Success Stories

It's All About Logic at Liberty Casting

"It was just logical to go with a drop-in fit", said Rick Vaught, IT Manager of Liberty Casting Company. Vaught was referring to Liberty’s overlying reason for choosing the BLIS-400 Payroll and BLIS-DC Time and Attendance Modules for their new in-house payroll system.

Liberty operates five foundries across Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania producing, Gray, Ductile, High Alloy, ADI, White Iron, Stainless Steel and Aluminum castings for a number of diverse industries such as power generation, power transmission, food processing, plastic injection, machine tools, and many others.

Process and cost inefficiencies precipitated Liberty’s decision to overhaul their payroll system. At the time, Liberty was using two different software packages. In three of the five facilities, they were operating an in-house PC-based payroll package that did not include data collection. This meant someone had to manually collect the time and attendance data once a week, re-key the data into an Excel-style spreadsheet and then forward the document to the main facility in Delaware, OH, for further processing into payroll. This procedure was both time-consuming and introduced data entry errors that are typical of all manual procedures. The remaining two foundries were outsourcing payroll using the more costly ADP payroll system and ADP’s ETime product for their time and attendance solution. Once Liberty made the initial decision to overhaul the system, the next step involved reconciling the entire organization under one payroll package. This meant replacing ADP.

At first Liberty investigated the possibility of using either the existing PC-based software or the BLIS-400 Payroll module to replace ADP. From Management’s perspective, both options would satisfy the cost-saving objective for replacing ADP. However, from an IT perspective, the BLIS-400 Payroll Module scored a number of points in its favor.

Liberty was already running BLIS-400 on an iSeries/400 platform; therefore, it would make more sense to choose a solution that was compatible with existing packages and with the iSeries/400 platform. According to Vaught, "with PC-based solutions, each time you introduce another piece of software into your system you need another server. Why would anyone want to worry about a number of different servers when with the iSeries/400 you only have to manage the one piece of equipment?" Having decided to consolidate and centralize payroll from their main facility in Delaware, the BLIS-400 solution scored a second point, in Vaught’s opinion, "a PC-based solution is adequate when you have fewer than a hundred employees, but anything greater than this and the iSeries is better, it is a more robust solution." The BLIS-400 option gained another point in its favor when Liberty then turned their attention to automating their time and attendance process.

Having replaced ADP, Liberty also lost the time and attendance ETime product designed to operate in unison with ADP. After reviewing what was involved in collecting time and attendance data using the PC-based package, how well it would interface with BLIS-400 Payroll, and the cost of having to customize the software to interface to BLIS-400 Payroll, Liberty was again faced with the same conclusion – it just did not make sense. On the other hand, the BLIS-DC Time and Attendance module did.

Like BLIS-400 Payroll, the BLIS-DC Time and Attendance was a simple drop-in fit. In fact, if Liberty had not changed the clocks and swipe cards, the shop floor employees would not have even noticed – the transition was that smooth. Though, according to Vaught, there was one notable difference when they changed from the magnetic cards and clocks to the barcode equipment, "the magnetic cards and readers used by ADP got dirty faster and because of the metallic particles in the air we had a lot of problems with readability. The barcode cards, in comparison, are read more consistently and holdup better in our environment." For the shop floor supervisors the transition was just as simple. One supervisor per facility required minimal training on the BLIS-400 Time and Attendance system. Implementing the BLIS-400 Payroll and Time and Attendance modules was simple and did not require a great deal of IT resources. It took only one day per facility to bring them on-line.

Making logical decisions has given Liberty a truly compatible and centralized payroll system with real time data availability. By emulating the principles they use to deliver quality products and services to their customers, Liberty has successfully achieved the goals and objectives set for their payroll and time and attendance project - process efficiencies coupled with cost and time-savings. Do the benefits stop here, not according to Vaught, "making the decision to go with a B&L iSeries/400 instead of a PC-based solution has given us the infrastructure that we can build on, at any time, with minimal effort and cost." Looks like there may be more to come for the Liberty Casting Company.

Nutech Systems’ CLASS product has allowed B&L to design the BLIS-DC Time and Attendance as a drop-in fit for BLIS-400 Payroll.