Posts Tagged: Everest

Herd Philosophy / IBEX Payroll — 1 Comment
3
May 12

IBEX Classic or IBEX Direct – You Decide

By IBEX Staff

For the last 2 years IBEX customers have been switching over to our new payroll platform that we call Everest.

We noticed that after the switch to the new system, some of our customers started relying on us less and less and became more and more independent.  They were basically doing their payroll in self-serve mode.  After their initial orientation and a few calls to verify procedures, they hardly called us at all.

We were curious – why were they not calling us?  Don’t they love us anymore?  Do they still need us?  We decided to call them and ask what was going on. They said things like:

  1. We’ve gotten used to this new system and like the fact that we can do our own payroll whenever it’s convenient for us – without having to rely on anyone else.
  2. After the orientation, the new system was easy use.
  3. We like that IBEX is still behind this making sure all the calculations are correct and up to date and making our remittance payments on time for us.
  4. We appreciate that IBEX is always there to help us with the system and to answer payroll questions.
  5. We like that if we have staff turnover, or when our payroll person goes on holidays or is sick, IBEX can step in and do everything for us without us having to learn the system.
  6. We like that IBEX always answers the phone without making us wait.

Some also said they would like to pay a little less since they do most of the work themselves!

Well now we had gone and opened a can of worms!

In the IBEX tradition we started working on a win-win solution to this.  How could we reduce the price for self-service clients and not shoot ourselves in the foot?  We went back to the drawing board, took out our calculators and designed a new self- serve option that recognizes that you’re doing much of the payroll processing work yourself, recognizes you for doing so, and solves a problem for IBEX.

Introducing IBEX Direct

The result is what we call IBEX Direct.  Our new self-serve payroll processing system that will save you approximately 40% compared to IBEX Classic.

Keeping the Familiar – IBEX Classic

What if you don’t want self-serve and you hate those self-check in/checkout thingies?  Well, we thought of that too.  In fact, we came up with a brilliant solution… Change nothing.

Keep everything just the way you like it.  As in, stop reading now and forgive the interruption!

You just keep on doing what you’re doing, the way you’re doing it and nothing changes.  IBEX Classic continues to be the best option out there for flexible, full service payroll.

Since IBEX Direct is new, let us tell you more about how it works.

What part of the payroll processing do you do?

  • Take Everest training (at half the cost of new customers)
  • Login to Everest to be part of each payroll
  • Create your own input sheet for every payroll
  • Enter your own hours and adjustments for every payroll
  • Preview and approve each payroll
  • Print off your own T4’s and ROE’s
  • Add your own new employees to Everest
  • Pay for your payroll by online bill payment, rather than traditional pre-authorized debt.

What does IBEX do?

  • Automatic remittances
  • Offer ongoing support for things like setting up a new deduction, setting up a tricky ROE, interpreting payroll laws
  • Jumping right in for you when your payroll staff is ill, on holidays or retiring – at no extra charge

How can IBEX afford to offer IBEX Direct at 40% of the cost of IBEX Classic?

When you do most of the payroll processing work yourself, we save staff time.  It only makes sense to pass on those savings to you.  But staff savings is only part 1 of the answer, because, after all, our staff will still be there to support you when needed.

The other reason we’re able to pass on such phenomenal savings to you has to do with reducing our credit risk and administration costs.  With IBEX Direct, customers will pre-pay us by online bill payment.  For you, this means you’ll be paying the full amount of your payroll 3 days prior to payroll day by online bill payment.  We have no more bad debts and no more overhead dealing with collection issues for IBEX Direct customers and in return we charge you less for our services.

IBEX Direct will be available to existing IBEX clients starting in October of this year, so you have plenty of time.  If you are interested, please click the link below and fill in the form to let us know, or call Alpine Crew to talk it over. If you decide to go ahead, we will schedule training for you prior to your switch to IBEX Direct, and if you are not in Everest yet, we will make sure you are converted in time to get going.

 

I’m interested in going Direct

 

 

 

 

Customer Service / Herd Philosophy — No Comments
25
Jan 12

How to dramatically appreciate a customer

By Darryl Stewart, Head of the Herd

We recently converted a large customer from our old web payroll, scheduling and time tracking system to our new completely integrated Everest platform.

This was one of the first customers to use all aspects of our new system, well beyond just payroll.  There were some rough spots and one of the things we did to get over the issues was spend time with our customer, at their office.  This allowed us to see first hand what we needed to improve and also allowed us to figure out together how they should best use the new system.

It the midst of all this we came to realize that our main contact at this organization could really use a bigger monitor.  This was a chance for us to plant one of our world famous IBEXseeds.

Yesterday morning Peregrin, our Head of Herd Geeks, dropped off IBEXseed #10.   It was an organizer basket with some cheerful flowers, a card, a bottle of “Everest strength” pain relief (Skittles) and a brand new 21″ monitor.  The seed was put together by Peregrin and Susan, our Herd Culture Queen.

Thanks for everything Toni!

Gift from IBEX to a customer

IBEXseed #10 - Also Included a 21" Monitor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Herd Philosophy — No Comments
3
Oct 11

Inside IBEX Herdquarters – How to grow your herd part 3

In a previous post, how to grow your herd part 2, I talked about defining our Hedgehog Concept.   In our case that turned out to be:

  1. Providing payroll, employee scheduling and employee time tracking to developmental service agencies across Canada.
  2. Providing PREMIUM payroll services to small to medium Canadian organizations.

The idea of a hedgehog concept was popularized by Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great.   It needs to be what you honestly believe you can be the best in the world at.  We believe we can be the best in the world at these two complementary things.

When we started our good to great journey, we thought that it would only be #1 above, we could only be the best in the world at serving Canada’s developmental service agencies, but we also knew we were not going to be able to do that without confronting some brutal realities.

The reality of the situation at the time was that we had figured out what really mattered to developmental service (DS) agencies and built that onto our existing systems, much to the delight of our first group of DS customers.  The problem was that the system we built it onto was not up to the challenge of serving the entire Canadian world of developmental services.  These organizations range from 50 to 1000’s of employees and the first group of customers of that size was taxing our systems and some key IBEX herd members as well.  It would not be sustainable to grow heavily on that base; it would be a big heavy house on a weak foundation.

We made the stunning realization that the problem was our basic payroll system.  Our pride and joy, built from the ground up over 10 years, was not up to the task at hand and would need to be scrapped.  Cost estimates for building a fully web-based, highly scalable, highly secure, web payroll system ran into the millions.  Even if we had those millions, what a risk!  We would need to increase our contingent of herd geeks from 3 to 10 or more and we better choose the right team or we would not get what we wanted for those millions and we would be bankrupt.

The solution was to find a partner.    In a previous post How “IBEX” built Canada’s most advanced online payroll system I explained the partnership between Protegra and IBEX that led to the creation of our new payroll platform.  It also led to the formation of Blue Canvas, a company to formalize and explain our partnership to the world.

Through the analysis of what the new system had to do, we realized that the payroll needs of Canada’s developmental service agencies was about as complex as can be and what we really needed to build was the best online payroll system in Canada, very flexible and highly adaptable.  We love the payroll business and we love serving our client base of over 500 organizations of all types and industries and now we had the chance to give them not just the legendary IBEX customer service, but the best system in the country.

In the time since, much has come to pass.  The reality is that we now have one awesome system, capable of delivering a very deep and detailed solution to developmental service agencies and also a great online payroll experience for any kind of small to medium organization.  We honestly have the most advanced and best system in Canada in both areas and the work to keep it that way is not mutually exclusive.  Working on one always improves the other.

We will be the best in the world if we stick to our hedgehog – no distractions please world!

In part 4 of this series I will talk about getting the herd word out.

System Improvement — 1 Comment
14
Jan 11

Champagne Flowed Today at IBEX

The IBEX Herd gathered for a toast yesterday, just before noon.

Our new payroll platform, Everest, ran its biggest payroll ever. Sure we’ve tested it for this size of payroll, but testing it and actually using it are two different things and definitely worth celebrating.

The good news is Alpine Crew, who ultimately reports to our payroll customers, was happy with the results.  Our Mountain Do team and the Herd Geeks out did themselves and were at the receiving end of today’s toast.

Herd Philosophy / System Improvement — 3 Comments
17
Jun 10

A Major Milestone

Becoming the best place in Canada to work takes more than an internal focus on putting people first.  It also takes a focus on customers and innovation.  For IBEX that meant finally admitting that our technology and capabilites needed a major overhaul so that we could deliver the features and innovations our customers want.

That process started for us in November of 2009 when we decided to commit whole hog to wholesale replacement of our payroll engine, online payroll/HR system and our inclusion (communitly living careware) platforms.  Since that time, work on the new system, codenamed “Everest”, has been going non stop.  There are currently 11 people working full time on Everest and the milestones are starting to happen.  A few months back we ran our first payroll in the new system and a few weeks ago we printed the first cheque from the system.

So far, all the real customers in the system are what we call full service customers.  They send in an email, phone us or fax us with their input and we do all the work in the system for them. Yesterday, we decided that we are ready to let customers into the system for themselves.  We wondered if anyone would want to go first and if anyone would even be interested.  In short, we were afraid.  We wondered how we should find out if anyone was interested.  Susan Turner, Payroll Specialist and Culture Queen had a simple solution – “Send out an email and ask”.  It was a brilliant idea and we did just that.  We were hoping to get at least three customers that we could work with one-on-one in the new system.  I hoped maybe ten customers might respond so we could pick three to begin with. Boy, was I off the mark!

Within 24 hours, 13% of all our customers emailed back saying they wanted to be the first to work with Everest.  The response was very gratifying and inspiring.  Maybe it was the free coffee mug that we were offering or maybe people really are interested in a new and better system.

We have picked three customers for personalized training and we plan to engage most everyone who wants to be in trying Everest over the next weeks and months.  So our milestone is really two fold.  1) we are letting customers into Everest for the first time and 2) people are really wanting to see us do this and make the system better.  We are inspired to keep going and see this through.

Darryl