Meet Jessica Neal

HR General Manager at American Cedar & Millwork

“I’d absolutely recommend BambooHR® Time Tracking. It’s a great system that does exactly what you need it to do.”

— Jessica Neal

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The Results

Before BambooHR, Jessica spent most of her time managing payroll. Now she can support managers in three different states in recruiting and employee satisfaction efforts.

BambooHR improved average employee performance by 25 to 30 percent, helping employees spend hours on productivity instead of asking about overtime.

Helping managers keep track of overtime with shifting schedules led to a 25 to 30 percent reduction in overtime, mainly in unnecessary overtime hours as clock-in/clock-out times became more accurate.

The Challenge

Geography can present a challenge to many businesses. For Jessica Neal, HR General Manager for American Cedar and Millwork, tracking employee hours across locations in three states consumed most of her time and led to inefficiencies throughout the business.

To achieve their vision of bringing their customers’ building visions to life, American Cedar and Millwork showcases high end building materials like doors, windows and cabinetry in their showrooms and pulls out the stops to provide a smooth delivery and service. Jessica’s HR tasks support the main office staff, sales reps at each of their showrooms, warehouse workers, and delivery drivers with fluctuating schedules.

This distribution of jobs can make even the simplest company communications difficult. “We have approximately 20 employees that don’t even have a company email address because it’s not necessary for their positions,” Jessica says. “They’re out driving trucks or working in our warehouses. I was asking managers to take company emails, print them out, and tack them up to the bulletin board for these employees. It was as manual as can be.”

Maintaining pay records and providing pay stubs for employees was an even greater challenge. With the need for timeliness, not even the post office could keep up. “I was putting all check stubs in their envelopes and taking them to FedEx every two weeks.”

As for measuring time, the time tracking included with Jessica’s payroll service required physical time clocks for each of their locations. “We were spending $600 per month just renting time clocks and physical badges. When one time clock got struck by a lightning surge, we didn’t have a way to fix it other than mailing out another one, leaving people without a way to clock in for two days.”

The Solution

After years of using stand-alone payroll software and simple spreadsheets to track everything HR-related, Jessica knew that she couldn’t keep up the pace as American Cedar and Millwork continued to grow. With BambooHR® and BambooHR® Time Tracking, she can now support the varying needs of all the employees in her company.

SELF-SERVICE: “If a driver is coming in at 5:00 in the morning to load a truck, he can pull up BambooHR on his phone and log in. It makes it so much easier. We were also getting a younger workforce who were asking for online access and other things that we couldn’t do previously.”

OVERTIME REPORTING: “If managers wanted overtime reports before, I had to manually go into our system and access [the report] for them. I couldn’t give them access to some things without giving them access to everything. Now I can give them access to reports for their own employees.”

SIMPLICITY: “BambooHR is an easy-to-use product. It’s intuitive, it’s easy to use for both low-tech and high-tech employees. It’s kind of dummy-proof— you can’t mess this up. I have accountants at their desks and truck drivers on the road that use it.”

IMPLEMENTATION AND CUSTOMER SERVICE: “After 25 years of HR with the same company, making a change was intimidating. But the BambooHR team provided a timeline and they were really responsive. I could update my management on where we were at with the timeline. I felt like [BambooHR was] really listening when I made suggestions. They’d say, ‘We’ll pass that along and make a change.’ I’ve never seen people do that in any other customer service aspect.”

About American Cedar & Millwork

Headquartered in Delaware with locations across the east, American Cedar & Millwork is a high-end cabinet and woodworking supplier. To help delivery drivers, warehouse workers, and office employees keep accurate hourly records, they use BambooHR Time Tracking.