Ultimate Software (Nasdaq: ULTI), a leading cloud provider of people management solutions, announced today that Athletico, a Chicago-based leader in outpatient orthopedic rehabilitation, has improved overall HR business reporting, provided better service to employees, and eliminated hundreds of manual transactions related to HR by leveraging UltiPro as the center of its HCM initiatives.

Prior to making the switch to UltiPro in 2007, Athletico’s leadership realized that the organization needed sophisticated technology that would handle HR activities better, faster, with fewer resources, and without the responsibility of managing software. To more effectively manage its rapid growth while controlling costs, Athletico chose UltiPro for its cloud delivery and for its breadth of HCM features and reporting functionality.

“With UltiPro, our HR team has become more of a business metrics and analytics group rather than a data-processing group,” said Nancy Kusner, director of HR at Athletico. “We are focusing our efforts on the bigger picture and instantly delivering HCM reports to executives about important issues like manpower trends and benefits costs. Supervisors also have immediate access to metrics they need on a daily basis to be effective, such as headcount reports, recruiting status data, and attendance history. UltiPro’s unified reporting really benefits the entire organization.”

With almost 100 locations and over 1,300 employees, it was important to Kathy Yates, payroll manager at Athletico, that the new HCM solution be easy to use so that adoption of the technology would be high.

“Our workforce touches UltiPro every single day—when managing their time, applying for a job, changing a benefits selection, or adding a dependent. We have had such positive feedback from our employees about UltiPro. Employees can see everything important to them whenever and from wherever, and they love it,” said Yates. “UltiPro has allowed us to provide better service to employees while reducing the burden and expense on our HR and payroll teams.”

UltiPro enables employees to view and modify their own personal information and lets managers access and update specific details about their teams. Changes can be routed to approvers or to those who just need to be ‘in the know.’ According to Yates, UltiPro’s ease of use and 24-7 access via the cloud also has reduced the time needed to train remote users.

“We have seven administrators accessing UltiPro who are HR professionals, not payroll professionals, so we rely on the solution to do the heavy lifting for payroll,” said Yates. “UltiPro’s intuitive navigation has allowed us to successfully take advantage of the technology’s time and attendance features, which has automated 500 to 1,000 changes per week related to time and attendance information, streamlined the time management process, and improved the integrity of our data. Managers also receive alerts to prompt them when a process is due or is late. In addition to our HR and payroll teams, UltiPro has been easily learned by our employees, managers, and executives who have core positions dealing with patient care and who typically don’t utilize computers throughout the day. As a result, we have seen a high adoption rate of the functionality, and now HR can focus on people and strategic initiatives while keeping administrative costs low.”

Athletico has leveraged UltiPro to reduce the time spent on many tactical activities. For example, payroll used to take four to five days each pay period with a great deal of involvement and oversight, but with UltiPro, the team is minimally involved and has cut payroll processing by 50%. Using UltiPro Recruitment, Athletico has transformed its procedures for hiring and applicant tracking from a burdensome manual process to one that is automated using built-in workflow. UltiPro Recruitment enables managers, recruiters, and HR staff to track and oversee the entire process over the Web—reducing the length of the recruitment cycle, saving significant time, and minimizing overall costs.

“With UltiPro Recruitment, we are posting and filling vacancies faster than ever before and our HR staff is free from devoting time and resources to tasks like cutting and pasting candidate resume details in emails for managers,” said Yates. “We have seven people to handle the entire gamut of HR, payroll, and benefits for approximately 1,300 employees in almost 100 locations. By using UltiPro for HCM, everyone across our company is benefiting.”

Athletico has also freed the HR and payroll teams from the paper-intensive open enrollment process for benefits. Employees completed their first Web-based open enrollment in 2008, and new hires are using UltiPro to easily make individual benefits choices. “Previously, benefits enrollment was one of the most tactical and time-consuming processes,” said Liz Lamorena, benefits manager at Athletico. “Now with UltiPro, employees make their own updates from home or office, and we can automatically generate a file for the benefits providers without having to decipher hand-written forms. We’re so pleased that employees are enjoying the convenience, ease of use, and flexibility of UltiPro just as our HR and payroll teams do.”

“The business advantages of cloud-based HCM for end-to-end HR are undeniable: better technology, fewer worries, more control, more flexibility, superior business continuity, fast payback, and more. Every day, Athletico is experiencing firsthand how one comprehensive, cloud-based solution for HR, payroll, and talent management is improving efficiencies at and driving results at every level across the business,” said Greg Swick, chief sales officer at Ultimate Software. “We’re very happy that UltiPro is not only helping Athletico’s HR and payroll teams work more effectively, but also delivering a technology experience that its employees and managers want to use.”

About Ultimate Software

Ultimate is a leading cloud provider of people management solutions, with more than 10 million people records in the cloud. Built on the belief that people are the most important ingredient of any business, Ultimate's award-winning UltiPro delivers HR, payroll, and talent management solutions that seamlessly connect people with the information and resources they need to work more effectively. Founded in 1990, the company is headquartered in Weston, Florida, and has more than 1,600 professionals focused on developing the highest quality solutions and services. In 2013, Ultimate was ranked #9 on FORTUNE'S list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Ultimate has more than 2,500 customers with employees in 136 countries, including Adobe Systems Incorporated, Culligan International, Major League Baseball, The New York Yankees Baseball Team, Pep Boys, and Texas Roadhouse. More information on Ultimate's products and services for people management can be found at www.ultimatesoftware.com.

UltiPro is a registered trademark of The Ultimate Software Group, Inc. All other trademarks referenced are the property of their respective owners.

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