About Lewis
Lewis Services is one of North America’s largest vegetation management companies. With over 4,000 staff members and 200 customers across the country, Lewis plays a critical role in the US energy infrastructure.
Solutions Used
Situation: Painful Invoice Processes & Time-Consuming Timesheets
Without a centralized system, Lewis’s payroll processing and customer invoicing were challenging, slow, and manual. To put it in perspective, the company processed 86,000 spreadsheets for payroll each year. This required nearly 45 full-time employees to complete, and the General Foreman had to enter the same data four times.
“The general foremen were being pulled in so many directions that it was causing inefficiencies in operations,” says Huntley Hedrick, VP of IT at Lewis.
Weekends of time-consuming work made for unhappy employees, payroll delays, slow revenue realization, and poor customer experiences.
Solution: Data Platform & Custom Application
Using ProArch’s Dataware Data Platform, the team integrated the HR and ERP systems into a data warehouse and then developed a custom application called “Tiempo.”
The data modeling in the background simultaneously calculates payroll and invoices based on customized rules by location, job type, pay rate, employee, and start/end time.
Results: A Game-Changer All Around
- Lewis has experienced a 90% reduction in the overall effort with a clear, streamlined process for time entry, timesheet creation, and approval.
- Advanced reporting capabilities using data from different systems.
- Before, Lewis experienced a high volume of invoice adjustments. Now, it is a 3% adjustment rate.
- Customers have a better experience, and Lewis can realize revenue faster.
- Lewis owns the tool so they can avoid future costly and complex ERP upgrades and customization.
For the general foremen, Tiempo has been transformational. Hedrick added, “What I’ve observed with the rollout of Tiempo has been greater than anything that I’ve ever seen in my career with how accepted it’s been in such a short amount of time.”
