Pike Electric is the leading integrated provider of a full suite of outsourced construction, repair, and engineering services. With 90 percent of services under long-term agreements and customers including AT&T, Verizon, Duke Energy, PG&E, and Dominion, Pike is positioned for lasting success. However, the HR leaders knew they needed some updated HR solutions.
Recording time for Pike’s 7,000 employees proved difficult, especially because 5,500 of those employees are working in the field under multiple crew leaders on a variety of jobs. This flexible work structure makes time reporting difficult in any native app, so the leaders at Pike had to come up with a new process.
With the company making $1.4 billion in revenue, Pike was willing to invest in various solutions, but a combination of a few Oracle products resulted in the best solution for Pike. This led them to develop a creative integration process between Oracle HCM, Payroll, and Oracle Time & Labor.
Why Oracle Time & Labor
The leaders selected Oracle Time & Labor because of the ability to:
- Configure different timecard layouts
- View existing and previous timecards
- Give managers the ability to validate, approve, or reject timecards
- Allow mass creation, submission, and approval of timecards
- Time collection device integration and exception handling
However, the leaders knew Time & Labor alone wouldn’t fit their unique needs because of three primary challenges with their field crew population.
- A crew member may report to more than one crew leader in a day or over the weekly period. There is no constant supervisor from the crew structure perspective, so the original set up leaves the supervisor-based system hierarchy redundant.
- A crew leader will have different members on his list depending on the work order and will need multiple timesheets created for the week.
- The crew leader needs access to real-time crew data to build his crew list efficiently.
To address these challenges, Pike developed a process that uses the customer application on the field. Today, people input data into an iPad with Pike Mobile which goes from Oracle HCM to Oracle Time & Labor and then to Payroll.
So far, over 5,500 employees have used this process. One week can include as many as 2,500 new tasks, where each employee has up to 20 tasks, resulting in 35,000 transactions from OTL to Payroll during the period.
What Else Does Pike Electric Use?
Additionally, Pike utilizes Oracle Web Services for Timesheet, Equipment, and Absence Upload. Here’s how it works: Timesheet Data is extracted and created in the JSON Format as a payload for the service. Once the payload is posted to Oracle, it will return the reference ID if it is successful. All the payloads are inserted into a staging table in Oracle. Pike chose to use the 50 payloads to be pushed to Oracle.
Challenges
Along the way, Pike encountered and conquered some major integration challenges:
- Web service was not generally available and was still in development.
- Pike leaders worked with Oracle product development to define and communicate specific requirements.
- Pike needed employee mid-period status change validation with the web service.
Today, Pike leaders are excited to have a seamless system in place. Combining Oracle HCM, Oracle Time & Labor, and Oracle Payroll is making daily life easier for every Pike employee; from executives and accountants, to crew leaders and crew members.
Learn More
To find out details about using HCM to streamline time capture, check out this Oracle video.