The Challenge
Kwik Trip is a family-owned business with 640 retail locations in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. With their own dairy, bakery and transportation divisions, the company offers fresh food, as well as fuel, in a convenience store setting.
Tasked with managing processes and files for 21,000 employees, Kwik Trip’s centralized, shared service human resources (HR) department is a busy place. Prior to implementing OnBase by Hyland, the department was struggling with paper files that were difficult to keep track of and took up too much office space. Cumbersome processes and an underperforming document retention system made employee file management labor intensive and inefficient.
The Solution
The Kwik Trip HR department needed help streamlining its operations. Having already implemented OnBase in their accounts payable (AP) department, the company knew that deploying the solution in HR could improve file management and create greater transparency.
With OnBase, each individual HR employee can now access and view the same information. Sarah Jilk, Kwik Trip’s OnBase administrator, explains,
“OnBase is the central unit for all sub-functions in HR to have a single view of employee information. Previously, these subfunctions were very siloed. Documents could be sitting on somebody’s desk for four days before anyone even knew about it. [OnBase has] given them a lot of visibility into the documents in a better timeframe.”
Additionally, each unit within HR has their own custom search built into OnBase that provides instant access to the specific files they need.
With 98 different document types, HR is the company’s largest document repository. Now that all of those documents have been digitized, the rooms they used to inhabit have been converted into additional workspaces for employees.
Another issue with the company’s previously all-paper HR processes: documents for new employees were sent by truck mail from the various stores, which meant receiving the documents took longer than necessary, and deliveries could be thwarted by adverse weather conditions.
Then Kwik Trip rolled out a store scanning system.
“All of the stores have a scanner now,” says Jilk, “and we use a sweep process from FTP to bring in documents from the stores into OnBase within five minutes. We have a lot of systems in play, but keeping all of our documents in OnBase gives us an easier way to move forward.”
Employee-initiated requests, like mileage reimbursement and status changes, can now be done using simple, standardized online forms. This not only accelerated processing, but has allowed Kwik Trip’s HR department to eliminate five Microsoft Access databases.
Document retention and file management are two other highly important functions that have improved.
“When we updated our system, we were finally able to do purging effectively,” said Jilk. “Now we can create rules for document retention that allow us to automatically purge documents after their termination date.”
Getting users up to speed with the new functionality of OnBase proved simple with the company’s premium training subscription. Supplied with highly affective training videos, new users “are able to spin up forms and modify processes with no help at all,” said Jilk.
Kwik Trip’s on-premises OnBase solution houses an impressive two million HR documents containing sensitive employee information. With role-based security built into OnBase, different users can have different access to documentation based on their HR function. For example, role-based security is used for garnishment and I-9 documents, allowing access to only four people in the company.
“I have 100 percent more confidence in the security of information,” said Jilk.
The Result
Provides centralized access to documents: Employees in each area of HR can access documents and view processing status in real-time. Supports records management: HR can set document retention policies to ensure that information is not kept longer than necessary. Reduces risk: Role-based security makes it easy to ensure that only employees with the proper permissions get access to certain documents
