2000. They have been with the same attendance software provider since.

Seeing the Difference

Hahn saw the difference as people could now use their computers to send leave requests electronically, “it just made everything easier. It also helped us make sure Supervisors approved all time taken.”

Making the Transition

United Way of the Greater Dayton Area first used the desktop solution and have since moved to the recently updated cloud-based version, SoftTime Online. Hahn noted “… everybody loves it! The new features make it even easier to use. The online version is fantastic because it has the tutorials – I didn’t have to do any training. I just shared the online information where the tutorials were and no one has even had any questions for me. It has eased up the workflow a great deal for me.”

Saving time

In addition to improving the workflow and cutting back on manual calculations; implementing the attendance software also reduced the amount of time Hahn had to spend on the phone. “It used to be people would always call and ask about how much vacation they had left, now they can sign in and look themselves.”

Flexibility

Each organization has its unique set of issues and SoftTime is built with the flexibility in mind to address varying needs. Hahn notes that this flexibility comes in handy with a staff that consists of a wide range of employees. “One of our departments works 24-7. It is a crisis center and people work very odd hours. SoftTime Online has the flexibility to schedule occurrences in different increments such as half or quarter day.”

[bctt tweet=”One of the benefits of moving to cloud-based attendance software is that it enables your office to grow and easily connect with satellite offices- @DaytonUnitedWay”]

Connecting Offices

One of the benefits of moving to cloud-based attendance software is that it enables your office to grow and easily connect with satellite offices. Hahn stated, “Even though most of our people work in our downtown Dayton office, we still do have offices in four locations. Having this internet based, those outside our home office can still access the system and that has been a huge help.”

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