Bendigo Bank has extended its successful implementation of the Empower-HR payroll system to 1200 employees of Adelaide Bank, with which it merged in November last year.

Since July 1, Empower-HR has replaced an outsourced CHRIS payroll system that was previously used by Adelaide Bank.  Bendigo Bank has used Empower-HR to pay its 4300 staff members since April 2006. The in-house system, which operates from the bank’s head office at Bendigo, now pays its staff of 5500 people at more than 500 retail outlets including bank branches, agencies and community banks.

Empower-HR equips Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to pay its direct employees one week and then, on alternate weeks, to pay the employees of community banks and agencies, who are independently employed on a wide range of workplace arrangements and certified agreements.

Empower Masterpay is an Australian company that specialises in providing functionally rich software solutions for Human Resource (HR), Payroll and Time & Attendance (T&A) management. Founded in 1984, Empower Masterpay offers "HR Payroll - Your Way", with a complete range of in-house and online (ASP) HR-Payroll solutions.

Empower clients include the State Government of Tasmania, Bendigo Bank, Queensland Investment Corporation, Newcrest Mining, Thiess, Just Jeans, RM Williams, Kone Elevators, Australand, Sydney Turf Club, the Australian Securities Exchange, ABN AMRO, Reuters, Penrith City Council and Startrack Express.

"NodePhone was the right solution at the right time. NodePhone provides all the affordability and flexibility of VoIP, but call quality is never compromised ... the decision to go with NodePhone services was straightforward and compelling."

Experien Finance IT Manager Trent Renshaw

Independent supermarket chain Drake Foodmarkets has slashed payroll paperwork and eliminated leave approval delays by deploying Empower-HR for its 4000 employees.

Since Empower-HR went live in July 2007, Drake Foodmarkets has managed to reduce payroll and leave processing time by more than two days each week due to Employee and Manager Self-Service facilities and automated workflows embedded within in the system.

Drake Foodmarkets, which is South Australia's largest independent supermarket chain, employs about 4000 people at 45 sites throughout South Australia and Queensland.

Drake Foodmarkets HR Manager Leanne Fraser and the company's Payroll Manager Jane Washington presented a case study at this month's Empower-HR National User Conference about how the retailer rolled out Self-Service to employees in SA and Queensland.

Key points of this announcement

• Hostworks provides Nutrimetics with 24X7 “critical system” availability and support
• Nutrimetics now manages more than 80 per cent of its consultants via the website
• More than half of Nutrimetics orders arrive in the last few days of each month 

The Australian arm of global network marketing giant Nutrimetics has chosen Hostworks to enable it to handle the large number of cosmetic product orders it receives in the last few days of each month.

Hostworks is an online demand specialist that provides high availability systems and expert staff to meet the rigorous requirements of running a 24X7 business in the modern world.

Nutrimetics first became a customer after Hostworks' 2003 acquisition of Dimension Data Central, an early entrant into the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) sector. When Hostworks significantly re-engineered this acquired SaaS offering, Nutrimetics extended its engagement from outsourcing its website to having Hostworks manage its Nutrisoft Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

Nutrimetics IT Director Charles Young said Nutrisoft was "an incredibly critical system". "Now that 80-90 per cent of our business is online, every minute of downtime can cost us a lot of money," he said.

Tasmania's Scotch Oakburn College has resolved years of frustration with its campus-wide wireless network by deploying a Colubris network controller and intelligent access points. Read on for the full Scotch Oakburn College case study.

Organisation Name
Scotch Oakburn College

Industry
Education

Executive Summary
Scotch Oakburn College, like many schools throughout the country, has used wireless technology since 2003. However, as the number of concurrent notebook connections increased, the college became increasingly aware of the limitations of consumer-grade wireless devices.

In January 2007, Scotch Oakburn resolved years of frustration with its campus-wide wireless network by deploying an 802.11n-ready Colubris network controller and intelligent access points. From day one, the Colubris wireless local area network operated faultlessly, repaying the capital investment in less than six months.

“What really makes the difference is having more relevant creatives, so that people are more likely to click on our ads. This translates to many more conversions within the same budget. The key improvement is that we’ve spent money on promoting the actual car listings available on Drive.com.au which improves both the user experience and conversion.”

Kylie Gore, Drive.com.au

Customer: 

Online car sales site Drive.com.au

Challenge: 

Drive.com.au’s key objective was to build Search Engine Marketing creatives and keywords for used car listings in Google AdWords campaigns while meeting volume and cost-per-unique-visitor targets.

Solution:

After deploying the Australian-developed Dynamic Creative software, Drive.com.au was able to quickly create and optimise granular search engine ad campaigns with a high quality Google score.

Benefits: 

Drive.com.au created an additional 250,000 keywords and associated creatives which went live within two months, extending campaigns to take advantage of the ‘long tail’ of ads that match specific used-car listings. Drive.com.au was also able to measure results such as boosting productivity by hundreds of per cent, increasing click volumes and decreasing cost per click (CPC) by 30 per cent. 

Dynamic Creative:

e-channel online is a leading search engine marketing company founded in 1999 in Melbourne. e-channel online has leveraged its knowledge, history and experience to develop Dynamic Creative, a powerful, patented search engine marketing campaign optimisation tool.  Dynamic Creative solves challenges faced by all search engine marketing: in particular, the need to quickly optimise granular ad campaigns with a high Google quality score. The product can deliver immediate benefits to organisations that run large database-driven websites, such as travel, classifieds, online auction and retail websites. Learn more at http://www.e-channel.com.au/.