COMPANY PROFILE

Since 1914, North Carolina Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat (NCEENT) has been a leader in providing ophthalmology and otolaryngology care as well as providing medical research and training of new physicians. It is estimated that more than 1 million patients have trusted NCEENT for their care.

THE CHALLENGES

Before selecting UltiPro Workplace, NCEENT had used three different service providers over a seven-year period. Because the health services provider had experienced some costly errors, including mistakes that affected shareholder compensation and internal company relations, the organization needed an HCM solution that could deliver greater accuracy, efficiency, and reliable service.

THE SOLUTION

After seeing UltiPro’s functionality, flexible set-up, and ability to integrate with other systems, the CEO and senior managers of North Carolina Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat selected UltiPro Workplace and then completed a successful launch in January 2008. As a result, the healthcare organization has experienced improved data integrity, increased efficiencies in reporting, and considerable time savings. A solid deployment is vital to running an HR/payroll solution, according to Sinead Ingersoll, HR director for NCEENT. After four implementations in the last seven years, Ingersoll has seen how errors and miscommunications during the process can snowball into HR chaos.

“Generally, any issue that I’ve ever had with a provider has stemmed from the initial implementation being conducted poorly,” said Ingersoll. “With our previous vendor, we experienced a poor implementation that resulted in errors and discrepancies in compensation, which lead to significant internal strife. Complicating matters further, the vendor could not identify what went wrong. With Ultimate, our experience has been completely different. The deployment of UltiPro was the most seamless, structured, and thorough rollout I have ever been through. Ultimate’s checks and balances, follow-up, and attention to detail were the greatest I’ve seen.”

Since activating UltiPro, Ingersoll has seen improvements in the consistency and accuracy of payroll. After completing quarter-end reporting with UltiPro, she was very pleased with the quality and precision of the data and how easy it was to generate a range of tax and compliance reports. For example, when Ingersoll runs a report for NCEENT’s self-funded health plan, she creates it in minutes. Previously, Ingersoll had to run ten different reports and then manually cut and paste the info into one document. “UltiPro’s reporting is the best. We don’t have to wait for a payroll service bureau to run reports or have to pay extra for them," said Ingersoll. "I have control of the necessary data to meet our organizational demands.”

Ingersoll recently used UltiPro to collect and report on information after company leadership realized it needed specific employee phone numbers in the event of delays or closures due to inclement weather. Using a special field created in UltiPro, employees entered their phone numbers with self-service. Ingersoll easily extracted the phone numbers and then sent them to her IT manager, who uploaded the info to the automatic call system—without HR’s having to manually enter this data. Ingersoll also was able to quickly modify UltiPro with the help of her services representative from Ultimate Software.

“Ultimate is head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to service. When I have a question, I get a response very quickly. Because the service representative assigned to our company knows our unique needs, I don’t have to go into long explanations on why we do something in a certain way,” said Ingersoll. “Most other vendors don’t get how important it is that their service team knows their customers’ particularities and structure. Ultimate’s customer support makes my job much easier.”