Case Study: BTG Inc.

Achieving Accuracy and Compliance in Billable Time Reporting for a Global Workforce

February, 2000: Technology services firms, especially government contractors, face a range of special administrative challenges. They must collect employee timesheets for fast customer billing and payroll from an increasingly dispersed workforce and obey rules and guidelines, such as daily time reporting, imposed by regulatory agencies like the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA). Project managers must see and analyze status of projects - time charged to customers - clearly and rapidly enough to steer a project to success while controlling costs. Web-Based workforce optimization solutions are bringing answers to these challenges by offering anytime, anywhere access to Web-Based timesheets with fast, electronic approvals and real time web-based project reporting.

After several years of pulling paper timesheets off fax machines, tracking down missing timesheets and correcting incorrect project codes, BTG, an information technology and technical services firm in Fairfax Virginia, automated its critical timesheet process to simplify and shorten the timesheet-to-invoice interval. With close to 2000 employees spread globally across customer sites, including secure government facilities, BTG had to find not only a web-based timesheet solution but also one that allowed time reporting by employees without access to the Web. Moreover, the solution had to comply with DCAA timekeeping guidelines that were written for a manual, paper environment and had been subject to limited testing under electronic timesheet systems. Rules such as mandatory daily time reporting, signed audit trail of changes to prerecorded time entries, manager approvals, and secured access had to be provided under an auditable system. On top of all this, BTG heard the call from their project managers, the front line of communication with customers, for tools to measure project status in order to identify situations in budget or delivery jeopardy and make adjustments to meet budgets and keep customers happy.

BTG’s search for a solution quickly centered on Unanet, a Web-Based Workforce Optimization solution that provides electronic timesheets and approvals, work-in-progress project and client reporting, DCAA controls, and above all, a unique module for touch tone telephone time entry for offline access. Jack Littley, CIO at BTG, said, “Unanet offered a one-of-kind answer to us; all of our employees could report their time quickly, regardless of location, either through the Web or through the phone, and Unanet would consolidate the reported time in one central database for reporting and approvals. The icing on the cake was the DCAA compliance through both the Web or through the phone, something we could not find in any other product.” On the topic of project reporting, he added, “Unanet’s web-based project and client reports on billable labor hours handed our project managers the decision support tools to monitor their projects daily from remote locations and gave them more control over the success of their teams.”

Within several months of implementation, BTG reduced timesheet processing costs by close to 90%. Jack Littley noted, “Unanet has decreased the effort to process timesheets from several people for 2 days down to 1 person for 2 hours each period. Invoices are out the door in half the time. Also, there were other immediate improvements including a significant reduction in timekeeping errors and a dramatic improvement in compliance with timekeeping guidelines. The system has the added benefit of supporting daily timekeeping audits on the whole employee population. That has dramatically improved both the accuracy and the timeliness of our timekeeping process.”

Unanet occupies a niche in the professional services automation (PSA) space today by offering an affordable, simple and feature-rich solution for resource scheduling, time and expense reporting, and project management. While competitors offers similar PSA suites, Unanet is the leader in web-based time and expense collection with Interactive Voice Response and PDA time reporting modules, integrated expense reporting that supports federal per diems and international rules, and flexibility to integrate seamlessly with any financial or ERP system for government contractors and commercial services firms.