Working as a compensations and benefits manager for the Caudwell Group, she part-time manages a fleet of over 1300 as well as 300 cash allowances. Assisting her are five full-timers and 10 part-time administrators, but even this workforce could not prevent Walkers department becoming snowed under by vast piles of paperwork. “Each year, we have 4700 car handovers, or from an administrative point of view, 4700 P11 D’s to process, the bane of my life.” says Walker.
Relying on a basic ‘ancient’ form of software and no less than 30 spreadsheets, it’s not hard to understand how things were slowly grinding to a halt, especially when Walker’s other role is to manage the payroll for the busy telecommunications company whose subsidiaries include the mobile phone retailer Phones 4 U.
“In the past the employer had to register a new employee on with HR, than manually re-input on payroll, then update on the fleet database. You can imagine the time delay.” adds Walker.
Then, last October, the company invested in some new software provided by Jaama. The web-based software has from day one saved time and reduced an impossible workload, mating with not only HR, but payroll too. Now a new driver only needs to be keyed in once. Already, there have been real benefits. Normally out of 500-700 invoices processed each month there would be 50-60 queries flagged up which would manually have to be painstakingly checked and re-checked. Last month there were none, saving untold man-hours.
Currently in phase one of introducing the software, without a single glitch or hitch, we quizzed Walker over whether or not she foresees slimming her team down, offering massive potential savings to a company. “I can now afford to be proactive, corporate negligence is very real, there is a need to actively manage a drivers exposure to risk. My team will help capture more data an information than ever to help us accurately assess whether a driver is a risk.”