Case Study: Haas Automation
SpinifexIT Helps Haas Automation Save 52 Days a Year in Productivity
ABOUT HAAS AUTOMATION
Haas Automation is the largest machine tool builder in the western world, manufacturing a complete line of CNC vertical machining centers, horizontal machining centers, CNC lathes, and rotary products.
It was founded in 1983 to manufacture economical and reliable machine tools. The company entered the machine tool industry with the first-ever, fully automatic, programmable collet indexer – a device used to position parts for machining with very high accuracy. The patented Haas 5C collet indexer was a huge success, and over the next four years, the company expanded its product line to include a wide selection of fully programmable rotary tables, rotary indexers, and machine tool accessories.
SpinifexIT was approached by Haas Automation to find the best fitting solutions to address their SAP Payroll reporting and report building requirements.
Solve your HR Reporting Puzzles
Using the US Tax Reporter reconciliation functionality in SpinifexIT Easy Reporter, the payroll department at Haas Automation has shaved eight hours per week off a single core business process.
Like most organizations with large payrolls, tax reconciliation and balancing the weekly payroll runs is one of the most critical and time consuming tasks in the payroll department.
SpinifexIT’s Easy Reporter has provided Haas Automation with the ability to produce deep tax reporter reconciliation reports directly from SAP Payroll On-premise. The Easy Reporter solution allows users to work exclusively within SAP instead of having to export to Microsoft Excel for further manipulation, increasing compliance and auditability and producing significant time savings.
Easy Reporter resides within SAP Payroll’s interface and doesn’t require any additional hardware or software to run. Installation takes less than a day and once installed, the solution ensures that the payroll results, Tax Reporter calculations and third-party postings are all in alignment. Any differences can be quickly identified so that the employees in question can be reprocessed as necessary.
It is considered best practice to use Easy Reporter to balance these results at least monthly to help prevent the year-end backlog.
Within the payroll department, a key role is to balance the weekly payroll. Prior to the implementation of Easy Reporter, it took, on average, ten hours to complete the process.
The employee responsible for this role had to become a spreadsheet expert instead of focusing on the real needs of the payroll and finance groups. A custom spreadsheet using complex lookups and pivot tables was manually created to review issues.
Concerns around the previous process included:
- Inflexibility, since it was not simple to add new data elements.
- Manual labour intensive, which increased risk of errors.
- Spreadsheets are often changed manually
- Slow, taking 10 hours over two days.
- Often inaccurate
Following implementation of Easy Reporter, the process now takes just two hours, with the Haas payroll department obtaining accurate results and quickly identifying any balance issues.
The process is now:
Faster: It takes 80% less time to complete.
Restartable: When upstream changes require a restart, it is no longer a threat to month/quarter/year-end closing.
Flexible: Easy Reporter allows new data elements to be added without the need for cumbersome transports.
Accurate: Any errors previously resulting from custom programs and manual involvement have disappeared.
Automated: It’s a repeatable process and report output shows variances without any manual involvement needed.
In addition, Easy Reporter helped identify an undetected error in a previous custom report step. The flexibility and speed offered by Easy Reporter allows new requirements to be met quickly and accurately, giving the finance and payroll teams more flexibility in their balancing and problem solving tasks.
SUMMARY OF RESULTS
Haas Automation’s payroll department has achieved exceptional benefits by using Easy Reporter. These benefits include: