Purdue University is a world-renowned, public research university with a highly complex workforce. More than 15,000 benefit eligible employees with different job levels, schedules, and benefits packages, work across three campuses: Purdue Northwest, Purdue Fort Wayne, and Purdue West Lafayette.
Kristina Lane is the overall Leaves Manager for every Purdue campus. She manages a team of leave administrators at the West Lafayette campus while Colleen Robison, Director of Benefits and Wellness for the Purdue Northwest campus, and Amy Jagger, Director of Benefits and Wellness at the Purdue Fort Wayne campus, manage the team for each of the regional campuses.
For many years, the Purdue team has relied on internal spreadsheets, a database, and an antiquated system workbench to manage and track their entire leave process from intake to return to work.
As leave requests rose in volume and complexity, the University started looking for ways to modernize their leave program. Colleen Robison was a member of a committee that was formed to look at options. After extensive review, they ultimately decided AbsenceSoft was the best choice for their workforce.
Today, each leave team on each campus all use AbsenceSoft to manage leaves across the university system.
Since making the switch to AbsenceSoft, Robison shares that her team has saved an immense amount of time on leave management tasks. Before AbsenceSoft, the case intake specialist on Robison’s team would have to manually load the database, prepare a hard copy packet, and place it in US mail for every single request. With AbsenceSoft, the data is preloaded, and the packet is generated in seconds.
“Our intake specialist estimated this morning that she saves between one and two hours per case,” said Robison.
To stay compliant before using AbsenceSoft, another member on Robison’s team felt “married” to her checklist, painstakingly reviewing it for every case to make sure she did not miss any steps in the process. Today, she has an automatically generated to-do list generated from a predetermined workflow, customized for their leave program. She estimates that with AbsenceSoft she has reduced her time that she spends by about 35 percent.
Robison’s team members are not the only ones who can do their jobs far more efficiently with AbsenceSoft. Robison herself has saved between five and six hours every month by using Insights, AbsenceSoft’s reporting system.
“Before Insights, I would have to run multiple reports out of our system and then sort and filter to get the data I needed. When I ran my reports before, I would spend about four to six hours trying to get the data so that I can prepare my monthly metrics. With Insights, it takes me about 15 minutes to pull the data that I need for my metrics,” said Robison.
Insights has also allowed Robison to strategically distribute her team’s workload, helping her team work more efficiently, keeping individual team members from getting overwhelmed.
“The person on my team that does intake uses a report that I created for her that sorts cases by case manager, employee type and case schedule. She uses that report to determine how she assigns new cases that come in. She takes the report and looks at the number of cases that people have and what type of leave the case is. She uses that information to determine who to assign the next case to,” said Robison.
Kristina Lane shares the same positive outcomes from implementing AbsenceSoft for all three Purdue campuses.
“While each campus handles their leaves independently, AbsenceSoft allows all of us to be consistent in administering the programs and to pull more sophisticated reporting that helps us to make decisions on behalf of the Purdue workforce,” said Lane.
By modernizing the leave processes, the Purdue team has streamlined their daily work and improved communication efforts to employees, supervisors and others involved in leave management. The team can also respond to requests and inquiries in a timelier manner.
“From a manager viewpoint, the reporting is amazing! From a case manager standpoint, the workflows that populate the to-dos are very slick. On behalf of the entire university, from a compliance standpoint, having what policies that are applicable given the kind of case that we’re working on is really important especially for our main campus because there are so many people from all over the country that work remote,” said Robison.
To learn how AbsenceSoft can help you streamline and automate your leave program, schedule a demo today.