Medical Center Automates FMLA Process and Gains Greater Control Over Confidential Employee Information

Background

Ultimus Client: Children’s Medical Center of Dallas
Industry: Healthcare
Solution: Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Process, Human Resources

This children’s hospital in North Texas is one of the largest pediatric healthcare providers in the nation. The 6,000 employees that work there strive to make life better for the patients they see during more than 360,000 visits each year.

Goal: Improve Patient Satisfaction

With an organization of its size and the dynamics inherent in a young workforce, one of the top challenges is ensuring accuracy in HR processes and compensation pay-outs.  

The human resources department at this pediatric hospital processes close to 500 leave requests per year.  These requests have historically been manually processed by type of leave (Medical, Military, Pregnancy, etc...). Some of the challenges with this process include:  

• Time Consuming, Manually Intensive: The FMLA process was very labor intensive (45 minutes per form), requiring the staff to select one of fifteen different letters based on the type of leave.
• Inconsistent Quality of Confidential Data: The HR staff had to type all of the employee’s benefit information into the appropriate letter, an extremely time-consuming and error-prone process when dealing with confidential employee data.
• Information Compensation Control: Each case was logged into an excel spreadsheet and manually tracked based on when the individual was expected to return to work.  There was little control or accountability to ensure that employees returned from leave within set limits.
• Execution on a Per Case Basis: With such a manual process, errors were often made with employees being paid before their leave was complete or receiving erroneous benefits.

Ultimus' Approach

Using the Ultimus Adaptive BPM suite, the HR staff pulls all of the benefit information onto the correct form automatically, reducing the risk of human error. The system retrieves the benefit information and selects the correct form based on the type of leave, ensuring that confidential employee information is handled appropriately. The work ques are updated daily so employees due to come back on a certain day are automatically flagged for the HR staff, thus allowing greater control over the entire process and reducing compensation errors.

Implementation

The implementation process for Ultimus’ BPM Suite was fast and efficient. The process was tested and ready to go live in less than five months, producing results quickly. A key to their success was the Ultimus e-Learning tool. With e-Learning, they were able to call up any customized learning module from their own desktop and review it based on their own specific needs, an option not available within a traditional classroom training environment. Additionally, this resource allowed them to run self-sufficiently, ultimately reducing training costs.  “It is a great tool to have at your fingertips and also represents a significant cost savings to our organization as we did not have to incur travel costs for training.”

Future Projects

Based on the positive response from this project, this hospital is looking to automate additional processes within their HR department by the end of the year including tuition reimbursement, certification reimbursement, and life status change reporting.  

In other departments across the organization, they plan to automate their invoice routing process, and recently implemented a process that improves the accuracy of cost estimations submitted for new projects at the hospital.

About Ultimus

Ultimus has automated more business processes than any other Business Process Management (BPM) vendor worldwide. Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite has enabled companies to accelerate their performance goals at every stage of corporate growth. Ultimus’ award-winning technology seamlessly adapts to people, systems and change.

Utilized by more than 2,000 customers worldwide, Ultimus provides solutions to organizations such as Pfizer, ProHealth, Bausch & Lomb, Northrup Grumman, DHL, Microsoft, Daimler, Perdue Farms, Chevron, and Tulane University. Ultimus is headquartered in North America, and has additional offices in Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia.