Case Study – USA – Government - City of Peoria, Arizona

Timesheet Xpress is feature rich and excellent value. It has enabled the City of Peoria to recover over $1M (US Dollars) annually of operating budget that can now be used for essential services.” - Edward Striffler, Design & Construction Manager; City of Peoria Engineering Department

About City of Peoria, Arizona, USA...

The City of Peoria is a municipality of approx. 150,000 residents with a ten year capital improvement program (construction program) approaching $1B dollars. During the period of 2006 – 2007 the workload of the Public Works Department became overwhelming ultimately driving the need for additional internal staffing resources. Edward Striffler, a licensed Architect and Construction Manager, first deployed Timesheet Xpress while employed by the City of Peoria Public Works Department. The Department’s responsibility is the Design and Construction of Public Building Infrastructures (i.e. office buildings, Libraries, Police and Fire Stations, recreation centers, theaters etc.)

Issues before Timesheet Xpress...

During the period of 2006 – 2007 many of the staff in the Public Works Department where left with no choice but to work many hours of overtime in order to fulfil the work load requirement. This situation lead to a need for time tracking in order to accurately measure the true cost and time spent on various projects so that a case could be made for additional staffing. At this time the reporting structures could be considered fairly basic and difficult to aggregate across more than 100 ongoing projects. Regardless of the solution to be implemented, a pre-requisite was to ensure that it was fully embraced by all staff to ensure that time reporting was completed accurately and in a standardized fashion.

Based on the basic requirements of simple, good reporting, with Outlook import capabilities; Edward set about looking for a solution and found Timesheet Xpress. Whilst looking for solutions, The City of Peoria also began to consider the concept of recouping project management costs. The goal was to enable a transfer of monies from the capital project funding sources (i.e. voter approved bond proceeds, development impact fees, or grant funds) to the City’s operating General fund from which salaries were paid. This had the effect of assigning the real costs of managing a project with internal staff to the actual project budget and freed up General Fund dollars to support essential services.

“Timesheet Xpress easily enables the recapture of that hour for chargebacks purposes since now everyone is preparing a timesheet and doing so more accurately. The reporting capabilities are the huge timesaver. ” - Edward Striffler, Design & Construction Manager; City of Peoria Engineering Department

After implementing Timesheet Xpress...

Successfully using Timesheet Xpress for a short period of time, Edward became aware of the need to track project costs and noticed that as an integrated feature of Timesheet Xpress, if they added employee cost (rate), the software would calculate the billing (or chargebacks) dollar amounts.

Quarterly, the Public Works Department needed to report to the Budget Office the amount of time and money spent on projects. Reports in Timesheet Xpress could be generated in minutes, in contrast to the tallying of spreadsheets still in use by other departments. The Budget Office really liked the way that reports were presented through Timesheet Xpress, so encouraged the Engineering Department to have a look at the software solution Public Works had been using.

In 2009, a reorganization took place which transferred Edward and his staff to the Engineering Department. This transfer gave the Engineering Department’s financial analyst an up close look at Timesheet Xpress’ ease of use and reporting capabilities. Since (mid 2009), the City of Peoria Timesheet Xpress deployment has grown to 45 users in the Public Works, Engineering, and Planning & Community Development departments. The multi-department abilities within Timesheet Xpress allow departments to be part of a larger installation with each having their own department specific clients, projects and tasks.

Additionally Edward said “The stability of the software has been a blessing. We have almost no time spent in desktop support after the initial installation!”

Current Situation using Timesheet Xpress…

As with many organisations, given the global economy shifts over the past 12 months, the City has fallen upon tough economic times. Budgets are all being tightened and staff reductions are being evaluated. The Engineering Department’s abilities to increase its chargebacks (financial reimbursement of operating funds from capital funds) were the Departments approach to cost reduction.

Striffler commented that “It (Timesheet Xpress) is working excellent. Our chargebacks are now higher than they’ve ever been simply because people can now track our time with ease. We now understand the real cost (in time and dollars) of managing a project. Our chargebacks are now approaching $1.5M per year … “

From a network standpoint, Edward said “we’ve been able to automate the deployment of Timesheet Xpress, minimizing our IT department’s support of the software. They “push” the install package out across the network to the Client PC, and we (Engineering) can configure for the user. Low cost software and low cost to maintain … perfect !”

About Timesheet Xpress...

As a leading application based product for logging and managing project efficiencies in any organisation, Timesheet Xpress is being used by thousands of users globally. The software is easily installed on either stand alone or network computers and offers a range of configurations for use in organisations of all sizes from independent consultants relying on accurate tracking of “billable hours” to large corporations who are concerned not only with project management and staff productivity but also with timely information for the purposes of workforce management and staff optimisation.

Timesheet Xpress will monitor organisational productivity and performance with quick and easy to use reporting. With accurate and timely information, effective planning and decisions can be confidently made leading to increases in business competitiveness. With links to various applications such as Microsoft Project, Excel, Timesheet Xpress offers a seamless integration into many existing business applications in organisations of all sizes and in many sectors.