PDS Streamlines Fulbright & Jaworski’s HR,
Payroll and Benefits Operations

Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P, a full-service international law firm, serves the needs of businesses, governments, non-profit organizations and individual clients around the world. It is one of the largest law firms in the U.S. with more than 900 attorneys in 11 offices worldwide.

Challenges
Fulbright had been using a third-party service bureau to manage its payroll operations and in 1999 decided to bring it in-house to make it a more manageable and cost-effective process. The firm sent out an RFP and narrowed it down to five HRMS vendors.

“We saw PDS’ solution at the IHRIM show and were impressed with its comprehensiveness and look and feel,” said Meribeth Spilger, manager, personnel administration at Fulbright. “We needed an integrated in-house system to handle our HR, payroll and benefit functions. Vista was the only enterprise system that truly met all of our needs.”

PDS’ Vista HRMS
As a completely integrated web-based HR management system (HRMS), Vista provides Fulbright with an employee data repository, payroll processing and reporting capabilities.

“With the user-friendly employee self-service option in Vista, we have eliminated the need for our HR staff to perform data entry and have taken one more step towards becoming a totally paperless operation,” says Meribeth Spilger, Manager of Personnel Administration at Fulbright.

With more than 50 practice areas, Fulbright has numerous IT systems throughout the company. Any employee-related data is entered and stored in Vista and transferred in and out of the other systems. Such data includes its more than 1,000 email groups, conference-room scheduling, accounting data, intranet directories, etc. As information changes, it is entered into Vista and automatically updated across the firm.

Using the web-based solution, Fulbright’s 2,200+ employees enter their hours into the time and attendance system and it is then uploaded to Vista and accessible via the Internet, eliminating allowing managers to easily approve hours and generate reports online. All deductions are imported from spreadsheets, requiring the data to be entered only once by the HR department, significantly reducing the data entry requirements.

At month end, Vista automatically generates and electronically distributes approximately 25 reports throughout the firm, helping Fulbright further streamline its processes.

Vista’s Value
As a winner of Human Resource Executive’s “World’s Most E-Savvy HR Organizations,” it is obvious that Fulbright is dedicated to increasing its productivity and cutting costs through the use of technology.

“With the user-friendly employee self service option in Vista, we have eliminated the need for our HR staff to perform data entry and have taken one more step towards becoming a totally paperless operation,” said Spilger. Eliminating the data entry for the HR team has greatly improved this previously time-intensive process and minimizes errors.

“We now only need one full-time staff member to handle our payroll processing and our payroll cycle has been reduced from 24 hours to just 20 minutes,” explained Spilger.

“The PDS team has been a godsend,” said Spilger. “At the annual users’ conference, PDS has customer brainstorming roundtables and actually incorporates the suggestions into Vista. PDS has a willingness to work with us and understand our needs. Their entire team has been very responsive and extremely helpful and encouraging over the years.”