Lipari Foods

Workforce Central^® suite helps regional food distributor automate its administrative processes and reduce costs

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Lipari Foods has come a long way since its founder, Jim Lipari, began selling homemade barbecue sauce to Detroit-area grocers from the back of his Ford station wagon in the 1950s. Over the past two decades, Lipari Foods — now operating from a 270,000-square-foot distribution facility north of Detroit in Warren, Mich. — has grown tremendously. Expansions have included adding to its product line, acquiring three distribution companies, and forging partnerships with several wholesale warehouses.

Now run by the founder’s son, Thom Lipari, the company currently distributes deli and bakery items, packaging, confections, and snacks to grocery stores across a region comprising Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and parts of other surrounding states. Lipari employs 420 people, including 130 warehouse employees as well as 140 delivery drivers who operate from 15 regional “drop points,” where product is brought from the main warehouse and transferred to smaller trucks used to deliver customer orders.

During the mid-1990s, the company had expanded to the point where it needed to install automated systems to process payroll, track time and attendance, and administer benefits for its growing number of employees. In 1994, Lipari purchased a DOS-based payroll application, which was interfaced to a timekeeping system purchased a year later. Then, in 1997, the company started managing employee benefits and accruals on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for its weekly payroll calculations.

“This collection of systems worked well for us for the first five or six years,” recalls Brian Zilo, Lipari’s HR manager, “but as our business continued to grow our needs changed.” Specifically, the company’s administrative department encountered problems with its old timekeeping system, including the inability to make changes to employee information. It was also difficult to access information “because the report-writing application was very hard to use,” Zilo says.

Capturing time, empowering managers

To remedy these issues, Lipari decided to go with the Workforce Central^® suite to streamline payroll, timekeeping, and HR administration. “One of the critical components for us when we were looking to improve our processes was, we didn’t want to have independent systems that couldn’t talk to each other or that needed complex links to communicate,” says Zilo. He adds that the Kronos solution was appealing because it is an intuitive web-based system that uses a single database: “We found that in terms of the functionality and cost, the Kronos solution was the best fit for us.”

Automating the process of capturing and managing employee time and attendance information by using Workforce Timekeeper^® made payroll administration much easier. Approximately 130 warehouse employees submit time entries using a Kronos data collection terminal, and another 50 employees submit their time entries electronically using desktop PCs. All data is captured and accessed in one central location, Workforce Timekeeper.

Zilo says Lipari’s managers have increased their productivity now that they use the system to approve timecards for the weekly payroll. “Prior to Workforce Timekeeper, we’d make sure punches were collected by noon every Monday. Then we’d have an employee print timesheets for managers, and they’d have to check every punch, making sure employees weren’t taking long breaks or punching in early. Then managers brought us the corrected and approved timesheets before payroll could be processed,” he explains. “It was an incredibly inefficient process.”

All those manual processes have been eliminated, and Lipari’s managers now use the web-based system to approve electronic timecards at their convenience. Now approving electronic timecards online is a 15-minute process for them, says Zilo. In addition, Lipari’s managers make notes on electronic timecards to explain variances about specific punches, and they can view information related to timekeeping and attendance trends. He adds that employees appreciate that managers can easily retrieve information about their worked hours, benefit changes, and time-off requests. Employees also like that their paychecks display detailed information about their deductions and accruals.

Tracking a mobile workforce

One of the biggest advantages achieved with the Workforce Central suite was automating the capture of time entries from Lipari’s 140 delivery drivers, approximately 80 of whom never report to Lipari’s main distribution facility. To capture time from this remote workforce, Lipari’s drivers used to call into a voice mailbox to submit their time entries. “And if that wasn’t the honor system, I don’t know what is,” he quips. For several years, an administrative staffer had to check the voice mail twice a day and manually record these time entries, which were then entered into the old timekeeping system.

Now Lipari drivers use a MobileCast phone with GPS-tracking technology that automatically captures and transmits time-entry data to Workforce Timekeeper through Kronos’ Workforce Connect integration tool. Each night Lipari’s transportation department uploads drivers’ routes to their respective phones; when drivers log onto their phones to get that day’s routes and when they log off, they are making their in and out punches. The system even adjusts entries for different time zones.

Based on its current productivity savings, Zilo estimates that moving from a manual to an automated system saved Lipari approximately five hours in administrative staff time each day. “And even more important, we’re capturing accurate data, and our transportation department uses this timely information to create driver routes and manage compliance with Department of Transportation regulations,” he says.

Workforce Timekeeper also streamlines the process of handling time-off requests for remote delivery drivers. “Before, this process was a nightmare,” he recalls. “There were many steps, many people involved, and many opportunities for errors. Now the requests come directly to our office, we put them into Workforce Timekeeper right away, and we’re able to generate reports for managers in the field. Some even want daily reports so they can plan for the coverage they’ll need.”

Funneling data from several sources

Lipari also faced many challenges with its payroll calculations and processes. As a result, the company implemented Workforce Payroll to calculate weekly commissions for approximately 200 salespeople and delivery drivers. The system is also used to determine the volume-based incentive pay for warehouse workers, who get a combination of a flat daily pay rate along with a certain amount for each case of product that is selected. The latter rate drops based on the number of inaccurately picked cases.

Without Workforce Payroll, a complex pay policy like this would have been nearly impossible to manage accurately. Previously the payroll department compiled this information to perform calculations in Microsoft Excel. But now operations software uploads this data to Workforce Payroll, which combines data captured by Workforce Timekeeper for payroll, a process that has been reduced from 1.5 days to half a day using the Kronos solution. Payroll is also more accurate now, which has increased employee satisfaction by reducing paycheck errors. Zilo says that since using Workforce Payroll, the firm has reduced payroll mistakes from an average of three weekly to about one a month.

Finally, Workforce Central also helps Lipari simplify its compliance-related record keeping and reporting. Zilo says the system also reduces the company’s tax burden by allowing the firm to accurately report on employee gross earnings and take full advantage of the deductions for Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and 401(k) deferrals. The streamlined process is especially helpful, as the company has to comply with labor and tax laws for nine states.

“We can’t believe how long we were doing things inefficiently in the past,” he says. “Now we have a clear picture of what the system is doing and how things are supposed to be done.”