About TreeTop

TreeTop is the world’s largest producer of dried apple products and the primary supplier to the U.S. market, providing food ingredients to over 20 of the nation’s top 25 food companies. The cooperative employs nearly 1,100 employees in a wide range of professions ranging from engineers to food scientists and skilled labor positions at seven various locations in Washington, Oregon, and California, including its subsidiary Northwest Naturals located in Bothell, WA. The company markets and sells its fruit-based ingredients and products to food and beverage manufacturers, to the Foodservice industry, and to consumers via grocery and other retail stores.

Improvizations has practical experience. They looked at our situation from the customers’ perspective and not the software vendors’ perspective.”

Renee Crawford

HR Systems Administrator

Our Challenges

Renee Crawford, the HR Systems Administrator for TreeTop, realized the need to consolidate all of TreeTop’s HCM systems to one platform. They were running Kronos HR Payroll 6.3 and Kronos iSeries Timekeeper and Attendance, and there were over 55 different interfaces required to get information moved between iSeries Timekeeper and Workforce Timekeeper HR/Payroll.

One of the biggest challenges was the process of benefits enrollment. Benefits enrollment was conducted through open enrollment meetings with an enrollment administrator, generating a massive file containing the benefit information for over 1,100 employees. The file was sent to HR, which was then responsible for cleaning up the file and manually entering the necessary additional information. The file was then uploaded for each different location and sent out for any revisions. Each location then had three weeks to add any changes for the upcoming year. The overall process would take over six weeks to complete. Beyond the time and manual labor demands, there were often multiple inaccuracies and issues to correct because of the volume of manually keyed information across multiple locations.

The benefits enrollment process was just one of many internal processes that required incredibly high amounts of manual labor. TreeTop ran all processes through a completely customized Kronos iSeries Timekeeper and Attendance system. A major concern with consolidating the systems was a loss of functionality. However, if the move to Kronos Workforce Timekeeper was successful, Tree Top would consolidate all systems to one platform, reduce manual processes, decrease the number of custom interfaces and reports, and avoid the potential sunsetting of their current Kronos version.

The Solution

Improvizations clearly identified which of Tree Top’s processes were redundant or inefficient and identified where the implementation of an interface would create a quick ROI. One of the most significant goals achieved was reducing the number of manual processes involved in the Benefit Enrollment by creating a Benefit Enrollment WIM interface. The interface eliminated manual entry of the enrollment data. Improvizations began development of the interface on November 22nd. Our integration team met the targeted go-live date necessitated by the annual benefits enrollment process timeline.

The amount of time saved for our plants was huge. We appreciated the speed with which Lisa was able to get the interface written. Improvizations’ quick responses made this process enjoyable and almost completely stress free.”

Jana Clark

Treetop HR Rep

The Outcome

The interface built by Improvizations was able to reduce 6 weeks of manual processes down to one day. Once the clean file is uploaded, the new interface executes all changes in employee records for the upcoming year in minutes. The Benefits Administrator then runs a few minor reports to ensure the information is correct. If there is an issue, the interface automatically sends an error report to the manager.

Beyond the Benefit Enrollment interface, Improvizations substantially reduced the original list of custom interfaces and reports from 124 down to 49 through a multi-pronged strategy: identification and utilization of new core functionality, consolidation, and custom interface creation.