Contributed By: Ronnie Alderete, General Manager and Yesenia Marquez, Human Resources Coordinator, Premium Packing

Premium Packing is headquartered in Salinas, California and has offices in Stockton and the Coachella Valley. The company provides contracted labor and all related human resources administration work for companies, primarily within the agricultural and construction industries.

Most of the labor force contracted by Premium Packing is seasonal. The organization processes an average of 900-950 full time returning employees annually. Along with two sister companies, Premium Packing generates 9,000 W2s every year.  The company had to deal with a lot of paper in order to onboard these employees at the beginning of the season and then to offboard them afterwards.

The first project that the organization tackled after implementing Laserfiche was automating this onboarding process. Premium Packing worked with their Laserfiche Solution Provider Appleby to automate this process with Laserfiche Forms and Workflow, resulting in processing time being cut in half.

“We should have automated this process sooner. Laserfiche Forms is so friendly to the person who is actually filling out the form. It is a product that both the employee and supervisor understand,” says Yesenia Marquez, Human Resources Coordinator.

Before automating the process with Laserfiche, any new employees hired by Premium Packing had to fill out a 14 page onboarding packet. This packet contained forms such as the I9, W4, DE4, as well as an employee handbook and various company policies and agreements. The employee had to sign and initial each page. This hiring would often take place in the field. The supervisor would bring the completed paperwork to the office where it would be reviewed for completion. Afterwards, the office clerk would enter all the information into the Famous ERP system and create a paper employee file. The I9 forms would be filed separately. One person was responsible for inputting information about all employees hired through all three office locations.

Every year, the company goes through internal audits. Every employee file had to be looked through and documents that were ready to be purged had to be shredded. This purging took specially hired staff to perform.

Supervisors now carry IPads in the field. Any new employee fills out information in a Laserfiche form. If the employee is a returning employee, then some of the data in the form is prepopulated from the Famous database. This person filling out the form can switch from English to Spanish by clicking one button.

Once the form is submitted, it is sent to the human resources coordinator who checks it for completeness. After the review, Laserfiche Workflow populates a PDF template with all of the data submitted through the form.

This PDF packet is then sent to the employee for signatures using OneSpan.

Once the employee signs the document, it is returned to Laserfiche and stored in an employee folder. The I9 is stored in a separate folder to make audits simpler. Access to each folder is customized so that only approved individuals can see the employee information.

The information is then compiled in a special format for uploading into Famous.

Automating the onboarding process reduced processing time in half. Since information is submitted through Forms, it is more complete and easy to read. The clerk does not have to re-enter everything into Famous, but can simply upload a file with all of the data included.

Audits have been simplified as documents are now easy to find. Automatic retention schedules have been applied to employee folders so that documents that are ready to be purged can be identified with one search.