Gaining Project Control and Visibility: How SD Worx Saved 70% on Billing Cycle Time with a Cohesive System

SD Worx drives business performance by providing results-driven HR. Bringing 70 years of experience to the table, alongside HR services, it also provides bill-slip processing and legal support for both employers and employees. With offices in Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxemburg, France and Germany, SD Worx is an active member of the Payroll Services Alliance, which provides services across 28 countries. SD Worx processes 1,350,000 payslips a month and posted a turnover of 262 million Euros in 2014.

Prior to using ChangePoint, SD Worx had no cohesive centralized system for invoicing, project management, resource scheduling, or time registration. Instead, teams relied on a variety of formats and tools, including Microsoft Word and Excel. This ran across offices in five countries, with many employees regularly working off-site and from home.

Without a centrally aligned system, work often had to be repeated, and it was difficult to share intelligence between different areas of this multi-functioning business. With billable time central to everyday operations, this became an area of concern. An organizational restructuring in 2005 amplified these issues: With several business units (HR, legal, and consultancy) grouped into a single business, it proved immensely time-consuming and complicated to integrate the wide variety of programs and formats.

SD Worx needed a better tool. After reviewing the market, it was clear that no other solution was able to meet the ranging needs of SD Worx better than the ChangePoint Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution.

SD Worx chose ChangePoint PSA because it can perform a multitude of business functions, including invoicing, project management, resource scheduling, and time registration—all from one, cohesive system.

“The ability to run the solution across a number of locations was critical. With ChangePoint, [teams] can log in to the system anywhere with an Internet connection, which is critical for a business like ours,” commented Benjamin Verlinden, senior project manager and functional expert at SD Worx.

SD Worx first started working with ChangePoint in 2005 when it deployed the solution to 400 users, mainly for time booking and billing. Then in 2008, the SD Worx IT services department started using the ChangePoint system as well to better manage its services and support.

With the addition of IT, in just two years the number of ChangePoint users more than doubled to 1,000—more than half of SD Worx’s workforce. By 2010, with expanding user adoption, SD Worx saw value in merging its two ChangePoint systems—working with ChangePoint specialists and consultants to analyse the two systems and ensure a smooth transition to a consolidated system that still accommodated the business needs of all users.

Since deploying ChangePoint PSA, SD Worx has cut the time spent on billing and invoicing by 70%. The process which previously took two weeks now takes the same amount of people three days.

ChangePoint has transformed how SD Worx interacts with data. Details that were previously dormant or inaccessible in Excel spreadsheets can now be proactively scanned for invoicing blackspots and leaks in billable time. Teams can easily see and use all of the right information to make more intelligent decisions. Similarly, improved visibility is enabling teams to identify mistakes, anomalies, and opportunities faster.

SD Worx knows its ChangePoint team is just a phone call away. “Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 11 launch was hardly seamless, and it disrupted some aspects of our use of ChangePoint. We were in contact with ChangePoint’s technical services team and they quickly got to work remedying the issue,” Verlinden adds.

SD Worx has also built its own internal ChangePoint competence centre, providing specialist support for the system from inside the organisation.

“This acts as an internal help desk for our 1,000 ChangePoint users, and helps transition new employees onto our internal processes with hour-long ChangePoint induction courses for new starters,” said Verlinden. “From a wider business perspective, the ChangePoint competence centre also plays the important role of ensuring our use of ChangePoint aligns with organisational strategy, which is very important for a solution that is used by more than half of our employees.”

In 2016, SD Worx will continue to keep up to date with developments in the ChangePoint platform. Plans are also in place to expand the data set available to the system, to further boost business intelligence.

“We have older sets of data, such as revenue figures and business information, which we plan to integrate with what we have on ChangePoint. Expanding our data cube in this way will allow us to make even better-informed decisions by spotting wider trends. Putting this existing data to work will allow us to use ChangePoint to make increasingly intelligent business decisions,” Verlinden concludes.

• Cut the time spent on billing and invoicing by 70%
• Widespread user adoption
• Teams can sign on and view/upload information anytime, anywhere
• Less time spent re-entering data to fit multiple formats
• Increased visibility to data in real time, revealing new opportunities
• Setting in motion plans for future development for expanded business intelligence